Despite Being A Geek In Many Ways | Cindy Bishop

Despite being a geek in many ways and choosing software development as my career, I’ve never really gotten into video games or game development. I used to be too much of a cheapskate to get good at games–I didn’t want to just keep dumping quarters into the slots at the arcade, and generally regarded video games as a waste of time. Even now, Candy Crush, a favorite free game among commuters, has little appeal for me, and my use of the term “video games” shows my age. “Gaming,” in which a player, or “gamer,” plays electronic games on a computer, is the preferred term.After Alessandro Canossa’s presentation, however, I found myself wishing that I had played more of the games he described because video game design is very similar to website interaction design, only more fun. Game design is also analogous to constructing an interactive documentary, since many games employ an interactive narrative paradigm that is used to engage gamers and keep their interest.

 

Alessandro has extensively analyzed games and gamer behavior: he noted that the where, what and how of the behaviors is easier to determine than the ever-elusive why. He has moved from analyzing demographics to analyzing psychographics. For example, the first Tomb Raider implementation monitored how gamers played the game according to a finite set of indicators and reported the data back to the server for processing. Information such as how long the gamer played before getting killed, how many shots were fired and how much time was spent in locations was all stamped and stored for analysis. These methods were useful, but were found to be lacking in terms of understanding motivation, or the ‘why’ of gamer behavior.

 

In general, scale, surveys and self-assessment questionnaires are the standard for gathering this information since most gamers report their actions and motives fairly accurately, but to monitor them in a non-obtrusive manner is more challenging, as is the inference of motivational factors. Alessandro emphasized that motivations are not simply a result of personality, that game-play behavior is a function of both personality and context, which is a seismic shift in the way gaming behaviors are understood.The presentation included a fascinating data visualization illustrating how the same personality within a different context can result in different behavior. The example invoked the “outsiders vs. peaceful town” trope – you can either try to oust the outsiders or you can do nothing but craft cakes and other things far away from the action.  Movement and actions of players was turned into a multi-modal “heatmap” and analyzed according to the following game interaction breakdown:

Conversational Interactions

Interaction with the World

Navigation

Narrative Compliance

Combat behavior

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Notes:

Design guidelines to preserve/ensure possibility/self-expression:

Phase 1: analysis of total game behavior

Phase 2: breakdown of analysis according to location/context

Traits like openness and conscientiousness characteristics exhibited differently inside the house versus outside in the world  – inside the house, “openness” motivated the gamer to explore everything in the house, but outside the house – out in the world – the player went very directly to the points of interest and did not appear to explore at all.

Net result: context is indeed as important as personality.Last but not least, Alessandro introduced the term “aAffective eElicitation.”

He emphasized that while it is commonly thought that all of humanity responds the same basic way to the same basic stimuli (Ekman), this is not true – at least as far as game play is concerned. He then illustrated a more dimensional approach to the question, in which “valence” is mapped to “arousal,” or in other words, unpleasant, pleasant  vs de-activation, activation. Pictures were crafted in order to express combination along axes.  It was interesting to see the choices of pictures along the graph and to generally feel what was intended:

Tunnel, claustrophobic, spiders

Outside, lake, flowers

Casino, jazz

Basement, dark

Neutral, (essentially neutral tones!)

Participants were asked to play, self-assess, and review.  They used electro-dermal activity to measure arousal and fFacial EMG to measure valence.

Findings:  self assessment of playback was as expected.  There were a few surprises regarding playthrough, however, as frustration for example, can overwhelm/override emotion.  Facial EMG analysis especially proves people interact differently given the stimuli – the emotion of frustration can look a lot like anger.The crux of the matter came at the end of the talk when we were viewing the MRI data to see how the brain is activated/aroused by both frustration and activation.  The eternal question seems to be whether emotional value is enhanced or cancelled by interactivity?  You can bet that if the HCI is frustrating, the gamers sure aren’t going to have a positive emotional experience with your work.

Other notes:

We were also shown the results of a Minecraft analysis which explored the limitations of the Pearson personality test – an evaluation of 16 “basic life motives” out of 546 statistics.  Baselines were interesting – Minecraft players were above average in traits like curiousity, independence and idealism and lower in average with respect to status and order.  I wondered if this motive map could be used to analyze #Gamergate and why it was such a mess – people tweeted nasty things because their idealized world was rapidly becoming too realistic.

Emergent games:  how to let player have almost total control, and what does that mean for authorial control?

There were a few mentions of research that I haven’t been able to follow up on but here are a few:

V-Pal  Virtual Personality Assessment Lab

Lanveld et al(2009), Spronk et al (2012), Yee et all (2011)

Portal – a game exhibiting very successful use of unusual mechanics.

Cindy Sherman Bishop

Fellow, MIT Open Documentary Lab
Comparative Media Studies/Writing