Using point and click mouse controls for new players

After chatting with one of my lecturers, she gave me some suggestions. She thought that the engine and the controls I was using for these tests weren’t accessible enough for the newer players. I agreed, as I wasn’t finding many trends in the behaviour of newer players, apart from how many of them seemed to be rushing through the tests, not taking their time to make decisions and just going with the first thing that came into their heads.

I ended up using Unreal’s mobile phone default controls. The controls were mouse only. Players clicked on a spot on the ground to move and held down the mouse and dragged it around to look. By having the ability to freely look around, and needing at lot less skill to control the camera movement, I hoped that this would cause players to slow down and analyse their environment before making a decision, thus give a more accurate result. Because of the way Unreal handles this, by emulating the functions of a mobile phone inside of the engine, it meant that I had to reconfigure the levels. This took some time to do, so I choose a limited number of levels to test. I choose one of the Mine level, in order to test the idea of threat. I choose the lighthouse level due to how much the results were skewed to one of the choices, and I wanted to see if the results were replicated. And finally the Light and Dark town, as it was one of the first maps I used which gave and interesting and unexpected result, so I really needed to see if newer players acted in the same way as the experienced players did.

First to be tested was the mine level. When the experienced players played it, there wasn’t much of a trend as to where they decided to go, and this unfortunately continued on with the newer players. even though they were now rushing less. I ended them asking them why they choose the directions they choose, and players who went down the safer path said it looked more interesting in the sense that there were objects there, and because they were there, there must be a reason for them to be there, that ended up sparking their imagination and interest.

Secondly was the dark and light town with the addition of the statue. This time the new players behaviour was more predictable. All of the players went down the lit paths more often, and continued to go down them until they got to about halfway through the level, when they started going the dark paths. Asking why, they said it was because if their goal was the find the statue, it must be hidden in some way. The players were assuming that there must be some sort of challenge present.

Lastly was the lighthouse level. I had to make a few changes to the level, as the mobile emulation in Unreal was having compatibility issues with previous version. This new version was smaller and I ended up replacing the lighthouse with a hut to make it less noticeable. The actual motivation for choosing one side or the other ended up changing in the process as well, from the semantics of the coast vs the semantics of earthliness, to a more general lively area vs bleak area.

Of 8 newer players, only 1 of them went to the bleak area first. All of them said that the path leading to the hut was more interesting, and the player who didn’t go to the hut first did so because they didn’t notice the path leading to it.

After getting the inexperienced player data from these two maps, I had changed my thinking about threat - It’s only guaranteed to affect behaviour if it’s an active threat which can put the player at a disadvantage. Essentially, what I had defined as ‘passive threats’ weren’t having much of an effect on player behaviour.

This made me consider something about player immersion. The only stimuli that was having a consistent effect on player behaviour has been colour and light (to an extent). None of the players were connected or immersed enough in the game world to be affected by stimuli that would affect their behaviour in reality. When people were playing the games, their interaction with the environment and conversely the environment interaction with them, was handled on a much more logical rather than emotional level. Interacting with a game seems much more akin to working a machine than it does to being in another environment.

It’s not the strength of the connection with the game world that draws people in. It’s the mechanics. Intuition is aided by affordance rather than realism.

At this point in the research, I also felt I had just enough evidence to arrive at another theory. I behaviour that I noticed was that most players, regardless of experience, considered the same areas of levels to be important, such as large gates (as seen in various semester 1 experiments), brightly lit areas (as seen in the Sands level and the dark to light town) and marks of civilisation (as seen in the Sands level, and the Mine level).

However, how players approached this seemed to differentiate with experience. As players explored individual spaces, more experienced players were choosing to go to the important areas last, after going through other optional paths and areas to check if there was anything there which would give them an advantage. Novice players would go straight to what they would find interesting first.

What I thought I had found was a way to split a levels critical path up between the experienced players and the inexperienced players, which meant that levels could be created that would have experienced players lead in one direction and inexperienced players lead in another.

This could be used to lead each player to challenge or experience that was catered to them, without having to select it in a menu, sort of like dynamic difficulty, except knowing what difficulty level is needed before that player has started any challenge.

However, looking back on it , it seems that I was ignoring or at least forgetting about some of the previous tests, where experienced players were attracted to important areas first and optional areas second.

The idea fell apart when I had experienced players play the new version of the Lighthouse map. All of them also went to the hut first, following the same behaviour as the newer players. I would like to blame this on the fact that the ‘optional’ path of the new mobile version of the map was a lot bleaker than it was the in the previous version.