Playing Without Moving: World-Centric Agency in Embodied Camera-Based Games

Embodied digital games commonly rely on direct mappings between a player's physical movement and virtual avatar motion to create a sense of control and agency. This paper challenges that assumption by exploring an alternative interaction paradigm in which the player's physical movement remains unchanged while the virtual environment dynamically adapts around the player. We present a world- centric interaction framework that manipulates environmental transformations—rather than player input—to influence perceived agency, effort, and control. Through a prototype camera- based game and a controlled user study with three environmental conditions (neutral, heavy, and distorted worlds), we demonstrate that altering the virtual environment alone significantly affects players' subjective and behavioral responses. Our findings suggest that agency in embodied play is not solely a product of motor input fidelity, but emerges from the perceptual interpretation of environmental feedback. The complete research prototype, experimental data, and analysis scripts are publicly available to support reproducibility and open science. This record contains the research preprint, experimental software prototype, and de-identified study data for the project "Playing Without Moving".