I’VE GOT YOU IN MY SIGHTS

Video games cognitively challenge players to perform multiple cognitive activities at once. Game researchers and designers need to understand how players are interacting in the game environment, and new methods that provide actionable and focused feedback would provide the greatest benefit. This paper presents an efficient and novel approach (The Tracer Method) to address this issue, and describes its initial demonstration. The Tracer Method builds upon previous research (using only process tracing methods and static environments) to evaluate the combination of the two Human Factors methodologies, Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) and Eye Tracking (ET), in a fast-paced first-person shooter: Overwatch. Both the CTA method and ET provided a level of validation between the data, however, this overlap was significantly lower than previous research. The Tracer Method findings do indicate that integration of the two methods provides new and useful information that either method alone would not be able to elicit.