Traditional peripheral displays rely on drawing the user's attention and gaze through alerts. These displays function best when the central task does not require the user's constant attention. For tasks that require a user to always maintain focus, alert-based displays are not appropriate. We assert that conveying information to a user without drawing his gaze, allows the user to maintain constant focus on his primary task while still receiving additional information. In this thesis we use video games to examine streaming peripheral displays as a means of presenting information without drawing gaze. The results of our experiments showed no significant difference between user performance using our display encoded for peripheral viewing versus an unencoded display. Additionally, we found that players were successfully able to perceive information shown on a streaming peripheral display, however, as game difficulty increased the effectiveness of the streaming peripheral display decreased. Finally, we show that as game level increases, users adopt risk-tolerant strategies. Drawing from these results, we have suggested some additional heuristics pertaining to streaming peripheral displays. Moreover, we have suggested further situations where streaming peripheral displays may be useful. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-28 10:41:41.602