Interesting results (a look into 'shine a light on it')

When looking into the theories around player guidance and indirect control, I found a bit of a dispute. In an interview for the website Gamasutra, designer Kim Swift talks about how she uses the players’ primal instincts to guide them through a level, for example by using lights.

‘Players are going to want to go towards the light, as opposed to the dark. That's hardwired into us as human beings, because we don't want to get eaten by the bad thing in the dark, and so we're going to go where it's light out and we can see...taking advantage of the fact that we're animals...’

However, another designer by name of Randy Smith, in a GDC talk about stealth games, says that what the player is drawn to depends more on the mechanics of the game than base human instincts.

‘…very bright areas are environmental challenges to hiding, and areas of loud flooring are environmental challenges to moving silently …during gameplay players tend to gravitate towards stealth friendly areas and tend to shy away from stealth unfriendly areas…’

So I decided to do a test. I created a maze like level made up of a series of t junctions, where one direction had a light in front of it and the other didn’t. The end goal for players was to find a piece of floating cake. Not all of the testers were told this goal. All of the testers were also experienced game players.

I tested 2 versions, one where the dark areas where completely pitch black, and the another which used a more artistic darkness made up of a dark blue light.

With the first few testers, things went as I had imagined - they were reliably taking the illuminated route. Every so often however, they would look down a dark corner in an effort to find the cake. After this intial batch, players arrived that were taking the darker routes more often than the light ones.

I asked players why they choose the routes that they did. Those drawn to light more talked about how they avoided the dark as games don’t often put things in dark areas, another talked about how she was able to see better in the light, and another said while playing ‘I’m not going down there, it’s too dark’. Players who went into the dark more often talked about how they thought that the cake, since it was hidden, was going to be in a darker area, or that they felt that the lights where there for people to be drawn to them, and thus out of genre savvy-ness decided to go against what they felt were being made to do. Whether or not the player knew of the ultimate goal didn’t seem to effect the outcomes.

With the other, lighter map, it would seem that players were more likely to go down the paths in the dark, as only 1 of the 5 players completely followed the path laid out by the lights. I feel that more testing is going to be needed.

From these results, it looks like the idea that players are naturally drawn to lights could be an incorrect assumption. It would be more correct to say that players seem to avoid absolute nothingness, whether because of a genuine fear of the unknown, or because the nothingness is seen as blank and uninteresting. But even then, more adventurous people are willing to brave it, and there are going to be people who have played video games enough to know when they are being manipulated by the design of the level.

I would like to go further with this test, as all of the players were experienced in video games, and I would like to see if I get the same results with people who don’t play video games often.

Also this week, I re-ran the tests with the bridges made out of different materials, as I was unhappy with the thoroughness of it.

This time, I have swapped the materials of the bridges, to see if it made a difference to the directions that players went in.

It turned out that it didn’t. Players were still going in the same general direction as last time, so it appears that people aren’t affected by the material of the bridges when it comes to making a decision about which one is safer to cross.

After talking to my tutor Josh about the results, and some of the previous tests including the use of weather to guide people, we came to the conclusion that players don’t have the same instincts in games as they do in reality. There are a few that still affect, such as a fear of the unknown as apparent in this week’s tests, but it seems that in a simulated environment you still need to teach the player about how the world works, the ‘rules’ as it were. If the wooden bridges in the previous map crumbled and fell after the player stepped on them, it’s obvious that they wouldn’t step on them again. But because they didn’t crumble, even if they looked like they were broken and falling apart, the player felt that they would forever be safe to stand on.

This has inspired a new direction to the research, and I will be asking the question of ‘Which human instincts to we bring into the game world and which do need to be taught again?’ Due to the lack of time this semester, I will be leaving a lot of the idea I have for the next one. However I should still have time to perform one more test in a couple of weeks.

Material Semantics Part 1 (aka - Bridges, what they're made of, and being shot at)

I’ve finishing creating the level testing the relationship between safety and materials.

I completely remade the level from the intial block map. It's now an 'S' shape rather than a straight line, and there is little variance in height. I did this so that when enemies are placed into the level, all of their fire won't come at the player in one go.I had two groups of testers, with one playing with bots and the other not.

Players first choose between these two routes, both with structural barriers, and with bots on the other side

Next they choose between a short, stable metal route, or a longer more precarious wooden route. Again with a couple of bots on the platform these routes are connected to.

Lastly they need to get past two bots shooting at them by taking the high metal route or the low wood route. I still wanted to see if height played a part in feeling safe, and I intend to do another version with the materials of the bridge swapped.

With bots enabled, the route that the players took seemed to depend on the positioning of the bots and where their fire was coming from more so than what the bridges were made of. I would go so far as to say that players ignored or didn’t take notice of what the materials were, or thought that it wasn’t significant.

Many players at the start walked to the left over the wooden bridge. However the fire from the bots on the opposite platform peeked out from the right side of the cover the player starts behind. The right side was more dangerous to them, the fact that the bridge was wood didn’t seem to matter. Afterwards, I changed the layout of the cover in front of them so that the shots weren’t peeking out. The players then went over the right metal bridge instead. 

One player forego shooting back at the bots enteirly and ran past them, running over the second longer wooden bridge. He was the only player to do so, and I believe he did it because it allowed him to get further away from the enemies. Again, the fact that the bridge was wood didn’t detract him.

During the end section, players usually stood on the platform adjacent to the bots and fired at them. After they defeated them the path they decided to take to the exit looked random, and was usually the path that was in their line of sight after taking out the last bot.

The players who played the level without bots had more predictable behaviour. They usually walked over the metal bridges, but there were a few exceptions.

One player, during this third bridge section, stopped before crossing the metal bridge and looked at it for a while before choosing to go over the wooden bridge. This directly goes against what I thought was going to happen, as the player thought that the wooden bridge was the safer option. It would seem that the material that the bridge is only one aspect of the object that goes towards what players’ feelings towards it are. Other aspects being the width of the bridge, the apparent structural soundness etc. This particular player must of thought the wooden option was safer because it was wider, and because the metal bridge was made from three girders with visible gaps through them, and perhaps he thought he might fall through them.

Another player went over the same wooden bridge but without checking the other options. He crossed the previous metal bridge, which gave him a direct line of sight to the wooden bridge. This player seemed less patient and didn’t feel the need to look around and explore.

The main observation I want to look into is that players seemed to default to taking the route on the right side (unless there was something drawing them to the other, such as safety or a gun to pick up). There are many possible reasons why this is. Was it because of the right turn the players first make? Were all of the players right handed and did that effect their choice? Is because we read left to right? Was it because the bridge was made of metal?

The next step is to create the new version of the map with the materials swapped.

Semantics and materials

This week, I’ve been taking what I’ve learnt from the experiments and putting them into a Skyrim dungeon. Here’s my rough plan:

To keep the project in scope I’ve decided to do a small linear dungeon with various offshoots and hidey holes with goodies down them. Players will be encouraged to go to these areas using the visual cues that I’ve been looking into.

Unfortunately, due to a recent update to Skyrim, I can‘t access the Creation Kit editor, or continue with work on the level. I’m going to have to wait for an update to the editor before I can continue.

So in the meantime, I’ve come up with a new experiment to test out.

I recently read a Gamasutra article entitled ‘Designing Better Levels Through Human Survival Instincts’. I talks about how people feel in different geometric environments, for instance people can feel uncomfortable in tight areas due to not being able to defend themselves. The main takeaway from the article, I felt, was idea of safety. People like to feel safe, and in a dangerous situation they will be drawn to areas that appear to be safe. How this applies to video games could be a bit complicated, as action based games use danger to excite players, and it could be said that an action game without the threat of dying would be boring. In that situation maybe players would be drawn to the danger more so than the safety?

But, by taking the idea of players being drawn to safety as a given, I want to see if the semantics of different materials can make people choose certain routes.

In this level, there is a series of floating islands connected by bridges. Some are made of wood, some are metal, and some have barriers and some don’t. At the moment, the different islands are at different heights, which is something else I took from the article. It mentions higher areas feeling more dangerous, unless they have barriers preventing players from falling off, where they become advantage points. I’m going to be taking the height out of the final map, as the islands are floating. It won’t matter how high the player is, if they fall off they’ll still die, so the threat will be the same no matter what the height is.

I’m also going to test the map with and without enemies. These will shoot and be shot at the by player. I want to see if the player still takes notice of aesthetics and thus semantics of the level if they are given task while also being put into danger.