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.