Experiment Number 01 - Side B

Right here we go then. *reaches for notebook* Side B.

Okay so carrying on from my last post I have had more people to have a go of my experiment, lets have a look see.

 I will also stick this here for reference as I will specify certain walls when writing up what each Subject did:

Side B

Test Subject 1

Okay. So. First up was Sean.

For starters, like the others, he went straight for the walls and just hugged them. All the way round.

And again.

And again.... You get the idea. This went on for a while. He did mix it up a little and went for the corners a few times but not much else. I think about 10 minutes went by before he even started looking at his surroundings. Once he did, He walked into walls again. More specifically wall number 3. He said this was because it had the 'Montee' written on it. And it was green and big. I have know idea why big was a factor, maybe it makes things seem more significant, the green factor though makes sense though because of it universal meaning for 'GO'.

Not much happened after this because he literally looked around for about 2 minutes and then walked backwards jumping. Que surprised face.

He went from the corner of walls 3 and 4 jumping backwards into the middle of wall 2. He had no idea why or how he did it but he did.

He tried again after this and it took him another 5 minutes to figure out how. How he was still fixed on the idea that it was the jumping that did it.

Test Subject 2

Up next was Josh from 3rd year of the BA. He was probably the most enjoyable to watch play because he was so energetic about what how frustrated he was. Once again, to start with he went for the walls, completely just running into them. He didn't hug them though, the only one who hasn't really. After this failed he had a bit more of a look around.trying to get his head around what the solution could be. However this din't help him as he just wandered around aimlessly for a while.

At the point when asked about what he was doing he explained that he understood the meaning of the symbols (or he thought he did) noting X marks the spot and arrows tell you where to go. Though that only lasted about 2 minutes, when he turned round and said they were confusing him. Now that was a quick change of mind.

"I'm lost" = I don't want to carry on or give up. He really REALLY wanted to give up but really REALLY wanted to finish it. he kept turning around as if to get up and quit, then span back round as if he had slapped himself mentally to carry on.

He kept going though. He figured the solution pretty soon after nearly giving up. He just didn't seemed to want to believe that it could be the solution. In total it took Josh about 28 minutes. He told me that the main thing making him feel confused was the conflicting symbols and colours.

Test Subject 3

So next was Will again from 3rd year of the BA. It started to get a bit monotonous at this point when people were starting out. Walking into walls and that was it. -_-

This time though Will was a jumper as well believe that it was the answer. He thought that he had to jump to certain sections of a wall to get through it. I'm guessing it was because he thought the solution was the "t" in 'Montee' on Wall 2 as the X was there and the other 'Montee' on Wall 3 had an arrow seemingly pointing to the "t". This was the first solution he came up with.

One main thing I noticed from Will was that he was extremely conscious of he surroundings, inspecting pretty much everything over and over, inch by inch. He was the first person to actually 'think' about the environment, which was what I was hoping it would do.

Not long after figuring he original solution wasn't right, he changed tactics. He double scanned the walls as if he had a sudden idea of what to do. When I ask what he was looking for, he explained that the 'X' must be the solution some how. Finally understanding the meanings he started to try to zig-zag from wall to wall and going from one marking to the next. Then after about 5 minutes got the movement right. One 'X' to the other.

He was a little confused but after I went through the room with he and pushed him for some info on what he thought the meanings were or could be, it clicked. He finished in around 25 minutes.

Test Subject 4

Right then. The single exception to the whole of the experiment. Taime. The only person who got confused to the point of no return. He quit in about 5-7 minutes. Yeah that fast. The only actually thing he did was walk into walls and jumped at the higher 'X' on Wall 4.

He said that there was nothing giving him guidance. Not one single thing. Nothing.

I was really confused at this point so I went though the room with him to explain what was going on and what he could have been looking for. I also showed him the solution. He then went on to tell me that this still didn't make sense and that without more guidance, wouldn't have completed it.

Test Subject 5

Last up was Joe. Of course you know what happened first. Yes you got it right. Walked into walls. Hugged them. And gave them a great big kiss.

I give him this though he only did it for 2 minutes.

From then onward, he just thought about what was around him. As if to take in every piece of information that he could. And it worked. He figured the clues out the fastest out of all the Subjects. He didn't really move that much just looked around the walls or sat and pondered to himself.

And then we had it. Within about 15 minutes got out of the room. AND. Knew how he did it.

The only person in the whole of the Experiment that understood completely what he had done. He said that at first the only thing that confused him was the conflicting meaning of colours and symbols.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay that's everyone. Well the Gamers anyway. If I get the chance to get anyone else to play it that is a Non-Gamer I will right it up but for now I will leave it.

Tomorrow I will write up my conclusion and what I plan to do next. See you then.

:D

P.S.
Note to self: Video them next time so you don't have to write it all up! Makes it look nicer to. -_-

Experiment Number 01 - Side A

So today I got a couple of people to have a go at Experiment Number 01, only three people at the moment but moving on to get more soon. One of the players was a non-gamer and I will leave this person to write about in the next post about this experiment, to see if I can get any more participants similar to them.

Anyway..... here we go....

Experiment Number 01 - Part A

Experiment Number 01 is a very basic challenge. The player starts in a square room with graffiti on them, there are no doors or windows. The player is given the task of getting out of room. Already this can be quite confusing. Hidden with the environment are hints, these are portrayed in a vague manor through the graffiti. However, the graffiti also has distractions to make the player think more into the meaning of their surroundings. The only way a player could get out of the room was by walking from a specific location to another, while tripping two triggers to change the collision of a wall along the way. These locations were marked but not easily interpreted in that way.

So the hints are as follows:

Arrows - So arrows mean in, general terms, this way. 

X - Right then. X or a cross can be interpreted in a few different ways. 

One of these is plain and simply WRONG. Another could be stop as well as X marks the spot. 

Montee - This is not a hint at all. This is just my name.

I put this in as a way of making the player second guess their thoughts 

and think in to it what was right and wrong. 

But mainly just to confuse them.

Another thing to point out is my choice of colours for the graffiti. Green is the universal colour for GO and CORRECT. And Red is the opposite - WRONG and STOP. I used these colours to again, make the player think more about the means of their surroundings.

This is a plan of the walls to understand what the player was looking at and what the hints looked like:

Now on to the Test Subjects. Each player had the same room nothing changed. 

Test Subject 1

First up was Jay. To start off with, he was just confused. He did exactly what I expected a Gamer to do and that was hug the wall and walk around the perimeter of the room as if to find a gap in the wall. This is quite strange when you think about it. He began to just run against the walls in specific points. One of these were the corners (something that I had expect also), as well as the areas that the graffiti was on the walls which from the looks of it went from the most likely to be the exit to the least.

He seemed then, to just stop and think for a few minutes. Looking from wall to wall to wall to wall. After a while he started to move about a bit more trying some of the things he had tried before as well as moving in sequences from one piece of graffiti to another. Quite often he would come back to the big Montee scribbled on the wall and just walk into it. Like as if he might have triggered something to happen. 

I asked him what he was thinking about and he just said  that he was trying to understand the meaning of the symbols but was getting confused as to what specifically some of them were telling him, or if they were just distracting him. This was really only a few minutes in. He was explaining to me the different thinks about what he was thinking the solution was and what he was being told by the environment to do. He understood that the Arrows where telling him that the second wall was significant in the solution but was not sure this was the exit. Or more so, if it was then how. He kept hinting at this point that he thought that line of sight was the answer (which was right in a way) and that the crosses were a link some how (which was right).

The funny thing was he was looking at the the smaller X (Wall 4) pretty much on one of the triggers (unknowingly) and explaining that he thought he need to look at it to trigger something. At the same time he was moving backwards from that trigger towards the exit wall where the other trigger was, which in turn changed the collision on the wall behind him. Out he popped on the other side of the wall all confused like he didn't understand. At the time he was just about moving through the wall, he was jesting at the idea of the crosses indicating a location to move from and then to. Which was completely right.

He told me that he was expecting something visible that indicated he had achieved something. Rather than something that was just so unexpected that it confused him more, and making second guess what he was doing and thinking in the moment it happened. In total he took around 8-10 minutes to finish, be it accidental or not.

Test Subject 2

Next up was Josh. Josh was the one I thought would get it fairly quickly. I guess I was wrong.

Josh had very similar approach to Jay but look around to get his bearings first for quite some time. He then proceeded to walking into walls corners and then circled the room hugging the wall. He then adopted an approach where he would use the graffiti as some sort of combination of directions he was supposed to walk in, often ending up with him walking into against the corners again. Another was zig-zaging between walls.

I ask what was going through his mind, he explained that he was thinking about the signs and what the mean. Saying he could figure out which meaning the symbols had, bring up the notion that red is stop and green is go, as well as the X marking the spot. Josh also mentioned that the arrows being a notion to go in a certain direction and red be stop was confusing him about if it telling him to look at something or not to.

One thing I noticed from Josh playing was that he payed the most attention to the biggest thing on the wall. That being the biggest Montee on wall three. I noticed this with Jay as well but Josh seemed to linger around it. Often using it the starting and/or ending point of movements or ideas for a solution.

At certain times through the experiment he did actually do the correct thing (walk from the highest crosses location to the other) but it didn't register. I think this was because of the speed at which he did it, but could also be the size of the hole or triggers being too small. What I found really strange though, was that out of all the solutions he thought of or tried he only tried three times. I don't know why this was. Maybe he had this idea that it was just too simple of a solution or it just wasn't prominent enough.

In total Josh took around 25 minutes to complete the experiment, which I wasn't expecting for anyone at all. maybe apart from non-gamers.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was really shocked how difficult Jay and Josh found this. I have a few ideas and thoughts about where this might lead next but I want to gain more Test Subjects gamers or not.

See you on Monday! :)

Guys Night...

A couple of weeks ago, a few of the guys had a lads night, playing games and that. Mainly on the Wii, a bit on the Xbox and with a few beers. ;)

One of the games we played was Black Rock Studios racing game Split/Second. I was a bit surprised with it. One reason was because its the first racing game I have liked since Test Drive Unlimited in 2006, but mainly because it fits into my research quite nicely.

For those who don't know of it, it's a racing game based off the idea that you are a driver in a TV show set in several locations that have been rigged with explosions to be used by the racers to make the race more interesting. These explosions aren't just used as traps to destroy your competition but also to change up the track making each track turn out different every time you play it.

Here's a little example of what I mean:

So the tracks change as the environment change from player interaction. This makes each race unpredictable each time it is played. You never really know what's going to happen. Sometimes you don't notice the biggest changes happening till its too late, often when your in the last stretch and in first place. -_-

You could say that racing games mainly play off the environment anyway, but the way that Split/Second does it is much different than your standard racing game as it keeps you guessing when the next turn is and wondering when your next move will come. As I found out, you are always jumping up and screaming at the game because of how it is surprising you. I remember screaming at Jay because of some of the plays that just totally threw what looked like a certain win into a desperate struggle to get back to a lead.

I really like this idea of the environment playing the player. I guess that this could be something that could really make the player think more into what is around them and rather just blindly playing through a game till the end. I think this is the problem with some of the current "BIG" games, the player just isn't thinking about whats happening and what they have to do but being guided to the finish.

Carrying on...

So I haven't posted in a quite a few days. I still have a few posts I need to pop on to here about some of the games I have looked into but I will wait a little bit for those. Now though I just want to write about some of the ideas I have had about this subject of using the environment to lead game-play.

So I have been looking into more of the different ways that this kind of "mechanic" can be used. I had a few ideas about using the players camera as a way of interacting with the environment and maybe even using it to trigger movements within it or even creating new parts of it. I starting looking into ways this could be used but a lot of it seems too technical or may need the help of a programmer.

For now though I want to stay away from that, and have come up with a few ideas of how to do somethings which seemed complicated at first but could just be done using basic kismet knowledge - which thankfully I have ;). I have a test which will be ran through tomorrow hopefully. I want to see if it can be understood without prompts or hints. Hopefully this puzzle will make sense. I hope it can as it is mainly to see if the environment can be the main element to the game and if it can give the hints to the player on its own.

One of the other test I will hopefully have ready by the end of tomorrow is one about camera views and moving the environment. I think this one is the one I'm most excited about as it will be a bit creepy and strange for the player. I hope anyway. The basic idea for this one is that the environment is movable to create new paths and/or complete a puzzle. I know this sounds standard to most games but not in the way I have in mind as the environment will only move according to the camera view not interaction.

I know its a bit hard to example without seeing it.

The third is again about camera view and positioning. I want to find out if a similar puzzle to that of one in The Room will work in a different camera view to a fixed 360° rotation. I want to give the player more control over the positioning of it. I'm also interested again with this one if it is easily interpreted with hints other than a code "discretely" placed somewhere. Again this might be a bit easier to understand when you see the test.

Some explanations tomorrow I promise.

:D

Crafts and that.

Another game I've been thinking about is Minecraft. I don't know why I haven't written about this earlier. In a idea generation session with the other guys on the MA we talked a little about it but in the form of level design and if it incorporates it or not . Thinking over that session though some of the things that were talked about, also work for what I'm looking into. Does it have an environment that leads game-play. Yes.

Well in my opinion anyway.

So Minecraft for those that haven't played or know of it, its "a game about breaking and placing blocks" (minecraft.net, 2013). It's basically a sandbox game, where the player uses the environment to create whatever they can imagine.