tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28658418031696278122024-02-21T05:51:10.966-08:00The Playability BlogRichardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-13045881001251173862013-01-07T07:56:00.002-08:002013-01-07T17:59:51.328-08:00Why Butt Stomping Feels So GoodWinter break inevitably brings holiday travel, which inevitably involves shifting my gaming habits to more portable platforms. This was a Final Fantasy Tactics year (the itch comes around every 3 or so), and my laziness convinced me that it was worth the $9 I paid for the iPad version on the app store if it meant I didn't have to dig out my PSP and War of the Lions disc. (FYI: I got it on sale; apparently, it's—unreasonably—priced at $16 as of this posting.)<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Much like the good folks at <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/my-name-is-ozymandias">Extra Credits</a> pointed out, ports of these kind often fail to live up to the original source material. (If you haven't already seen Extra Credits through <a href="http://www.penny-arcade.com/">Penny Arcade</a> or the link in my last post, it's a fantastic web series. I wish I could do the kind of game design analysis they do, but like I've said before, I'm a psychologist, not a game designer.) Their video mentions that new control schemes fail to match the original experience intended by the games' designers (at best) or even ruin your ability to play the game entirely. As anyone who's played an iOS port with a virtual D-Pad can attest, a variant control scheme on a port can be a game-breaking problem.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Read the reviews for Final Fantasy Tactics on the iPad, and you'll see a lot of the less-patient gamers raging about the clumsy touch controls (also, the game just crashes on certain devices). Part of this may be the unfair expectations created by Square Enix's claim that the port was "designed for touch control," which is one of those <i>technical</i> truths that should really be illegal. Apparently, "designed for touch control" means "tapping and dragging work kind of like mouse clicks." So besides lacking a virtual D-Pad, you're forced to grope awkwardly at the screen just trying to get someone to move to the tile you actually want them on. And gods help you if you accidentally select the wrong tile—there's no option to undo that move. (A cardinal sin to any user experience designer familiar with <a href="http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/">Nielsen's design heuristics</a>. Ooh, I should write a post about those...)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCqB48nb8Z9LDrdljYG25PbxMpymTOCAV_n-nr1Hi498u4wVYoc6QzqGGYwocm1tSxFSXk3uRmHT-FI7fiFhKbgbkLNo9ZLQEvv2f9WJG0VfSEhqnxSao_ctZxUpUaeGU_qJNzonNxoKN2/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-01-07+at+3.19.23+AM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="109" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCqB48nb8Z9LDrdljYG25PbxMpymTOCAV_n-nr1Hi498u4wVYoc6QzqGGYwocm1tSxFSXk3uRmHT-FI7fiFhKbgbkLNo9ZLQEvv2f9WJG0VfSEhqnxSao_ctZxUpUaeGU_qJNzonNxoKN2/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-01-07+at+3.19.23+AM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>An abnormally coherent review</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So what creates this problem? Everyone knows it's frustrating, but the "why" is often somewhat ephemeral. "It doesn't do what I want it to do" is often the common complaint, which doesn't really help anyone solve the problem. So what's the diagnosable (and fixable) problem here?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I could go on and on about issues with touch screens in general. In fact, I compiled a fairly beefy internal report on potential issues and design guidelines for touch screens while working at Motorola Solutions. But that's not what this post is about. These control issues extend beyond the glass plains of the capacitive touch kingdom. This is about stimulus-response compatibility.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Stimulus-response compatibility is probably the oldest concept in cognitive psychology. Whether or not you've heard of it by name, you've probably done some variant of the Stroop task (perhaps mixed in with a random assortment of children's brain teasers in a magazine or the back of a cereal box). Name the color of the following words' font, not the words themselves.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: lime;">Blue</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: yellow;">Red</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue;">Green</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: magenta;">Yellow</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: orange;">Purple</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: orange;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
As you'd probably expect, that's a lot trickier than if you do the same thing with this list:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: blue;">Blue</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: red;">Red</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: lime;">Green</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: yellow;">Yellow</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: purple;">Purple</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div>
Depending on what point is trying to be made or what the author thinks is most interesting, you'll hear lots of different reasons for why the first example was hard and the second example was easy, all of which are often true to at least some degree. The particular point trying to be made here is that the stimulus you are looking at and the response you have to make (saying the font color aloud) are in conflict with one another in the first example, but they are consistent in the second example. Cognitive psychologists call the stimulus and response <i>incompatible </i>or <i>incongruent</i> in the first example, and compatible/congruent in the second. What you're trying to do and the stimulus you're using to do it can either conflict with one another or play together nicely.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This principle goes further. Now, say I give you a slightly different task, and because I'm a cognitive psychologist, it's incredibly boring and ostensibly simple. I'm going to show you arrows that point either left or right. If I show you a left arrow(<=), you press the left shift key on your keyboard. If I show you a right arrow (=>), you press the right shift key on your keyboard. Dead simple, right? I don't even have to mock this up for you on this webpage because my words have painted a gloriously clear picture in your mind's eye.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, imagine I change the directions on you. If you see a left arrow (<=), you have to press the RIGHT shift key on your keyboard. If you see a right arrow (=>), you have to press the LEFT shift key. You might eventually get the hang of it, but just reading that feels incredibly frustrating. The stimulus you're using to do the task doesn't line up nicely with the action you need to generate. The key mapping in the first example is straightforward and intuitive, but the mapping in the second example is bonkers. It's like trying to say, "purple," while looking at the word "green."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Every 2D game you've ever played has operated on the no-brainer principle of "press left to go left" and "press right to go right" because of this sort of compatibility. You want the little guy in front of you to move leftward, so you press the left side of the d-pad (or tilt the joystick to the left or what have you); you want the little guy to move rightward, you press right.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Things got less straightforward in 3D gaming. Why? Because your input options were all in 2D, but your stimulus was in 3D. This has seen quite a bit of evolution over time, but with the exception of virtual reality headsets, there is no control scheme currently used in gaming that actually involves a true 3-dimensional controller. I hope you fight me on this, but as far as I can figure, all existing control schemes do their best with some kind of 2-dimensional input (up/down and left/right) to control movement in a 3-dimensional space. The avid gamer forgets it, but there's quite a bit of mental gymnastics to figure out how left/right/up/down can be converted into left/right/above/below/towards/away. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Incidentally, I think this is why any "casual" game you see is always in 2D (or fixed-perspective 3D). That extra little mental conversion is just too big a hassle for some and downright scary to others. I mean, TWO joysticks? You kids are high on the drugs.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To make this more concrete, let's look at an example that everyone cites as getting 3D movement <i>right</i>: Super Mario 64. (I'm going to take a brief moment, though, to give honorable mention to <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_Flash!">Jumping Flash</a></i> for being - for me, at least - the <i>first</i> game to show everyone that 3D platforming could be just as precise and fun as 2D platforming. Last I checked, it's on the PSN store as a PSone classic, so check that out if you've never heard fo it before. Again, feel free to fight me on this, but keep in mind you're challenging my childhood here.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUf8nTRNZZ67OsOUUBl0HXhADwIyDlB0bTyqT4R5PU8T14yMRAUJ27WY-Qdny9ssXZVAWGKlrZRtIXAc608rHK8vN8yX50xoBjzvtJ15_ss_zUaAIEc5YLwdkv29W7GEe5KgUrZHSmm5RF/s1600/tumblr_ls7c43dsDP1qbk3e7o1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUf8nTRNZZ67OsOUUBl0HXhADwIyDlB0bTyqT4R5PU8T14yMRAUJ27WY-Qdny9ssXZVAWGKlrZRtIXAc608rHK8vN8yX50xoBjzvtJ15_ss_zUaAIEc5YLwdkv29W7GEe5KgUrZHSmm5RF/s400/tumblr_ls7c43dsDP1qbk3e7o1_500.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Motherfuckin' space-robot-rabbit action!</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ok, so Super Mario 64 was lauded as gaming's shining example of how controlling a third-person avatar in a 3D world should work. Before Super Mario 64, the camera never moved around the player—it either sat there or you explored the world from a (relatively restrictive) first-person view. Issues with optimal camera placement aside, there is one question that needed to be answered: how would you control Mario?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Daily/2011/06-Jun/23/Trees/final_supermario64--article_image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://static.gamesradar.com/images/mb/GamesRadar/us/Daily/2011/06-Jun/23/Trees/final_supermario64--article_image.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>You probably never even thought to ask.</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In retrospect, this seems like a ridiculous question. You need to control him the way you do, of course. But what makes that the <i>right </i>way? To put it into perspective, let's look at an example that (arguably) got the question horribly wrong: the original Resident Evil games. Fixed camera (so a simpler problem), characters moving through a 3D space. How did you control these guys? Left made the avatar turn to their left, right turned the avatar to their right, up made them walk forward, and down made them walk backwards. Seems great on paper until you realize your avatar isn't always facing forward. Once your character is facing you, the player, you have a wonderful mess on your hands. Left turns the avatar to <i>your </i>right, down moves it <i>away</i> from you...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I can't even keep thinking about it. It's actually making me kind of nauseous.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZwhQqZJXS5v4OdjRlN00o4wWEPXMTQmWeZmjJ2Irz8Eg-s5jn-1-EGEt7mM3wgd8zmIAyLTGP1NVOoZD86bvoe9chYscPNwuXXlAwonrEHGvufGGZJWI2aFknhBz6pDdR86iOfanWfbH2/s1600/dogs-breaking-through-window.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZwhQqZJXS5v4OdjRlN00o4wWEPXMTQmWeZmjJ2Irz8Eg-s5jn-1-EGEt7mM3wgd8zmIAyLTGP1NVOoZD86bvoe9chYscPNwuXXlAwonrEHGvufGGZJWI2aFknhBz6pDdR86iOfanWfbH2/s320/dogs-breaking-through-window.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Crap. How do my controls work relative to the dog's dominant axis?</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I swear I recall other games doing this, but none of them leapt to mind writing this. And maybe I'm besmirching Resident Evil's good name by misremembering. All I know is I remember finding those games horrifying, and not for the zombies.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ok, so back to Mario. Mapping your controls relative to the avatar seems great in theory (and works in first-person shooters), but does not work in a third-person 3D game. The first great idea Nintendo had: make the controls work relative to what the player is seeing. Left always moves Mario left, right always moves him right, up always makes him run into the screen, down always makes him run out from the screen. You have a straight-up compatibility between what you see and what you do.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But wait! You still have a problem here. You're still only moving Mario in two dimensions, and this is a 3D platformer. Alas, like I said, we only have 2-dimensional input schemes, and we need a third dimension. Luckily, moving in that third dimension really only corresponds to two possible (or necessary) actions: jumping (above) and ducking (below). Again, we don't have a direct control to that third dimension, but we are given an approximation in the form of button presses: A to jump, and Z to squat/stomp.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.mariowiki.com/images/6/62/Mario_Pound_NSMB2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.mariowiki.com/images/6/62/Mario_Pound_NSMB2.png" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Figure 1. The "Ground Pound."</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ah, the butt stomp. So, this is where the title of this post comes from, because this is something that I think is so subtly brilliant, you'll miss it if you're not paying attention. (Part of its appeal was just the precision it added to your platforming: you always had a shadow on the ground telling you where Mario would land if he were to suddenly drop straight down from where he was in midair, which is exactly what butt stomping did for you.) So, like I said, movement along the above/below axis is relegated to buttons. Unlike moving the stick left to go left, pressing A to jump doesn't have that same intuitive mapping to it. There's an inherent "leftness" to tilting the analog stick left to make you go left, but there's no inherent "aboveness" or "jumpiness" to the A button. It's just sitting off to the side there, and for some reason, pressing it tells Mario he should jump.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But that Z button...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukmoOmI6bjE9SlPyKs72Jxcl73siCzlN4K3RaVDF5L0EKAlyxa9ZjvlOFLK5SRq4Uoluy-_qUoQ4H3oz3zZlf3RatVdOA9KcVjcPetf0tQ8gX41l8_wz_RcDpz4rXa2Tq60W3iDtrY0_O/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-01-07+at+3.24.37+AM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiukmoOmI6bjE9SlPyKs72Jxcl73siCzlN4K3RaVDF5L0EKAlyxa9ZjvlOFLK5SRq4Uoluy-_qUoQ4H3oz3zZlf3RatVdOA9KcVjcPetf0tQ8gX41l8_wz_RcDpz4rXa2Tq60W3iDtrY0_O/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-01-07+at+3.24.37+AM.jpg" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: start;"><i>Dat Z button....</i></span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ok, here's why I think it's insanely brilliant that the Z button thrusts Mario earthward (assuming the mushroom kingdom is on some alternative reality of Earth). Imagine Mario is standing on your analog stick, and you're pointing your N64 controller at the screen. Wherever you tilt the analog stick, he's going to start running in that direction. That's what makes so much sense about it. Now, think about where that Z button is located: directly <i>under</i> the analog stick.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUkCZDUfu8Yk7Gqhew5JF_ozd2SeAi5OSqnUvFHxOHmLEjJB4x0Hb0ttHUzBr7pMKbHUaeXd9prc0pT37slVx7gJRv0IfHgkftV2jr-pm_vuqQYtKpOaLcLl0tsamF0D2Z8k59QEK8LH3x/s1600/controller_n64.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUkCZDUfu8Yk7Gqhew5JF_ozd2SeAi5OSqnUvFHxOHmLEjJB4x0Hb0ttHUzBr7pMKbHUaeXd9prc0pT37slVx7gJRv0IfHgkftV2jr-pm_vuqQYtKpOaLcLl0tsamF0D2Z8k59QEK8LH3x/s320/controller_n64.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Figure 2. The Nintendo 64 controller.</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I hope you see what I'm getting at here. If you want to move Mario in the X-Y plane, you tilt the stick in those directions. If you want him to move <i>downward</i> along the Z-axis, you press the Z-button located <i>underneath</i> the X-Y control plane. Everything about the Z-button and its corresponding action screams "down," but in particular, "<i>below the X-Y plane</i>." It has an amazing stimulus-response compatibility that can only come from building the controller and the game together from the ground up. Which is probably also why movement never feels quite as intuitive in any other game, with any other controller, and any permutation therein. It's also why, I would argue, it felt so awkward when you had to move up and down poles and them try to jump from them. It broke out of this natural stimulus-response mapping Nintendo had going for them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XyoHj5cxR0abREpEKD2wKo46Grgwoijrg15eGRNC573Wi2cnFPs2vDoYWgFhqyOpJ4p4EcZIQD07YLoQTemOXCOkBUiUPSSKKuYfi53wHS8Fha4zeAEaxPVYa_LTGAUQ6HEh5KOdlTW6/s1600/tree.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XyoHj5cxR0abREpEKD2wKo46Grgwoijrg15eGRNC573Wi2cnFPs2vDoYWgFhqyOpJ4p4EcZIQD07YLoQTemOXCOkBUiUPSSKKuYfi53wHS8Fha4zeAEaxPVYa_LTGAUQ6HEh5KOdlTW6/s320/tree.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>lol i don't know wtf im doing</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I could wax poetic for hours about the ergonomic genius of the Gamecube controller, but as an input medium, it just didn't have that same X-Y-Z correspondence that the control stick and Z-button had on the old N64 controllers (albeit limited enough already).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Gamecube-controller-breakdown.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="307" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Gamecube-controller-breakdown.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Dem curves...</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So that is a (probably needlessly long) example of brilliant stimulus-response compatibility. But, wait! That was an absurdly specific example! And flawed at that! ...Is what I imagine you might say if you were the overly critical voice of my mother that I've internalized into my inner monologue.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Right. That was just a toy example. So allow me to bring us back to the bigger picture with a fabulous problem: inverted axis controls.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/il-7z85lABo?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>A Public Service Announcement from Freddie Wong</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ah, inverted controls. A divisive issue, yes. But why? Different gamers will play exclusively with inverted or non-inverted controls, and argue for hours over why anyone who does differently is wrong. What is stimulus-response compatibility to do? On the one hand, stimulus-response compatibility would seemingly dictate that non-inverted controls make more sense: up moves the camera angle up, down moves the camera angle down. But, as an inverted-controls devotee myself, why would you reverse that?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The answer comes down to the user's mental model.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Mental"! Time for the psychologist to shine! So, a mental model, generally speaking, is (an admittedly vague) term for your understanding of how a system works. You use this understanding to determine how you will interact with the system to achieve the outcomes you want. For instance, you have a mental model for how an ATM works. It could be simple (I put in my card, enter my PIN, and the magic money fairies give me cash) or complex (pressing my finger against the screen presses together two conductive plates, modifying the resistance across the electric field to bla bla bla...), but no matter what your mental model is, you can use it to understand that a certain set of actions will lead to a certain set of outcomes. That's what they're for.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But sometimes mental models can be a little screwy. For instance, you can find discrepancies between the mental model of one person and the mental model of another, or even between the mental model you have and <i>physical reality</i>. Take this example from (apparently, based on <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/lbianchi/nats1800/lecture16a.html">the website I got from Google</a>) Michael McCloskey's <i>Naive Theories of Motion</i> in Gentner & Stevens<i> </i>(eds., 1983):</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The blue spiral is a metal tube that is higher in the middle and lower on the outside, so if I put a marble into the high end (where the arrow is), it rolls through the tube and out the other end, which is resting on a flat surface. If I were to do this, what would the path of the marble look like as it exited the tube?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeD5a9uODBRqS7BcJJ-7_WB62XVksBAYgOtIxOLfDZS6CDDm7m2IL8ZMqcbynm9JUpV5uKkUqDxOprgpPMO6D5F5hc0AGofrTztBv5JLimzRV6tXTqE5t9VJzgky_yTN5-iERy1uHnlU-q/s1600/spiral.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeD5a9uODBRqS7BcJJ-7_WB62XVksBAYgOtIxOLfDZS6CDDm7m2IL8ZMqcbynm9JUpV5uKkUqDxOprgpPMO6D5F5hc0AGofrTztBv5JLimzRV6tXTqE5t9VJzgky_yTN5-iERy1uHnlU-q/s1600/spiral.gif" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>The marble problem</i></div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It turns out if you ask this question to a bunch of people, a lot of people answer (incorrectly) with a path that looks like (B). The laws of physics dictate that if you carry out the scenario I just described, the marble would roll straight out the end of the tube (A), but people's intuitions say that the marble will continue along the spiraling path. A lot of people's mental models don't match reality—but more important to our story here, some people's mental models do; mental models can differ from person to person.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Ok, so what the hell does this all have to do with inverted axis controls? It all comes down to mental models. What is the player's mental model for how their actions with the control stick map onto the result on screen? A wonderful image floated around the internet that illustrated the mental model of the inverted controls user way better than I could describe it. I wish I could cite the original creator, but I can't seem to find them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2e6oZ0ubAhm7BA6_oDc9JIE73zXip74n8MI4h_xKr7Ch8nf0Fgq_0Zyn6L-AMDa2l8PAwHknMqUBOeRg_ErOPnYKNK6ZHPQbapAFuFe-MvJz_pAFsDzA9FA4HKRPg4bgf_3yr-9_P0e1A/s1600/why+some+people+use+inverted+controls.+FUCKING+SCIENCE_766e2b_3779586+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2e6oZ0ubAhm7BA6_oDc9JIE73zXip74n8MI4h_xKr7Ch8nf0Fgq_0Zyn6L-AMDa2l8PAwHknMqUBOeRg_ErOPnYKNK6ZHPQbapAFuFe-MvJz_pAFsDzA9FA4HKRPg4bgf_3yr-9_P0e1A/s320/why+some+people+use+inverted+controls.+FUCKING+SCIENCE_766e2b_3779586+(1).jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Tilt, puppet. TILT!</i></div>
<br />
<div>
To the inverted-control player, it's as if the camera is mounted pointing along the same axis as the analog stick itself. Tilt your end of the stick up, and the other end goes down (and vice-versa). I told you it's better illustrated than I could describe. You might also liken the camera's control stick to the control arm of a camera tripod: push the arm down, and you're pointing the camera up. If that's your mental model for how the camera controls work, inverted controls just make sense and feel right. However, you might have a totally different mental model that makes the non-inverted controls feel better and make more sense.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The drawing is a pretty simple and clean-cut example, but I think what made it so popular when it first made the rounds on the internet was that it made explicit a feeling that a lot of people had but couldn't verbalize. And that's the major problem with trying to design an intuitive control scheme.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
- What makes a control scheme intuitive is stimulus-response compatibility.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
- Stimulus-response compatibility depends on users' mental models.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
- Users can't always tell you what those mental models are.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And, so, that is a great problem of game design. How can you figure out what users' mental models are to design around them? It's a question that goes woefully unanswered, or worse, answered incorrectly.<br />
<br />
Being a huge fan of customization, I think one solution is just to make everything customizable, but you can't just leave all those decisions up to the player to figure out for themselves. For one, that can be incredibly overwhelming when you have more than two actions to map. You have to give them some kind of starting point that is at least halfway intuitive, and if you did your job right, that default option will feel great. No one ever said they wished they could customize the controls on Super Mario 64 (except perhaps the mentally ill). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In a perfect world, the video game industry would have more psychologists around to probe players' mental models to make control schemes that feel great. Hell, in a perfect world, every industry would figure out people's mental models and have a team of human factors specialists on hand to guide the design of more intuitive interfaces. Look around, and you'll notice almost no one takes the time to figure out underlying mental models anymore, let alone figure out how to account for individual differences and design towards them.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, if you'll excuse me, I am off to post an incredibly long, scathing review on the app store.</div>
Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-66607777524623371272012-10-16T15:49:00.002-07:002012-10-17T13:31:07.456-07:00Content for LaterI see people stumble on this page occasionally, so I want to try to put at least a little something on here every so often.<br />
<br />
I came across this awesome video on Penny Arcade TV that I wanted to discuss in the future. I'm saving my full thoughts on it for later when I'm not defending my dissertation proposal and programming experiments, but I'm excited to share.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/beyond-fun">http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/beyond-fun</a><br />
<br />
The long and short of it is that video games are being bogged down by this idea that they have to be "fun," when really we need to be thinking about how they can be <i>engaging</i>. Fun is part of that, but not the necessary component of a game.<br />
<br />
I couldn't agree more, but at the same time question the whole "treating video games like other art forms" premise. Yes, video games can vary in genres like books and movies, but they also require a degree of interaction you don't see in those media. Video games are kind of their own monster that doesn't follow a lot of the rules and conventions you can get away with in a purely aesthetic entertainment experience.<br />
<br />
Anyway, food for thought.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-89699793312050167752012-09-28T11:10:00.002-07:002012-09-29T10:11:13.341-07:00Going off the Deep EndI need to get my writing mojo going, so I thought I'd pop in here for a long-delayed spell.<br />
<br />
I'm teaching introductory psychology and working on my prelims (dissertation proposal), so I honestly shouldn't even be wasting time on this, but I need to get my fingers moving and some ideas flowing. So here's one I've been munching on for a while (even though I know I have a cliffhanger on my decision making post).<br />
<br />
Video game design faces a fascinating problem that you simply don't see in human-computer interaction or human factors: the issue of challenge. (Perhaps outside the realm of error prevention, where you want to make screwing something up difficult to do or easy to undo. But even then, it's a much more discrete and categorical issue.)<br />
<br />
Normally, good design in software and technology means that the user doesn't have to think. A good design anticipates the user's needs and expectations and hands them what they want on a silver platter. Unfortunately, that's almost exactly the opposite of what the core gaming audience wants. (A metaphor I'll admit was inspired by this rather apt comic floating around the web:)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXxvxsKaG8id_gWQqGUwmKNtvcbWec5JpSEoVlnsqc9yTSMbczcTwMs9U7AlamZnInYNSSyl1TM1L_NpghP-eYKgxVcbd-v4oQlVmhEOGU1mTCkCJaXMpknBqBKh0qASYiQXCFBThyJ22/s1600/hardcore_217be5_2739543.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEXxvxsKaG8id_gWQqGUwmKNtvcbWec5JpSEoVlnsqc9yTSMbczcTwMs9U7AlamZnInYNSSyl1TM1L_NpghP-eYKgxVcbd-v4oQlVmhEOGU1mTCkCJaXMpknBqBKh0qASYiQXCFBThyJ22/s400/hardcore_217be5_2739543.jpeg" width="152" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>I did my damnedest to find out where this came from to give credit where credit's due, but couldn't find a source. If you know who made it, leave a note in the comments.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
There's one small change I would make to the cartoon, though. Gamers - hardcore gamers especially - demand that obstacles be thrown in their way, but not to <i>keep</i> them from the fun. When a game is well designed, fighting it IS the fun part. Back in the NES days, we didn't complete games - we <i>beat </i>them. The game was a malevolent entity bent on your destruction, and you were a champion determined to destroy it. And that's how we liked it, dammit.<br />
<br />
A greater distinction between the hardcore and casual markets, I believe, is perhaps more about the time investment required to appreciate the core experience of what makes the game fun. Angry Birds is a casual game because it takes very little time to appreciate the fun in chucking stuff at other stuff to make it fall down. Whether you're good or bad at that is another issue entirely. Compare that to Skyrim, where simply learning all the options available to you for creating your character is at minimum a half hour investment in and of itself. You can play either game in short bursts or in multiple-hour marathon runs, and even log the same amount of hours on both; but, the initial cost of entry is dramatically different.<br />
<br />
As a side note to my side note, I thought about how games like Super Meat Boy (which <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/40800/">Steam</a> brazenly calls "casual") and Smash Bros. fit into this scheme, as they're a sort of easy-to-learn but difficult-to-master type game. Like chess, there's a low cost of admission, but there are depths to them that most people will never see. You can jump into those sorts of games and have fun immediately, but there is still a question of how fully you've experienced the game after a limited time. But that's another discussion for another day.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I digress. The issue I wanted to talk about here is that applying human-computer interaction is a tricky issue to video games. On the one hand, following the principles of good design are necessary for a comfortable and intuitive experience. Yet, it's possible to over-design a game to the point of stripping it of exactly what actually makes the experience <i>fun</i>. <br />
<br />
I'm going to use two super simplified examples to illustrate my point.<br />
<br />
One obvious place you want to remove obstacles for the player is in control input. Your avatar should do what you want it to when you want it to and the way you expected it to. Many an NES controller has been flung across the room over games where a game avatar's reflexes (at the very least, seemingly) lagged behind the player's. (Or maybe that's just a lie we all tell ourselves.) A slightly more recent example is the original Tomb Raider franchise (back when Lara Croft's boobs were unrealistically proportioned pyramids). Lara had a bit of inertia to her movement, never quite starting, stopping, and jumping immediately when you hit a button, but rather with a reliable delay. You learned to compensate, but it limits the sort of action you can introduce to the environment, as it's impossible to react to anything sudden. Bad control is not only frustrating, it limits the experiences your game can provide to players.<br />
<br />
Underlying this principle is the fact that humans generally like feedback. We like to know our actions have had some effect on the system we're interacting with, and we want to know that immediately. When your avatar isn't responding to your input in real time, or you don't know if you're getting damaged or doing damage, or you're otherwise unsure of what your actions are accomplishing, that's just poor feedback. This is a very simple and basic foundational concept in HCI and human factors, and it has a huge impact on how well a game plays. Just look at Superman64 or the classic Atari ET that's currently filling a patch of Earth in the New Mexico desert. People complained endlessly about how unresponsive the controls felt and how the games simply did not properly convey what you were supposed to do or how to do it.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE7qXytYtZ7sRDPOGyVqm7aolH06ROh-ZQMIy3BGY0adZmjfn2lIJ4GngNtGZ7c8zM823vhcWWTsAITJKrr0__floM5aD-KuyG63GlZSedynG_XC3xyCMA2SZ2OeuzH8aZnSP_-FtR1eux/s1600/ET-Well.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE7qXytYtZ7sRDPOGyVqm7aolH06ROh-ZQMIy3BGY0adZmjfn2lIJ4GngNtGZ7c8zM823vhcWWTsAITJKrr0__floM5aD-KuyG63GlZSedynG_XC3xyCMA2SZ2OeuzH8aZnSP_-FtR1eux/s320/ET-Well.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ironically, the game appeared to be all about getting out of holes in the ground (though no one is entirely sure - we </i>think<i> that's what's going on).</i></div>
<br />
The trickiness comes in when trying to distinguish what's a frustrating obstacle to actually enjoying the game and what's an obstacle that makes the game enjoyable. You want to present the core experience of the game to the player and maximize their access to it, but at the same time manufacture a sense of accomplishment. It's an incredibly difficult balance to strike, as good games ("hardcore" games especially) stand on the precipice of "frustrating." You want to remove obstacles to what makes the game an enjoyable experience, but you also risk removing the obstacles that <i>create </i>the enjoyable experience.<br />
<br />
I believe no one is more guilty of this right now than Blizzard. It's been immensely successful for them, tapping into the human susceptibility to variable ratio reinforcement schedules, but the core gaming crowd doesn't talk about Blizzard's games these days with affection. <br />
<br />
Blizzard has successfully extended a bridge from what were hardcore gaming franchises into Casual-land. Pretty much anyone can pick up Diablo III or World of Warcraft and experience the majority of what makes the game fun: killing stuff for loot. But if you listen to the talk about these games, you find that these games are regarded as soulless and empty experiences. So what went wrong?<br />
<br />
Blizzard's current gen games follow a core principle of design, which is to find the core functional requirements of your product and design everything around gently guiding your users toward them without requiring effort or thought. The one thing that keeps people coming back to Blizzard games is their behavioral addiction to the variable ratio reinforcement of loot drops for killing things.<br />
<br />
Blizzard wants you to keep coming back to it, and they clearly made steps to optimize that experience and minimize obstacles to accessing it. Your inventory in Diablo III is bigger than ever, and returning to town incurs absolutely no cost - two things that previously interrupted the flow of action in previous incarnations of the franchise. Having to use resources to return to town just to make room for more stuff is an incredibly tedious chore that just keeps you from doing what you'd rather be doing in the game: killing demons in satisfyingly gory ways. Hell, one of my favorite features of Torchlight, Runic Games' Diablo clone, is that you can even have your pet run back to town to do all those tedious housekeeping duties that normally pull you out of the demon-slaying action.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://sticktwiddlers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/torchlight-2-skills-pet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://sticktwiddlers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/torchlight-2-skills-pet.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Torchlight II even lets your pet fetch potions for you from town.</i></div>
<br />
If you look at these games, almost like the design of a casino to keep players at the slots, everything is geared towards keeping you killing monsters for loot. Sure, there are a lot of accessories and side attractions, but they're all part of or related to getting you into their Skinner box. The ultimate side effect is that it makes the game feel like a one-trick pony. You practically habituate to the killing, and soon what used to be fun simply becomes tedious. And yet the periodic squirts of dopamine you get from blowing up a crowd of monsters or picking up a legendary piece of equipment keeps you doing it past the point you really feel like you're enjoying yourself.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/a7S29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="94" src="http://i.imgur.com/a7S29.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Granted, this was made before any major updates.</i></div>
<br />
Like their behaviorist heroes, the Blizzard (Activision?) business team doesn't seem to care about your internal experience, they just care about your overt behavior: buying and playing their game. I personally don't think this is a sustainable approach for the video game industry as a whole; it would be akin to food manufacturers just putting crack cocaine in everything they make so that people keep buying their product. Your addicted consumers will continue giving you their money, but they'll hate you for it and tear themselves up over it in the process. And that's fine if you don't have a soul, but I think that's hardly what anyone wants to see.<br />
<br />
Anyhow, the point is, these games are not creating the obstacles that the hardcore crowd expects. A good game rewards you for mastering it with a sense of accomplishment, no matter whether it's hardcore or casual. A major problem is that the hardcore crowd requires so much more challenge in order to feel the same sense of accomplishment. Like junkies, they've desensitized themselves to (and perhaps developed the skills necessary to overcome) typical game challenges Just to complicate things more, it's not so simple a matter as making enemies deadlier, like monsters that randomly turn invincible or become exponentially stronger after a time limit, as in Diablo III's Inferno mode. Blizzard operationalized challenge as "how often your character dies," and they had to overhaul Inferno mode because everyone hated it - it was a cheap means of manufacturing an artificial challenge.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGMJ2m_8AO3ffQOOvuTMj4I5YwOP78r4kPgCAUe2AsiUxRyWqnkx0zSw-VGlIu96AUUDyo5Kyiv2T7nHxo4DNKCrpVTFyjIr5r0grobLKKNDZAiX4mIuokq-1M97gzcQT-v1IwQng6BqAR/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-09-28+at+1.02.44+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="78" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGMJ2m_8AO3ffQOOvuTMj4I5YwOP78r4kPgCAUe2AsiUxRyWqnkx0zSw-VGlIu96AUUDyo5Kyiv2T7nHxo4DNKCrpVTFyjIr5r0grobLKKNDZAiX4mIuokq-1M97gzcQT-v1IwQng6BqAR/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-09-28+at+1.02.44+PM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Oh, fuck you.</i></div>
<br />
Challenge in video games is a hugely difficult problem. A good challenge is one in which the solution is foreseeable but not obvious, difficult but attainable, and furthermore provides a sense of agency to the player. I believe these are features all great games - that is, the ones you return to and replay for hundreds of hours instead of shelving immediately after completion or (gasp!) boredom - have in common. When the player overcomes the challenge, a good game leaves you with the feeling that you did it by mastering some new skill or arriving at some insight you didn't have when you started - not because you grinded (is that correct syntax?) your way to some better stats or more powerful equipment.<br />
<br />
Not a simple problem to solve.<br />
<br />
One potential solution I believe already exists is the idea of flexibility (providing an optimal experience for multiple tiers of players), but this is even only a step towards the answer. This traditionally took the form of adjustable difficulty levels, but that seems like a clunky approach. A player may not know what tier of difficulty is best for them, and the means of modulating the difficulty can very easily feel cheap (like making monsters randomly turn invincible). That's often where "rubber banding" (a sudden spike in difficulty) comes from - a developer introduces some new obstacle to crank up the difficulty without having any sense of scale or calibration for the player. Another reason why aggressive user testing is necessary and important.<br />
<br />
I'm not gonna lie, I have some opinions on methods for overcoming this problem. But like the Joker says, if you're good at something, never do it for free.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I should get back to my prelims.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-77431243900991359312012-08-16T23:29:00.000-07:002013-07-07T11:50:01.610-07:00That troublesome question "why"<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8805606530513614" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Greetings from Sitka, Alaska! It’s been a busy two weeks for me, hence the delay in updating. In that time, I wrapped up my internship with Motorola, drove back home from Florida to Illinois, then proceeded to fly off to Alaska to visit my wife. I teased a conclusion to my last post, but this one just flowed out of me on the plane to Alaska, so tough nuggets if you were eagerly awaiting that other one. I’ll post it when I get a chance to work on it some more. For now, enjoy this (unintentionally general interest) post I wrote.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b><br />
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8805606530513614" style="font-weight: normal;"><b id="internal-source-marker_0.8805606530513614" style="font-weight: normal;">======================================</b></b></div>
<b id="internal-source-marker_0.8805606530513614" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This one starts with a story.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I have a baby cousin-in-law who’s the sweetest little kid. Three years old, cute as a button, shock of golden hair. If you ever visit her, after some coy hiding behind her mom’s leg, she’ll eventually show you her ballet moves and invite you to a tea party by holding up an empty plastic tea cup that you’ll have no choice but to appreciatively sip from.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Their family has a dog who’s the sweetest dog you’ll ever meet. A chocolate lab, loyal to a fault, and loves to play. Pet him on the head, rub his belly, and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. My wife and I accidentally lost him for the most harrowing 10 hours of our lives, but that’s neither here nor there.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One day, my sweet little cousin was walking around the house with her sweet little dog. Seemingly unprovoked, she slammed his tail in the door and broke it. There was a lot of frantic yelping and screaming and running around; the dog went to the vet, my cousin banished to her room. They’re both fine now, but this is all to set up the pivotal moment for the purposes of my post. When her parents took her aside after the incident, they sternly demanded, “Why did you do that?!” As the story goes, she looked her parents dead in the eye and simply replied:</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Because I can.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Chilling, isn’t it? Maybe even a little distrubing. “Oh, my god,” you’re thinking, “That child is a psychopath!” Maybe she is; it’s a bit early to tell. But for the sake of argument, I will counter: quite the opposite! In fact, I must say that she was, if nothing else, honest - and in a way that adults simply cannot be. And by the end of this post, I hope to have convinced you of the same.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So why do I tell you this story? Ironically enough, it’s to illustrate how difficult it is for humans to answer the question, “Why?” Why did you do that? Why do you feel that way? Why do you want that? The ease with which we usually come up with answers to that question - as encountered in our daily lives - belies the difficulty of getting a truly valid answer.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This has profound effects on human factors and psychology. Every human instinct tells us that answering the question, “Why?” should be easy and straightforward, but psychology has definitively demonstrated that a lot of the time, we’re just making stuff up that has almost nothing to do with what originally drove us. If you’re a human factors researcher trying to figure out how people feel about your product and how to fix it, that leaves you at a loss for solid data. My goals for this post are two-fold: first, to clear up some misconceptions I find many people - even professionals in industry - have about humans’ access to their thoughts and emotions. Second, I hope to completely undermine your faith in your own intuitions. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because I can.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ll start with emotion. We like to believe we know how we feel or feel about something (and why), but try this little experiment (if you haven’t already had it inadvertently carried out on you by a significant other or friend). Just have someone you know stop you at random points during your day and ask, “How do you feel?” Your first instinct will be to shrug and say, “fine,” and the fact of the matter is that you really aren’t experiencing much past that. You’ll find it’s actually pretty difficult to think about how you’re feeling at any given moment. You start thinking about how you feel physiologically (i.e., am I tired? Hungry? Thristy?), what’s happened to you recently, what’s happening around you now, and so on. Then, only after considering these data do you have any more of an answer.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Don’t believe me? Well, you shouldn’t - I just told you that you can’t trust introspection, and then proceeded to tell you to introspect on your behavior. But there are some solid experimental findings that back me up here.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First is the study that formed the foundation of what is currently the consensus in how emotion works in psychology. We often just think we feel the feelings we do because they’re just intrinsically triggered by certain thoughts or circumstances. But it’s not nearly that straightforward.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1962, Dan Schacter and Jerome Singer tested the theory that emotion is made up of two components: your physiological arousal (which determines the intensity of your emotion) and a cognitive interpretation of that arousal (which determines </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> emotion you experience). The first part, arousal, is pretty clear and measurable, but that cognitive interpretation is a hornet’s nest of trouble. You start running into questions of what people pay attention to, how they weigh evidence, how they translate that evidence into a decision, bla bla bla. It’s awful. in all honesty, I would rather take on a hornet’s nest with a shovel than try to isolate and understand all those variables.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So Schacter and Singer kept things simple. They wanted to show they could experimentally induce different levels of happiness and anger through some simple manipulations. They brought some subjects into the lab and gave them what they said was a vitamin shot. In actuality, they were either shooting you up with epinepherine (i.e., adrenaline, to raise your arousal) or a placebo saline shot as a control condition (which would probably raise your arousal a little bit, but not as much as a shot of adrenaline). Then they had these subjects hang out in a waiting room with a confederate (someone who was working with the experimenter, but posing as a subject).</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now comes the key manipulation. In one condition, the confederate acted like a happy-go-lucky dude who danced around, acted really giddy, and at one point started hula-hooping in the room. I don’t know why that’s so crucial, but every summary of this experiment seems to make special mention of that. In the other condition, the confederate was a pissed-off asshole who very vocally pointed out how shitty and invasive the experiment was - things we normally hope our subjects don’t notice or point out to each other.</span></b><br />
<div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/NPFZU.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://i.imgur.com/NPFZU.gif" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>This gif makes me interpret my physiological state as happiness.</i></span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After hanging out with the confederate (either the happy one or the angry one) for a while, the experimenters took the subjects aside and asked them to rate their emotional states.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, what happened? </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">People who were in the room with a happy person said they were happy, and the people with the pissed off person said they were pissed off. On top of that, the degree to which a given subject said they were happy or pissed off depended on the arousal condition. People with the epinpherine shot were really happy with the happy confederate and really pissed with the angry confederate, whereas the subjects in the control condition were only moderately so.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The data support what’s now known as the two-factor theory of emotion. Even though we don’t feel this way, there’s no intrinsic trigger for any given emotion. What we have is an arousal level that we don’t necessarily understand, and a situation we need to attribute it to. If you’re in a shitty situation, you’re likely to attribute your arousal level to the amount of anger you’re experiencing; if things are good, you’re likely to attribute your arousal to your happiness. Either way, the category of emotion you experience is determined by what you</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> think</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> you should be experiencing.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What a lot of people in the human factors world sometimes overlook is just how volatile subjective reports can be. Now, I’m not saying all human factors researchers are blind or ignorant to this; the good ones know what they’re doing and know how to get around these issues (but that’s another post). But we definitely put too much stock in those subjective reports. Think about it - if you ask someone how they feel about something, you’re not prompting them to turn inward. In order to know how you feel about something, you start examining the evidence around you for how you </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be feeling - you’re actually having people turn their attention </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">outward</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The result: these subjective reports are contaminated by the environment - the experimenter, other subjects, the testing room itself, the current focus of attention, the list goes on and on. Now, these data aren’t useless; but they definitely have to be filtered and translated further before you can start drawing any conclusions from it, and that can be extremely tricky indeed.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For instance, people can latch onto the wrong reasons and interpretations of their emotions. There’s a classic study by Dutton and Aron (1974) where they had a female experimenter randomly stop men for a psych survey in a park in Victoria, BC. (The infamous Capilano Bridge study, for those in the know.) They key manipulation here was that the men had either just crossed a stable concrete bridge across a gorge (low arousal) or a rickety rope bridge that swung in the wind (high arousal). The female experimenter asked the men about imagery and natural environments (or some such bullshit - that stuff isn’t the important part of the study), then gave them her business card. She told them that they could reach her at that phone number directly if they wanted to talk to her about the study or whatever.</span></b><br />
<div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.destination360.com/north-america/canada/images/s/canada-capilano-suspension-bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="256" src="http://www.destination360.com/north-america/canada/images/s/canada-capilano-suspension-bridge.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>I kind of wanna piss myself just looking at this photo</i></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Now, here’s the fun part: the men who talked to the experimenter after staring the grim specter of death in the eye were significantly more likely to call her up than the men who crossed the stable (weaksauce) bridge. The men on the rickety bridge were more likely to call the experimenter because they found her more attractive than the men on the wuss bridge did. The men misattributed their heightened arousal to the female experimenter rather than the bridge they just crossed. "Wait a minute," you might say, "maybe it was selection bias; the men who would cross the rickety bridge are more daring to begin with, and therefore more likely to ask out an attractive experimenter." Well guess what, smart-ass, the experimenters thought of that. When they replicated this experiment but stopped the same men ten minutes after they crossed the bridge (and their arousal returned to baseline), the effect went away.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the way, this is also why dating sites and magazines recommend going on dates that can raise your arousal level, like doing something active (hello, gym bunnies), having coffee, or seeing a thrilling movie. Your date is likely to misattribute their arousal to your sexy charm and wit rather than the situation. But be forewarned - just like the confederate in Schacter and Singer’s experiment, if your provide your date with a situation to believe he or she should be upset with you, that added arousal is just going to make them dislike you even more. Better living through psychology, folks.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another favorite study of mine generated the same phenomenon experimentally. Parkinson and Manstead (1986) hooked people into what appeared to be a biofeedback system; subjects, they were told, would hear their own heartbeat while doing the experiment. The experiment consisted of looking at Playboy centerfolds and rating the models’ attractiveness. The trick here was that the heartbeat subjects heard was not actually their own, but a fake one the experimenters generated that they could speed up and slow down.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The cool finding here was that the attractiveness rating subjects gave the models was tied to the heartbeat - for any given model, you would find her more attractive if you heard an accelerated heartbeat while rating her than if you heard a slower one. Subjects were being biased in their attractiveness ratings by what they believed to be their heart rate: “that girl got my heart pumping, so she must’ve been hawt.” They found a similar effect also happened for rating disgust with aversive stimuli. So there’s another level of contamination that we might not otherwise notice.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No one likes to believe they don’t know where their feelings and opinions come from, or that they’re being influenced in ways we don’t expect or understand. The uncertainty is troubling at a scientific - if not personal - level. And guess what? It gets worse: we will bullshit an answer to where our feelings come from if we don’t have an obvious thing to attribute it to.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If memory serves (because I'm too lazy to re-read this article), Nisbett & Wilson (1977) set up a table in front of a supermarket with a bunch of nylon stockings set up in a row. They stopped women at the table and told them they were doing some market research and wanted to know which of these stockings they liked the best. And remember, these things were all identical.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The women overwhelmingly chose pairs to the right. Then the experimenter asked: why did you go with that pair? The “correct” answer here is something along the lines of “it was on the right,” but no one even mentioned position. The women made up all sorts of stories for why they chose that pair: it felt more durable; the material was softer; the stitching was better; etc., etc. All. Bullshit.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/02/27/the-days-of-wine-and-mouses-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/">Steve Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, is said to have carried out a similar experiment</a> on some hoity-toity wine snobs of the Harvard intellectual society he belonged to. He wanted to see if expensive wines actually do taste better than cheap wines, and if all those pretentious flavor and nose descriptions people give wines have any validity to them. As someone who’s once enjoyed a whiskey that “expert tasters” described as having “notes of horse saddle leather,” I have to say I’m inclined to call that stuff pretentious bullshit, as well. </span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So he had three decanters: the first had an expensive wine in it, the second had some 8 buck chuck, and the third had the same wine as the first decanter. As you probably expect, people showed no reliable preference for the more expensive wine over the cheap wine. What’s even better is that people gave significantly different ratings and tasting notes to the first and third decanters, which had the same goddamn wine in them. We can be amazing at lying to ourselves.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My favorite study (relevant to this post, anyway) comes from Johansson et al. (2005) involving what they called "choice blindness." It happens to involve honest-to-goodness tabletop magic and change blindness, which are basically two of my favorite things. In this study, the experimenter held up two cards, each with a person’s photo on them. He asked subjects to say which one they found more attractive, then slid that card face-down towards the subject - or, at least, he appeared to. What the subjects didn’t know was that the experimenter actually used a sort of sleight of hand (a black tabletop and black-backed cards, if you’re familiar with this kind of thing) to give them the card that was the </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">opposite </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of what they actually chose. Then the experimenter asked why they thought the person in that photo was more attractive than the other.</span></b><br />
<div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/wRqyw-EwgTk?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Check out the smug look on his face when he listens to people's answers</i></span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two amazing things happened at this point: first, people didn’t notice that they were given the opposite of their real choice, despite having just chosen the photo </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seconds</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> before. (That’s the change blindness component at work.)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second, people actually came up with reasons </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">why</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> they thought this person (the photo they decided was </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">less</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> attractive, remember) was the more attractive of the two choices. They actually made up reasons </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">in direct contradiction</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to their original choice.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The moral? People are full of shit. And we have no idea that we are.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These subjects didn’t have any conscious access to why they made the choices they made - hell, they didn’t even remember what choice they made to begin with! And probing them after the fact only made matters worse. Instead of the correct answer, “I dunno, I just kinda chose that one arbitrarily, and also, you switched the cards on me, you sneaky son of a bitch,” subjects reflected </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">post hoc</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on what </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">they thought</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was their decision, and came up with reasons for it after the fact. The “why” came </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">after</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the decision - not before it!</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you try to probe people on what they’re thinking, you’re not necessarily getting what they’re thinking - in fact, you’re much more likely to be getting what they think they </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">should</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> be thinking, given the circumstances. Sorta shakes your trust in interviews or questionnaires where people’s responses line up with what you expected them to be. Is it because you masterfully predicted your subjects’ responses based on an expert knowledge of human behavior, or is it just that you’ve created a circumstance that would lead any reasonable person to the same conclusion about how they should feel or behave?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This rarely crosses people’s - lay or otherwise - minds, but it has a profound effect on how we interpret our own actions and those of others.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taking this evidence into account, it seems like understanding why humans think or feel the way they do is impossible; and this is really the great contribution of psychology to science. Psychology is all about clever experimenters finding ways around direct introspection to get at the Truth and understand human behavior. It takes what seems to be an intractable problem and breaks it down into empirically testable questions. But that’s for another post.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So let’s return to my baby cousin, and her disturbing lack of empathy for the family dog.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Why did you do that?”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Because I can.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you think about it - that’s the most correct possible answer you can ever </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">really</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> give to that question. So often, when we answer that very question as adults, the answer is contaminated. It’s not what we were really thinking or what was really driving us, but a reflection of what we expect the answer to that question to be. And that’s not going to come so much from inside us as from outside us - our culture, the situation, and our understanding of how those two things interact. There’s a huge demand characteristic to this question, despite the fact that it feels like we should have direct access to its answer in a way no one else can. And it contaminates us to the point that we misattribute those outside factors to ourselves.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If you think about it that way, there’s a beautiful simplicity to my cousin’s answer that most of us are incapable of after years of socialization. Why did you major in that? Why do you want to do that with your life? Why did you start a blog about human factors and video games only to not talk all that much about video games?</span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Because I can.</span></b></div>
</div>
</div>
Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-48801038066225979682012-08-02T14:53:00.002-07:002012-08-02T15:25:20.292-07:00Choices, choices...I was doing a little research at work on UI design recommendations, and I came across <a href="http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/userexperience/conceptual/mobilehig/UEBestPractices/UEBestPractices.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH20-SW12">this Apple developer guideline</a> that basically says custom settings are bad (or, at least, should be de-emphasized). There are some technical reasons in there for why, but I want to highlight something they float by nonchalantly:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
When you design your application to function the way most of your users expect, you decrease the need for settings.</blockquote>
Give the people what they want, and they won't want to change it. Or, to put it another way, the people will take what you give them and like it. The latter is basically the Cult of Apple's M.O., but there's actually some behavioral support to the idea (so let's calm down, shall we). This raises an interesting question: is choice actually good or bad for design?<br />
<br />
Given the participatory nature of video games, it can be easy to assume choice is good in gaming. In fact, we generally tend to see choice as a good thing in all aspects of life. The freedom to choose is a God-given American right. Americans don't like being told what to do. Why not? Fuck you, that's why not. 'MERR-CA!<br />
<br />
But what role does choice play in game design? <br />
<br />
One of the biggest complaints you'll hear from Diablo fanboys about Diablo III is the lack of choice over stat changes at each level-up. <br />
<br />
Nerds raged for weeks over the Mass Effect 3 ending because the game seemed to disregard the choices they had been making up to that point throughout the past two games.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfDlNz0aMzJA9g7epOt7lW7fjfVCYxhnw1LgAxR-pLowt2uN1zq-W9aK_qST2-7UJkg09DZ0KIGdkOVg5ybEsdTjP9YGqoYBwhCqhmdrza2zmBV_WQkqnBGbodAh0KRY9j7WDYXvpmlD1/s1600/endings.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="167" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTfDlNz0aMzJA9g7epOt7lW7fjfVCYxhnw1LgAxR-pLowt2uN1zq-W9aK_qST2-7UJkg09DZ0KIGdkOVg5ybEsdTjP9YGqoYBwhCqhmdrza2zmBV_WQkqnBGbodAh0KRY9j7WDYXvpmlD1/s320/endings.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Credit: <a href="http://www.virtualshackles.com/299/">Virtual Shackles</a></i></div>
<br />
<br />
People get mad when you don't give them choices. And they get madder when they get choices that don't culminate in consequences. People just don't like the feeling that they've been deprived some sort of control.<br />
<br />
But the issue of choice and its impact on how you enjoy something is much more complicated than you might initially expect. Choice isn't always a good thing. Choice can be crippling. Choice can be overwhelming. In fact, choice can even make you unhappier in the long-term. But the thrust of western game design is steadfast in the opinion that the more choices you have, the better. I'll discuss here a little bit on what we know about choice and its impact on our happiness.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" height="400" src="http://i.imgur.com/Wp6ZD.jpg" width="333" /><span id="goog_1722520155"></span><span id="goog_1722520156"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/hnxpl/nintendo_rpgs_always_bit_me_in_the_ass_for_this/"><i>Choice in RPGs</i></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<b>How Choice is Good</b><br />
<br />
When you hear psychologists sing the praises of choice, they usually cite studies of freedom or control. You'll hear about experiments in which old people in retirement homes live longer on average when you give them some semblance of control - even when it's something as small as having a plant to water or having a choice of recreational activities. Depending on who you ask, you'll hear different theories on the mechanism behind exactly why this happens, but regardless, the commonality is that having choices leads to an increase in people's lifespans.<br />
<br />
Recent work by Simona Buetti and Alejandro Lleras at my university (and other research that led to it) suggests that even the illusion of choice makes people happier. When presented with aversive stimuli, people feel less anxious if they <i>believe </i>they have some control over the situation, even if they didn't and were only led to believe that through clever experimental design. <br />
<br />
Interestingly enough, this is accomplished through the same psychological mechanism that causes some people to swear to this day that pressing down+A+B when you throw a pokéball increases your odds of it succeeding. If the capture attempt succeeds, it's because you did it correctly; if it fails, it's because your timing was just off. It was never just random coincidence. At least, that's how our young brains rationalized it. Of course we had no control over the probabilities of a pokeball's success - but we convinced ourselves that we did.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.vgcats.com/super/images/080619.gif" width="337" /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>But did he time it right?! (<a href="http://vgcats.com/super">VGcats</a>)</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
You can do something similar in an experiment. You have a bunch of trials where an aversive stimulus comes on for a random period of time - sometimes short, sometimes long. Then you tell your subjects that if they hit a keyboard key with just the right timing, they'll end the trial early; if it goes on past the keypress, it's because they didn't get the timing right. As a control condition, you give people the same set of random trials but don't let them make any keypresses. Now you have one group with absolutely no control over the situation and another group with absolutely no control over the same situation, <i>but thinks it does</i>.<br />
<br />
What you'll find is that the group that <i>believes</i> it had control over the trials comes out of the experiment less anxious and miserable than the group that <i>definitely</i> had no control.<br />
<br />
Even when we have no control or choice, we'll latch onto anything we can to convince ourselves we do. That's how committed we are to having choice - even the illusion of choice is enough to make us feel better.<br />
<br />
Of course, humans also show a similar to commitment to heroin. Is it necessarily a good thing?<br />
<br />
<b>How Choice is Bad</b><br />
<br />
This is the more counterintuitive of the two theses here, so I'll flesh it out significantly more.<br />
<br />
This thesis has been pushed forward popularly by a behavioral economist named Barry Schwartz (who's just as old and Jewish as his name suggests). If you'd like to see a TED talk about what he calls "the paradox of choice," you can see it here:<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br />
<object height="374" width="398"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"></param>
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"></param>
<param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2005G/Blank/BarrySchwartz_2005G-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/BarrySchwartz-2005G.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=384&vh=288&ap=0&ti=93&lang=en&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice;year=2005;theme=how_the_mind_works;theme=unconventional_explanations;theme=what_makes_us_happy;event=TEDGlobal+2005;tag=business;tag=choice;tag=consumerism;tag=culture;tag=economics;tag=happiness;tag=personal+growth;tag=potential;tag=psychology;tag=shopping;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="398" height="374" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2005G/Blank/BarrySchwartz_2005G-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/BarrySchwartz-2005G.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=384&vh=288&ap=0&ti=93&lang=en&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice;year=2005;theme=how_the_mind_works;theme=unconventional_explanations;theme=what_makes_us_happy;event=TEDGlobal+2005;tag=business;tag=choice;tag=consumerism;tag=culture;tag=economics;tag=happiness;tag=personal+growth;tag=potential;tag=psychology;tag=shopping;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;"></embed></object>
</div>
<br />
I'll hit some of the highlights.<br />
<br />
<i>Choice is paralyzing. </i> As Schwartz mentions, having multiple attractive options for something can make someone freeze up and put off making a decision, even if it is to that person's detriment. Not having to make a tough decision can actually psychologically offset the cost of procrastinating on it. Full disclosure time: I have not finished a single Bioware game because of this effect. I know, I know, it seriously hurts my nerd cred. I was probably one of the last people in this world who had the big plot twist in KOTOR spoiled for him in 2010.<br />
<br />
<i>Attractive alternatives make us think about what we could've had instead of what we chose.</i> We just can't let ourselves be happy sometimes. When presented with multiple attractive options, all we can do is think, "Did I make the right choice?" And we spend all our time obsessing over what's wrong with what we did choose and how the alternative could be better. The grass is perpetually greener on the other side. And it gets worse the more easily we can imagine or access the alternative. I have an example to illustrate this point below.<br />
<br />
<i>Making a choice affects how we perceive the decision and ourselves</i>. I have an entire post about this very topic brewing right now, so I'm not going to say too much on this just yet. For now, I'll just say that it's much more often that our actions direct our opinions rather than the other way around - we just aren't aware of it. You actually do a little bit of cognitive acrobatics whenever a decision is made that all happens without you realizing it. <br />
<br />
First, you convince yourself that your decision was the right one - but only if you can't change your mind! One study (I have the citation somewhere, but I can't for the life of me find it right now) had participants take a photography class, and at the end, they got their two favorite photos developed and framed. The twist: the experimenter said they could only take one home, and the class would keep the other for its own display. The manipulation here was that one half of the participants could change their mind and bring the photo back, whereas the other half had to make a final decision right there. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/DZSTX.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://i.imgur.com/DZSTX.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Just because something is in black and white doesn't mean it's good</i></div>
<br />
When the experimenters later asked the students how much they liked the photo they ended up keeping, the students who were allowed to change their mind were actually <i>less</i> happy with their choice than those who had to stick with their first decision. <br />
<br />
What happened? <br />
<br />
The people who were stuck with one photo didn't have an alternative available to them, so they spent all their time convincing themselves how awesome the picture they chose was. The people who could change their minds were pre-occupied with whether they should've gone with the other one, and so spent their time thinking about everything wrong with what they chose. Freedom made them <i>un</i>happier.<br />
<br />
(An important subtlety I should point out is that, on average, people are happi<i>er</i> with their choices when they're stuck with them than if they can change their minds. This is a relative statement. You can still be stuck with a decision and dislike it, but - assuming your options were equally good or bad to begin with - you'd be even angrier if you could've change your mind.)<br />
<br />
If you want to see an example of this in the gaming wild, do a google search for Diablo II builds and compare the discussions you see there to discussions over Diablo III builds. The major difference between the games: you can change your character's build in D3 any time you want, but it's (relatively) fixed in D2. People still wax poetic about their awesome D2 character builds to this day and will engage with you in lively debate on how theirs was best. With Diablo III, there's mostly a lot of bitching and moaning. People seem to love their D2 characters and are indifferent or even negative towards their characters in D3. Why? The permanence of their decisions and the availability of attractive alternatives.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i.imgur.com/PSgup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://i.imgur.com/PSgup.jpg" width="162" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>All these skills and I haven't a thing to wear</i></div>
<br />
The second thing that happens after you make a decision is you attribute its consequences to someone or something. Depending on how the decision pans out, you may start looking for someone to blame for it. Things can go in all sorts of directions here. Schwartz opines that depression is, in part, on the rise because when people get stuck with something that sucks in a world of so many options, they feel they have no one to blame but themselves. <br />
<br />
I'd disagree with that claim - first, because the idea about justifying your decisions, which I described above, would suggest that you'd eventually come around and make peace with your decision because, hell, you made it and you're stuck with it. Second, I don't believe humans - unless the predisposition towards depression was there already - would dwell on blaming themselves. People tend to have a self-serving bias: they believe they're responsible for good things that happen, and bad things are other people's fault.<br />
<br />
No, I think we still pass the buck to whomever else we can when a decision pans out poorly. In the case of video games, if you made a choice and are unhappy with it, you blame the game developer. If the player is unhappy with the choice they made, they don't suddenly think, "I've made a huge mistake," they think, "Why would the developer make the game suck when I choose this option?" And sometimes, they have no way of knowing whether the other option that's now unavailable to them would've been better or worse. The game dev just ends up looking bad, and people hate your game. (Again, look at Diablo III among the hardcore nerd crowd.)<br />
<br />
I've been thinking a lot about how these factors have historically impacted choice in video games and how I think they made various games I've played either awesome or shitty. Based on that, I think there are a few simple rules devs could follow to make choice enhance their games rather than hurt them.<br />
<br />
But that's for the next post.Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-46767651059162421212012-07-29T16:29:00.001-07:002012-07-29T16:41:11.679-07:00I like my women like I like my keyboard shortcuts...I keep starting posts that turn into grand, sweeping philosophizing, and I'm trying to get away from that. (Hence the delay in updating.) So to make things a little more tractable, I'm going to take a small-scale approach and discuss a common gaming pet peeve: The unskippable cut scene.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: -webkit-auto;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
There are all sorts of reasons to hate the unskippable cut scene. For one, cutscenes in general violate the inherent participatory nature of the video game. The Half-Life games were praised as revolutionary in their time because they were the first games among their contemporaries to tell the story through the game. You experienced the <i>entire</i> story through Gordon Freeman's eyes, and it was an incredibly immersive experience as a result. There wasn't a fade out and cut to 3rd person view every time the game designers decided it was exposition time. Hell, if you wanted, you could just walk away from the people talking to you and start hitting stuff (including the people talking) with your crowbar. Gordon Freeman is a mute MIT physicist - he's clearly on the autism spectrum, and people will understand if he'll just do that kind of thing from time to time.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6KgRNhSrvrWw1-qCmgVehGTFCzKGduvVdQsG8Efs_WSQhsjAORmcDhaVFARdmFJy-udddQrnYyO95bd981T-kOyixJ8tqhpJhGVNlSkKAESH_fYDftoNHtBYQ5g9zqAeyYFvG9Ol9kbo/s1600/7.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF6KgRNhSrvrWw1-qCmgVehGTFCzKGduvVdQsG8Efs_WSQhsjAORmcDhaVFARdmFJy-udddQrnYyO95bd981T-kOyixJ8tqhpJhGVNlSkKAESH_fYDftoNHtBYQ5g9zqAeyYFvG9Ol9kbo/s400/7.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Gordon Freeman's teeth grinding and hand flapping proved just too unsettling in preliminary game testing, but if you look closely, NPCs' reactions to it are still coded into the game.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
Taken from a human factors perspective, though, I can think of two major reasons why cutscenes can be so annoying. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<b>Requirements Analysis</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
First, good design involves a strong understanding of your creation's requirements. There's quite a bit of formal theory built around requirements analysis, but I'll present one popular take. There are basically four major requirements you have to work through when designing something:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Functional requirements: things your thing absolutely has to be able to do, and if it didn't, would make people think your thing is broken. For instance, a calculator has to be able to perform arithmetic (correctly) on numbers that you enter into it.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
Indirect requirements: things that have to be present to make the functional requirements possible. To keep going with the calculator example, you need to have a power source of some kind. (Don't start with me, abacus nerds.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
User requirements: what's your audience? What do they know and what do they expect to be able to do with your thing? Are they men or women? Big or small? Young or old?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
Environmental requirements: where is your thing being used? A solar-powered calculator is useless to an astronomer at night. But then she's probably using a scientific calculator or a computer anyway.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
Gameplay and cutscenes have a very tense relationship under this sort of framework. The core gameplay mechanics serve as a functional requirement (or perhaps an indirect requirement to behavioral reinforcement...), but what is a cutscene? </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In the games that use them, they can serve a range of purposes. They provide motivation to the player. They inform the player of the next thing they have to do. And in story-centric games, they may even be the very thing the player is primarily interested in. Depending on their implementation, they can be considered a functional or indirect requirement. So then why do they get so annoying? For one, they are if they don't accomplish any of the things I just listed above. If they're uninformative, provide superfluous narrative, or are just plain insipid, you're gonna piss people off. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAi4cbeATwmRMhRU3-vhFBnV3W5ipsjbafA2tZgCIRXamVRzSLxbANfrO8W_vdacF9H2WVuifRCAw5eaz0Jkq363lFcime1uEWaA1pWgGGc87LaG4X7VsvangS_dvak-btR3McStnFv6O3/s1600/Rose.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAi4cbeATwmRMhRU3-vhFBnV3W5ipsjbafA2tZgCIRXamVRzSLxbANfrO8W_vdacF9H2WVuifRCAw5eaz0Jkq363lFcime1uEWaA1pWgGGc87LaG4X7VsvangS_dvak-btR3McStnFv6O3/s320/Rose.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Oh, my god, I don't care. I just want to sneak around and kill terrorists.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Then there are people who have absolutely no interest in the cutscenes, and just skip them because it's standing between them and playing the game. This can be indicative that the cutscenes are not serving a purpose in the game to begin with, and their presence becomes questionable (sorry if you just wasted hundreds of man-hours making them). For one, they're failing to meet their requirements, but second, they're actually interfering with the main functional requirement(s) of the game. As with so many things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is why game devs need to sit down and figure out what they're trying to accomplish with their game, and how they want to do it. Is this going to be gameplay driven? What purpose are the cutscenes serving? Do we need them? What constitutes a justifiable reason to have a cutscene?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But then there's another, even simpler reason why the unskippable cutscene is so annoying, and it's highly related to a concept from user-interface design: flexibility. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<b>Flexibility</b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
In computing, flexibility refers to the degree to which a computer program can provide an optimal experience to users of different expertise levels. Keyboard shortcuts are the prototypical example. In a well-designed program, the functions to which keyboard shortcuts are mapped will be organized in some kind of menu or toolbox structure that allows users to find or stumble upon them. However, as a user starts using a function more and more often, navigating through menus or toolboxes becomes cumbersome. Fortunately, through that frequent use, the user notices and becomes familiar with the keyboard shortcut noted on the function, and can use that to access it quickly without having to go through the UI infrastructure. And so, keyboard shortcuts provide an optimal experience for the novice and expert users alike, while providing a support structure to aid in the transition between those two levels of expertise - all without getting in the way of the different users. (You'll find many games ignore that last part; the Sequelitis video I put up in the first post speaks to that already.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Can you imagine how annoying it would be for you if, every time you used your computer, you had to go to the edit menu to copy, then again to paste, every single time you wanted to copy and paste? It seems so small, but just try doing that for a day. You won't last an hour. For an expert user, having to go through the process, as simple and short as it is, feels incredibly slow and frustrating.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Sound familiar?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
As a hardcore completionist when it comes to games, I can't even relate to why someone would skip a cutscene on the first pass through. But as a hardcore completionist, I have found myself on a fifth pass through a game wanting to stab the game dev's eyes out for making me sit through this same cutscene <i>again</i>. Unskippable cutscenes are a pain because, at the very least, they ignore the principle of flexibility. They ignore the fact that the player might already be an "expert," intimately familiar with the goals and story of the game, and just wants to get back to the action. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Unskippable cutscenes are just bad design.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But wait! There's another side to this coin. Unskippable cutscenes are becoming more and more rare these days, I'll admit, but this is also giving rise to another problem. The too-easily-skippable cutscene. I've probably had this problem even more often than the unskippable cutscene, to be honest. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
I've lost count of how many times I've been in this situation: You're sitting through a cutscene, no idea how long it is because this is your first pass through the game, and you've really gotta pee. You don't want to miss anything, but holy crap, your kidneys are gonna explode! You never had to leave the game mid-cutscene before. Can you pause them? I don't know! This thing just keeps going... But I can't hold it any longer... Let's just hit start and maybe that'll--FUCK!</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
(Or, even simpler, you accidentally bumped a button, and poof! Cutscene goes bye-bye.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Now what am I supposed to do? Granted, a well-designed game will provide you with some kind of redundancy to indicate where you're going next or what your next goal is if the cutscene served to tell you that, but what about the content itself? That's content you paid for, gone. If you're lucky, the game lets you re-watch cutscenes in some kind of gallery, but how often do you see <i>that</i>? Now, that portion of the game is lost to you until you play through to that point again. Well, ain't that a kick in the balls. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
(I started playing Saints Row The Third recently, and I've already managed to lose a cutscene. It seemed to involve an energy mascot beating up a gangbanger, though, so I'm guessing I'm not missing anything, but the fact that I don't care speaks to the justifiability of your cutscene in the first place.)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUmS_qSAZ9K1LRo0xNaQwi1bjqZUlFpfhLdTixl7AwhNK_F7tSgw9svEJTXje8zNv5Rzi-v0f185bVSIw9PAOK2C_1goCzSSic36922C1t9Cxr8hjqN44Y3GkzBcjs0PW1ApRylLw0-37/s1600/DB6306B39A45EDDD8408C1254E6DD12EC234CC17.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzUmS_qSAZ9K1LRo0xNaQwi1bjqZUlFpfhLdTixl7AwhNK_F7tSgw9svEJTXje8zNv5Rzi-v0f185bVSIw9PAOK2C_1goCzSSic36922C1t9Cxr8hjqN44Y3GkzBcjs0PW1ApRylLw0-37/s320/DB6306B39A45EDDD8408C1254E6DD12EC234CC17.jpeg" width="232" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>What I'd look like if I had a sweet scar, a more chiseled face, and a better haircut.</i></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Game devs wised up and provided an option to cater to the expert user, but now the first-time player is left hanging in the wind, which is just as bad (if not worse). So how do we deal with that? Once again, a simple principle from general UI design: error prevention.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Error prevention is what it sounds like: a means of keeping the user from doing something stupid. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It's why your word processor pops up a window when you try to close a document that says something like, "Are you sure you'd like to close? You haven't saved any of the additions you've made to your dissertation in the past five hours, you lunatic." Or whatever. No one reads text strings longer than about 5 words anyway. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Error prevention is also why there's that little plastic door on buttons that do awesome things in airplane cockpits and tricked out cars that you have to flip up like a bad-ass first before you do something that usually corresponds to the phrase, "punch it."</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
The ideal solution, as you can probably guess at this point, is pausable cutscenes that give you the option to skip them when you pause. Thankfully, Square-Enix, responsible for 20% of the world's cutscene content despite producing .05% of all games annually, has implemented this in a lot of their recent games. It's probably one of the few good game design decisions of Final Fantasy XIII. </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/vp-iac-kTR4?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>There's that and the Shiva sisters summon who form a motorcycle by scissoring.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Still, confirmation that you're about to do something stupid, at the very least, is a step in the right direction. Diablo III is the most recent example of this that leaps to mind - you can't pause a cutscene, but at least it asks you if you're sure you want to skip it. And you get a cutscene gallery in the main menu, so you don't have to worry about missing anything.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Flexibility is a particularly interesting principle with a multitude of implications in game design, so look forward to discussions of that in future posts.</div>
</div>
</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-2219309364193302422012-07-17T17:22:00.001-07:002012-07-17T17:36:32.553-07:00Justifying my Existence, part 3Ok, time for the glorious conclusion of my blogging trilogy. Wherein I tie everything from parts 1 and 2 together, then celebrate blowing up the Death Star II with a big Ewok party in the woods.<br />
<br />
(Everything else that's wrong with Jedi aside, how could blowing up the death star and killing the Emperor definitively end the Empire? I mean, did the entire enterprise really hinge entirely on one functional but partially unconstructed starship and two top leaders? They can't possibly be outnumbered and overpowered at that point by the Rebel Alliance - characterized as the ragtag underdog throughout the series - after a single battle, which itself resulted in great losses for the Alliance's already dwindling force. I'm not willing to believe that the sociopolitical infrastructure that is both a requirement and product of an intergalactic empire can be undone in one stroke like that. But, whatever. I bet the Expanded Universe answers these questions, but frankly, it just makes me feel <i>too</i> nerdy to have <i>any</i> knowledge from the SWEU. Anyhoo...)<br />
<br />
So let's recap where we've been:<br />
<br />
Human factors was born out of the military wanting to know why their best-trained pilots were still crashing the most precision-engineered planes. The answer: the technology wasn't designed to fit the limitations of the human operator. A bunch of people came together to figure out how to engineer the technology around the human being, and bam, we have human factors.<br />
<br />
Video games are at an interesting point in their history. Graphical improvements have defined the step up from one console generation to the next for the past 30 years. But we're getting to a point where graphics are not significantly adding anything meaningful to the video game experience. Recent trends have moved towards employing motion controls, but no one is really crazy about them except for idiots (and even then, for not very long).<br />
<br />
So what do these things have in common?<br />
<br />
I'm going to answer this question with a graph. 'Cause that's how we do in academics.<br />
<br />
I know there's an official figure for this somewhere, but I can't seem to find the one I have in my mind's eye. That makes me wonder if I made the whole thing up, but it all sounds probable enough to be real.<br />
<br />
Anyway, discussions of human factors usually involve a graph that looks something like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdzsXeYXyLPQKc8OHpzb7PiHO-HSnFZpSz4lRgj0CxbtMGciwUwZfcejkcd89ELkFekdgfowQrZYKNzH4zDxNUHSHqlgwcXUaH8d_cVxvdFUMQrURIJmxD-YkZ8hRK1Her1gq78_LnjuUI/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-07-17+at+5.42.44+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdzsXeYXyLPQKc8OHpzb7PiHO-HSnFZpSz4lRgj0CxbtMGciwUwZfcejkcd89ELkFekdgfowQrZYKNzH4zDxNUHSHqlgwcXUaH8d_cVxvdFUMQrURIJmxD-YkZ8hRK1Her1gq78_LnjuUI/s320/Screen+Shot+2012-07-17+at+5.42.44+PM.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>FUCK YEAH, GRAPHS!</i></div>
<br />
What this graph tells us is that aviation incidences have decreased over time thanks to advances in engineering. More reliable hardware means planes aren't spontaneously combusting and sputtering to a halt in midair so much, so of course you see a drop in aviation incidents. That's super, but engineering will only get you so far. You eventually hit an asymptote at the wall of human error. Even with the best engineering possible, you're still going to have some percentage of people mistaking one dial or switch for another and getting caught in a death spiral. Codified safety regulations also help to bring the numbers down, but even they only do so much. You never really reach zero.<br />
<br />
To break through that wall, you need human factors. You need a method to systematically study <i>what</i> mistakes people still make, understand <i>why</i> they make them so you can develop solutions, and then systematically test the solutions to see what works. When you start engineering the human-machine (or human-human or human-human-machine) system as a whole, then you suddenly find avenues for improvement that weren't there before.<br />
<br />
Now consider this graph which I most definitely just made up:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuEGk3rZUrXqSNUGl1jPLW8DFtCjXfUSW0QFYkA15goARSsdbcbLFDZl67pnfkJMFaq17kvTuNk4tQ8FBXwGYUkM8ckdeooBOA1-6_t2tbc9SbfulfehAkT5jjLw5dURJdXjXI8nSs-VC7/s1600/Screen+Shot+2012-07-17+at+6.11.50+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuEGk3rZUrXqSNUGl1jPLW8DFtCjXfUSW0QFYkA15goARSsdbcbLFDZl67pnfkJMFaq17kvTuNk4tQ8FBXwGYUkM8ckdeooBOA1-6_t2tbc9SbfulfehAkT5jjLw5dURJdXjXI8nSs-VC7/s400/Screen+Shot+2012-07-17+at+6.11.50+PM.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Human Factors is driven largely by Nyan Cat</i></div>
<br />
Like aviation engineering, we're getting to a point in video games where our hardware is starting to asymptote. Technical advances are adding less and less to the experience, even if they continue to advance monotonically. <br />
<br />
(Sometimes, they even make the experience worse. Remember how awesome it was when Dead or Alive introduced boob jiggle physics? Then remember how horrifying it was when Team Ninja made the boobs jiggle <i>independently from each other in wildly different directions</i> on the Xbox 360? WHAT HATH OUR SCIENCE WROUGHT?!)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://ryuker.carrotnetwork.com/images/deadoralive/doax2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://ryuker.carrotnetwork.com/images/deadoralive/doax2.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>OH GOD, WHY IS ONE UP WHEN THE OTHER IS DOWN?! STOP RUNNING, FOR GOD'S SAKE. You're hurting MY tits.</i></div>
<br />
<div>
Back to the point, video games - in my opinion - are hitting a similar technical wall to the one I described for aviation. While the technology evolves, things get better, but the rate at which they're getting better is slowing down. (Before you jump up to argue with me on this, hear me out.)<br />
<br />
Think about the Mario series. Break it down into its core components (I'll discuss more on this in future posts), and you have this underlying thread - running and jumping through an obstacle course - that just evolves over time. But think about how that evolution has played out.<br />
<br />
We saw incremental improvements going through the 2D Mario games on NES, and those were awesome. But then the SNES came out, and the graphical leap allowed game designers to introduce enemies and environments they never could before. Enemies could be huge or tiny, they could change form, they could respond differently to different attacks. Your environment could shift and move around you in new ways, creating situations and challenges that people had never seen before.<br />
<br />
Then the Nintendo 64 came out, and it was an even bigger leap. There was not only a leap technically, but also in the experience afforded by this open, three-dimensional world. Challenges and puzzles could come at you from all new directions, and it fundamentally altered the way you approach and move through the game. Once again, gamers were faced with a brand new experience they had never seen before.<br />
<br />
Then the Gamecube came out, and it was cool because it was prettier, and the worlds were a little bigger, and for some reason you had a water jetpack? I'm not normally one to denigrate a jetpack, but honestly, can anyone say that's as big an evolutionary step as the addition of a spatial dimension?<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBZp-DNVhTNpGKXMoBcobcsL0GlYOwIcWYUTVJ8kiOdTV57YnGlgisNxZylOzuHjA5-Y00spTQ4ry0f8I6iSBjbAGq02btTUOtmktCwNxuTKOXU9o3ZAXdHuxtyDI0UI-yhn7cNOqutL3A/s1600/446757-fludd_hover_super.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBZp-DNVhTNpGKXMoBcobcsL0GlYOwIcWYUTVJ8kiOdTV57YnGlgisNxZylOzuHjA5-Y00spTQ4ry0f8I6iSBjbAGq02btTUOtmktCwNxuTKOXU9o3ZAXdHuxtyDI0UI-yhn7cNOqutL3A/s320/446757-fludd_hover_super.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Oh, I almost forgot: Mario got short sleeves. Progress.</i></div>
<br />
And then the Wii came out with Super Mario Galaxy and it was like Super Mario Sunshine without the jetpack and some funky gravity physics. And the revolutionary new control scheme the Wii was supposed to give us? Wiggling your wand at the screen picked up stars. (Oh, if only that were true in other facets of life.)<br />
<br />
And now we have "New Super Mario Bros." which is basically Super Mario Bros. with pretty graphics and co-op play. The evolution has become a cycle that's eating itself.<br />
<br />
When an iconic figure in the industry like Mario is running out of places to go, you know something's up. The point is, video games are running up against this wall I talked about before; it looks like there's nothing else to improve on, but there's still this sense that we could be doing better if we knew what was holding us back. And that's what human factors affords us: a tool set for making bad ideas good, good ideas great, and great ideas amazing.
<br />
<br />
Motion controls were one attempt to break through the wall by taking things in another direction. While that was a valiant approach (that some say have ruined the glut of modern video games), it's become a joke among the core audience of gamers. Understanding why it failed (and how to fix it) is one major application of human factors. One reason that I've mentioned already (though there are many, in my opinion) sits at the core of human factors - developers pushing motion control didn't think about the users. They designed a blender for someone who wanted a toaster; sure we have this cool new gadget, and they made some money off some protein-shake-drinking douchebags, but a lot of us are still waiting here with cold, pallid bread in hand. <br />
<br />
And now, I've officially spent way too much time pontificating. Enough with the mission statements. Next post will be more like what I had originally intended for this blog.</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-54188441620071616002012-07-10T19:32:00.000-07:002012-07-10T20:18:19.799-07:00Justifying My Existence, part 2Ok, in retrospect I don't know why I teased the ending of the history lesson. The big reveal is that the human factors engineers went back home to their universities, and continued their research. The result was the beginnings of human factors as a field. There were now scientists interested in the systematic study of human beings in the context of a technological system.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Although I use the term "technological," it's important to note that human factors covers more than what we would normally consider technology. For instance, the way a restaurant kitchen staff interacts with each other to deliver food properly and efficiently can be considered a technological system to the human factors researcher. The real interest is in understanding humans as part of a greater system rather than the human <i>per se </i>(cf. psychology's study of the individual's mind). It's a multi-disciplinary field in that regard, as human factors is interested in the cognitive psychology of a person's mental processes, the biomechanics of how they move and act on the environment, the sociology of how their broader cultural contexts influence their behavior, and so on. As a cognitive psychologist, though, you'll find I'm primarily interested in what's going on between people's ears.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So, I'm not talking about video games nearly as much as I want to be, so let's reign it back in. Why should video games care about human factors?<br />
<br />
Back in 2005(ish), Nintendo's head honcho, Satoru Iwata, explained the company's philosophy behind the Wii. (I wish I could find the original interview, but it's getting swamped by Wii U stories.) In essence, he explained that the defining change from one console generation to the next up to that point had been a boost in graphics; but we're reaching a plateau. It may have been a while since you've seen it, but check out the original Toy Story:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/fPhse4WlgEA?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Back in 1995, this blew our freaking minds.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
It took 300 computer processors 2-15 hours to render <i>a single frame</i> of the movie. Perhaps with the exception of the self-shadow effects, the entire movie looks like a current-gen in-game-engine cut scene. For instance, check out what the PS3 pumps out in real time for the Toy Story 3 movie tie-in game:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNtZMrPjQyC-5aMkuyXd5wOJXrzEWBMtxp4xVxhLenn_zNc0Yym2hkEqkSb4sZS9UYFewyVImyRBETOdagtLHmqye8iLcFJYWYA1-cQq0J-hY04slyizjLifsEBr3jgpBwiTLkm2KNe_aJ/s1600/toy-story-3-photos.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNtZMrPjQyC-5aMkuyXd5wOJXrzEWBMtxp4xVxhLenn_zNc0Yym2hkEqkSb4sZS9UYFewyVImyRBETOdagtLHmqye8iLcFJYWYA1-cQq0J-hY04slyizjLifsEBr3jgpBwiTLkm2KNe_aJ/s400/toy-story-3-photos.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i>Woody facing off with his infamous nemesis, skinny bandana man</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Graphics are responsible for innovation in games insofar as they can more veridically represent a developer's vision, and the gap is rapidly closing. We've hit a point where games are sufficiently <i>pretty</i>. You're unlikely, for instance, to mistake someone's headband for their face in current-gen graphics. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://chanarchive.org/content/2_v/111278193/1316835890529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="http://chanarchive.org/content/2_v/111278193/1316835890529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Agahnim from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (<a href="http://chanarchive.org/4chan/v/21819/sprite-misinterpretation">source</a>)</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
And as any retro gaming nerd will tell you, graphics don't even affect how the game <i>plays</i>. Whether you're reflecting energy balls back at Agahnim with your bug net on an SNES or Gannondorf's magic blasts with a bottle on your 3DS, it still feels awesome. And it's about as much fun in all the other Zelda games since LttP, which just about all used it, too. (<i>Nerd burn!)</i><br />
<br />
In fact, the only example I could think of off the top of my head where a step up in graphics had a direct impact on gameplay was when Nintendo (ironically) first used Link's eye gaze as a means of providing puzzle hints in Wind Waker.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJixK1g4KnVmFgZ31WrIk6n6RLji14FH-uYEJpq4o9u1QQMGW6_-9ZaN0KpNhhmvd9eU8o9NfVuEwNID4PlwZjkOSsNgz6yABs7Kr4TaaSMrTkq1tSa0fcl_uMPVjNHL41mgA-uYwnIGr/s1600/zelda-wind-waker.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaJixK1g4KnVmFgZ31WrIk6n6RLji14FH-uYEJpq4o9u1QQMGW6_-9ZaN0KpNhhmvd9eU8o9NfVuEwNID4PlwZjkOSsNgz6yABs7Kr4TaaSMrTkq1tSa0fcl_uMPVjNHL41mgA-uYwnIGr/s1600/zelda-wind-waker.jpeg" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Fun fact: You automatically direct your attention toward the target of other people's (especially cel-shaded people's) eye gaze (<a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/yx7539p40846886j/">Friesen & Kingstone, 1998</a>).</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Getting back to my point, Iwata explained Nintendo would not significantly upgrade the Wii's graphics capability over the Gamecube, and instead would focus on upgrading the means of interacting with the game. That, he argued, would lead to the next great innovations in gaming. Granted, it eventually became a lot of mindless waggling, but Nintendo accomplished their goal of shaking up (har har! <i>PUNS!</i>) the video game industry. The new gimmick proved profitable and now every major console company is trying to cash in with their own make-an-ass-of-yourself-by-wiggling-some-part-of-your-body-around-but-oh-god-not-that-part-of-your-body-except-maybe-for-that-one-time-you-wanted-to-see-if-your-dong-was-big-enough-to-get-detected-by-the-Kinect method of game control.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
(By the way, because I know you're curious now: the answer is <i>yes</i>.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But here's the thing: the tactic was profitable because Nintendo drew in a whole lot of new, (*shudder*) casual gamers. The assumption was that the Wii would be a gateway drug of sorts, luring in upstanding members of society with a few minutes of tennis here and a few minutes of bowling there. They could never figure out how to do that on an XBox with its multiple joysticks, 11 visible buttons, 2 invisible buttons (L3 and R3), and its XTREME 'TUDE. But this, you're just wiggling a little white stick! How cute. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Then in order to justify spending hundreds of dollars on what amounted to an afternoon diversion, those same people would try out something a little headier - like a Metroid or an Okami. Then BAM, you have a new generation of gamers pre-ordering the next iteration of your system.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Or do you?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Of course you don't. That question always means you don't. You tapped into a completely separate market that behaves in a totally different way. You tapped into a market that tries out that new "Dance Dance Resolution or whatever" game at the movie theater one time on a date but then never again (OMG! He thought I was such a nerd! Lolololol).</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
You tapped into a market that can justify buying <a href="http://www.destructoid.com/wii-is-the-most-popular-console-for-netflix-streaming-207510.phtml">a $150 Netflix box</a> or a $200 smartphone and sees games as fun, two-minute time-killers that <a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/11/want-to-sell-an-iphone-game-price-it-2-or-less/">they won't pay more than $2</a> for. (Try selling those guys a 50-hour RPG for $50.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
You tapped into a market that would never understand why you'd pay $65 for a 16-bit game cartridge in 1994 no matter how awesome it was or how many times you've replayed it since then, and what does that even mean, the battery died and you can't save your game anymore?</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Point is, those profits are punctate. Nintendo didn't create repeat customers. It's not a coincidence that <a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/05/could-pc-gaming-make-a-comeback/?utm_source=GaggleAMP-The%20NPD%20Group%20Toys/Games&utm_medium=Twitter%20(GaggleAMP)&utm_content=24151-Could%20PC%20gam&utm_campaign=(GaggleAMP)">console game sales are down and PC game sales are way up</a> (though Steam offering cross-platform games probably also has something to do with that - how am I supposed to resist the complete Assassin's Creed series at 67% off? DAMN YOU, GABEN!). It made Nintendo a buttload of money, but it left a lot of gamers with a bad taste in their mouths.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
So what role can human factors (and psychology) play in all this? That's for the next post to explain.</div>
</div>
</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-71716390603069873192012-07-05T11:25:00.001-07:002012-07-10T19:57:30.868-07:00Justifying My Existence, part 1Any discussion invoking human factors would be remiss if it didn't include some time spent on justifying why human factors is relevant and important. Even when you look at internal reports and presentations at an organization that <i>has a human factors division</i> that regularly serves as a step in their protocol, you will see at least some form of justification for why they should exist and why they did what they did. Honestly, I've never seen so much dismissal of a discipline from scientists and such frequent defense of it from its practitioners that didn't begin with someone saying, "my degree is in literature."<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, we'll start with a little history lesson. What the heck is human factors? Like I said in my introductory post, it is - in part - applied psychology. It's often characterized this way because of the field's historical roots. And as with all great advances in science, it was born out of World War II.<br />
<br />
As an aside, the field also has roots coming from "efficiency experts" of sorts such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bunker_Gilbreth,_Sr.">Frank and Lillian Gilbreth</a> of Cheaper by the Dozen fame (the original, not the godawful Steve Martin remake). For now, I'm going to focus on the scientific aspect.<br />
<br />
As you are no doubt aware, World War II was a golden age for the development of new ways for humans to kill each other. The field of aviation was one such booming area. Do a google image search for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod%3D10&q=world+war+ii+aircraft&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=L3n0T5zwNY-E8QTHq5DSBg&biw=1048&bih=722&sei=MXn0T4n9MYqS9QT6oMTaBg">World War II aircraft</a>," and then do a search for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=pokemon&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1048&bih=722&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=IHn0T-37KYrA8ASXxrXZBg">Pokémon</a>." You will find the results to be eerily similar to one another.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/7/735/JL3Z000Z/posters/world-war-ii-aircraft.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://cache2.allpostersimages.com/p/LRG/7/735/JL3Z000Z/posters/world-war-ii-aircraft.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Man, Nintendo's really getting lazy with these Pokémon designs.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Point is, the world was engineering the hell out of aircrafts. We were making them bigger, tougher, faster, more agile, painted to look like sharks. Engineering was hitting a plateau. (Especially with that shark thing - have you ever seen a plane painted to look like something more bad-ass than that?) Aircraft represented the pinnacle of contemporary human technology. And so, of course, you can understand why the military would go to great lengths to make sure the operators of their ludicrously expensive, cutting-edge tech were extensively trained to skillfully exploit it.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
But here's the problem: the military kept seeing plane crashes that had nothing to do with combat. Extensive, thorough training with these machines, all the single-minded discipline of the top pilots of the air force, and the cleverest mechanical engineering just weren't enough to keep these things intact and pilots safe to the military's standards. What was happening? With the razor-sharp clarity of hindsight, you probably know where this is going. Let's take a look at a World War II era cockpit. I never claimed to be a WWII aircraft buff, so I'm not going to pretend I know anything about this plane, but just look at this mess:</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://olive-drab.com/od_other_aviation_unit_histories.php"><img border="0" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHX9igwRpNfj75cKjtVoDnEfRALmbQsij5WJEbrS1LgIalcvbhN3DECQaUsbaAzDfHzTxS4B7l730fsZopNu32TnvfJgV0Jhro3L-vq0jwLNweMhBAXq8NtFCCRBa6PLKo3ZFsvt4AyaGG/s400/b24_cockpit_full.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Cockpit from a B-24 Liberator, which sounds like the name of a sex toy to me.</i></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Humans (and their brains) evolved to do some pretty awesome things. The fact that I'm transmitting thoughts from my mind to yours through the use of visual symbols is itself staggering. But humans, in terms of sheer hardware, evolved to basically hang out with a few other humans, pick berries, catch the occasional small animal for dinner, and run like hell from the occasional big animal <i>looking</i> for dinner. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Evolution has not sufficiently operated on our bodies and minds to optimize them for driving down a road in a 2-ton death machine at 70 mph, let alone soaring above the clouds while relying on something like what you see above to keep us up there. But I'm jumping ahead in our story.<br />
<br />
The military brought in scientists from different fields to try answering the question: why do our planes keep crashing? Setting a precedent for future generations of human factors specialists to follow, the psychologists in the room stated the obvious: the cockpits are too damn confusing. There was simply too much information being shoved down the bottleneck of human attention, and the pilots just couldn't manage it all while having to simultaneously operate the things. The major culprit wasn't something about the mechanics of the aircraft - it was human error.<br />
<br />
And so, the psychologists, being the amazing wizards of understanding and systematically studying human behavior that they are (HA! Just kidding - the field didn't really get its shit together, in my opinion, until behaviorist and cognitive psychologists started duking it out in the 60s and everyone had to become that much more precise and rigorous in order to establish scientific dominance. but these guys were still pretty good. Oh, man, this ended up being a really long parenthesis. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the psychologists, as experts in studying human behavior), isolated the sources of human error and worked with engineers to prescribe remedies to the problems.<br />
<br />
Then life for the first human factors engineers became a victory montage set to 40s big band music. Cockpit designs evolve, there are shots of guys wiping sweat off their brows and gazing thoughtfully at blueprints, pilots start crashing less, the war ends, and then a sailor in New York creates an iconic photograph by committing what amounts to sexual assault on a random nurse in the street. <br />
<br />
But what of our scientists?<br />
<br />
The military had no use for them anymore and sent them home like all those drafted military men. But they were bitten by the human factors bug. Their heads were still full of research questions the military didn't care about or otherwise deemed "out of scope" for their purposes. And everyone knows how dangerous it is to leave a scientist alone with a burning question that dwells within him.<br />
<br />
And so, like David Banner in the credits of the 80's Incredible Hulk TV show, the scientists were sent hitchhiking down a desert road to some oddly maudlin piano music...<br />
<br />
<i>To be concluded in the next post.</i></div>
</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-42503128318553639352012-06-29T18:07:00.000-07:002012-07-10T20:01:12.714-07:00You can't fight this feeling anymore<div>
I had more of a plan for the flow of this website, but screw it, I feel like writing about this more than what I had planned for my second post.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Looking to see what territory's already been covered on this topic in the blogosphere, I came across a pretty neat blog with a very similar M.O. (but much more visibility) called <a href="http://www.psychologyofgames.com/">The Psychology of Video Games</a>.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, I'm not naming names, but I find that a lot of these sorts of blogs and sites launch into grand theorizing that weave these fun and amusing stories that overlook much more parsimonious and tenable explanations. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that in the blogging world. I used to love that stuff as an undergrad psych major. It made me feel like I understood people more than anyone really does (or can). But as a man of science these days, I find myself looking on like some kind of kung fu master who only notices the sloppy, extraneous movements in a martial arts exhibition rather than just enjoying the pageantry of the show.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Wow, reading that over, I just feel silly, but I'm a Scotch and a half into my Friday night with my wife out of town, and that kinda crap just sorta flows in these contexts.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/CljldVFRk6o?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>My anticipated recollection of this evening</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, I was checking this guy's blog out and came across this article on <a href="http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2009/12/just-one-more-level-decision-making-under-arousal/">why we gamers just can't resist that "one more level" itch</a>. You can go ahead and read it for the full story, but I'll summarize it here.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Basically, he attributes it to the impaired decision making associated with a state of elevated arousal. To me, that must've just been an excuse to bust out one of my favorite studies in behavioral science, <a href="http://danariely.com/pdfs/Heat_of_Moment.pdf">Ariely & Lowenstein, 2006</a>. Sadly, the blogger at Psych of Games left out some of my favorite details. Allow me to fill them in:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
They had dudes rate agreement with statements about risky sexual behaviors. These included things like (and I'm paraphrasing here): "I would totally bang a grandma," "I guess I have a shoe fetish," and "Screw condoms, am I right?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The control condition had men rate these statements in a state of cold, flaccid sobriety. The experimental condition had them masturbate "to 75% arousal" (don't ask me how you'd <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operationalization">operationalize</a> that) while viewing pornographic images and periodically interrupted the wank session with one of those statement ratings. Lo and behold, men's propensity for the sexual behaviors increased when their soldiers were at attention. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(You will not believe how many euphemisms for erections I have competing for attention in my head right now. So here are a few more: their firemen were bunkered up. Their guns were locked and loaded. Their rockets were go for launch.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, our psychologist gamer friend theorizes that the desire to play "one more level" in the face of having to go to get up for work in five hours is the result of impaired decision making in a state of arousal. I'm not going to make jokes about him getting turned on by video games. I'm sure at least some people have in his comments. Instead, I posit that the arousal experienced during video games is more akin to "wakefulness," and if anything, puts you in an optimal state of arousal for performance. (But, to paraphrase Alton Brown, that's another post.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
No, I'm going to argue for what I think is a more parsimonious and tenable theory: video games are an addiction.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
(Somewhere, a smirk of smug, victorious satisfaction curls over my mother's lips.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The psychologists reading this know where this is going. Time to invoke our old friend, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner">B.F. Skinner</a>. Wait a minute, they wonder, is Richard a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism">behaviorist</a>? To which I answer, yes, but only when it works. Here's a picture of B.F. Skinner catastrophically failing to explain why you can't use the principles of behaviorism to reinforce your dog into having a conversation with you:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://cultblender.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/bfskinner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://cultblender.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/bfskinner.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>"But, Richard, a dog can't reliably execute the motor behaviors necessary for the scientific measurement of what would be considered evidence consistent with our definitions of capacity for human language. And the inability to match the ostensible form and complexity of human language does not necessarily obviate the possibility of a capacity for some form of language."</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
SHUT UP, YOU OLD SLUT!
<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, I won't belabor you with the details of how behaviorism explains how video games are an addiction. <a href="http://cultblender.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/bfskinner.jpg">Cracked did a surprisingly good job of that already.</a> I'm just here to invoke that explanation.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Any time you're playing a game and you say, "Just one more ___," you're describing a discrete, reinforcing event. A reinforcing event that probably comes about from the repetition of some varying number of discrete actions. Hey, wait a minute, that sounds a lot like my psych textbook's definition for a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, which has been shown to lead to a prolonged persistence of the reinforced behavior - even in the absence of reinforcement - sometimes at the expense of basic needs like food and sleep!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Sweet tapdancing Christ, gamers are cousins to slot-jockey gambling addicts!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"I just need two more boar livers. Maybe this next boar will have one." We've all had at least some variant of that thought at some point. You may not be proud of it, but goddammit, you can't get better until you admit you have a problem.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyway, my point is, that's why you find yourself saying, "One more level..." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It's because you have a problem.<br />
<br />
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play Diablo III for the next six hours. You can find me on there as ChairmanYao.</div>
</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2865841803169627812.post-25827721453516717062012-06-24T19:20:00.001-07:002012-07-10T20:05:05.417-07:00IntroductionsIn my never-ending quest to procrastinate (productively, when possible), I've decided to begin a blog fusing my personal and professional interests together. Welcome to the Playability Blog.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you're somehow not related to me or a real-life friend wondering what logorrheaic nonsense I'm up to now (instead of the many things I should actually be doing to graduate), introductions are in order. </div>
<div>
As of writing this, I'm a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the University of Illinois psychology department. I'm a cognitive psychologist by training, but growing ever immersed into the world of human factors. In fact, I'm writing this as a human factors intern at Motorola Solutions in Planation, Florida. If you're not familiar with human factors, then for now let's just call it "applied psychology" (though I'm sure there are ergonomists out there who would be offended at such a limited definition, I have plans to flesh that statement out in future posts).<br />
<br />
This blog's title, "Playability," is my spin on a ubiquitous term from human factors, "usability" (basically, user friendliness). My goal is to apply the ideas of psychology and human factors to understanding what makes games fun and engaging.<br />
<br />
This is certainly not virgin territory. It's becoming increasingly popular to look at the psychology behind what makes video games good and bad, due in no small part to my academic older brother, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ambinder">Mike Ambinder</a> of Valve. (It's weird to see a wikipedia article on someone you've gotten drunk with, but I digress.) <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/">Gamasutra </a>has also been doing this for years (and I encourage you to check them out if you haven't already).<br />
<br />
Still, there are ideas I've had while playing games, conducting research, and standing in the shower that I have yet to see discussed anywhere on the internet. Maybe it's because they're painfully obvious or canon for courses in game design. Heck, I'd never even heard of a lot of the terms mentioned in egoraptor's Sequelitis on what makes Mega Man so awesome (one of my favorite videos on the internet right now, by the way).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/8FpigqfcvlM?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<br />
But being the narcissist I am, I'd like to think maybe I can provide that same learning experience to others on the internet with the particular knowledge base I have.<br />
<br />
Some disclaimers:<br />
<br />
1. I make no claims to being an expert in game design; what I <i>will</i> shamelessly flaunt is an expertise with studying and understanding the cognitive processes underlying human behavior - which I hope gives me at least a little more street cred than the angry nerds on the IGN message boards.<br />
<br />
2. This blog is my fun pet project first and an educational experience second, so I might not hunt down every single citation to back up every single thing I say. I do that enough in my professional life. I will happily go the extra mile, though, upon request.<br />
<br />
And so, with that, I embark on this masturbatory exercise of intellectualization.</div>Richardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07732868193937368435noreply@blogger.com0