How visual background motion and task difficulty modulate players’ performance in a shooting task

•Lateral background motion decreases player performance in shooting tasks.•The performance impairment tends to decrease when task-difficulty increases.•The data may be applied to control challenge in simple, shooting video games.

In many virtual environments, such as those of video games, the scene background moves to give the illusion of movement. In the present study, two experiments were designed to investigate the combined impact of lateral background motion and task difficulty on players’ performance in a target-shooting task. Participants had to perform the task on either the moving or the stationary version of a patterned background that was either green (Experiment 1) or black-and-white (Experiment 2). The difficulty of the task was manipulated by varying the number of visual features shared between the target and distractor items. In accordance with the literature, the participants’ performance was worse, and the number and duration of participants’ fixations increased when the task was difficult. Background motion had an additive, negative impact on performance. When the background was black-and-white, background motion had an impact only when the task was easy but not when it was difficult. Design recommendations based on manipulations of the background characteristics are proposed to establish the level of difficulty in simple video games that use lateral background motion.