Exploring the Effects of Gaze Awareness on Multiplayer Gameplay

During tabletop gameplay, players monitor each other's gaze throughout, providing a form of implicit nonverbal communication. A player can infer the intention and potential strategies by estimating the gaze of another, especially in co-located gameplay. This early work-in-progress paper details an exploratory study design that explores the effects of gaze awareness on gameplay, in particular when the gaze of one or more players is augmented over the game and revealed to others. We believe that players may very well change their strategies when gaze becomes `common knowledge', but can also be used as a form of deception. We will explore these effects with the same game in two settings: a screen-based digital version with players in separate rooms and a co-located tabletop board game version augmented with a projector. This work evaluates the effects of gaze awareness in both settings, providing new insights towards the emerging research of EyePlay.