A possible new direction

My lecturer Josh, after looking at the ‘wood vs vinebridges’ level, had a brilliant idea. Why not make a level where some of the bridges broke depending on how dense the vines were. Some vines would be thin, and snap easily, and others would be thick and not snap at all.  This was great because in many games' mechanics, interaction is very digital; one thing looks like this, so it does this. The idea of having an analogue interaction is something that feels new, and the level could be constructed with the aim of making it 'feel' more realistic than usual.

The main aim of the level, however, is to see if players understand it and like it. Will they be cautious about the vines? Will they be frustrated at the level? Will it feel like they are having to make judgements?

Currently I have only had one playtester play the unfinished level. They partly understood the idea saying that they thought the number of leaves on the vines indicated whether or not it was stable, but they didn’t understand the analogue nature of the bridges.

To the player, the thought process was ‘Will this bridge hold me?’ rather than ‘How well will this bridge hold me?’ To them it was a binary decision to make, because their action too is binary – to cross or not cross the bridge.

On the same day as the testing, I meet Arthur Parsons, game director at TT Games, as he was giving a lecture at the university. The lecture was based around whether or not creating a game for an existing IP stifled creativity. One of his points that really interested me was how an IP game is grounded within the IP in the same way that any other game can be grounded in reality. They are 'grounded in the reality of fiction’. As my research is currently looking at how much of a player’s reality is brought with them into a game, I asked him if the same applies to IP games, if they have ever used the players knowledge of an IP as a way of guiding them through the game. 

He said that it was a case of yes and no. In the Lego Harry Potter games they used Nearly-Headless-Nick as a form of player initiated guidance, where if they were stuck player could walk up to him and he would float off in the direction they needed to go, an analogue to how he helps Harry and the gang in the books. However, unlike the books, as he was floating off he dropped a trail of lego studs, a collectable item. More traditional guidence methods were also used, such as entrances to new areas being lit up with different colours to make it more visible to the player.

I told him about what I was doing and he gave some great suggestions. He recommended that I did some tests with a 3^rd person camera, to see if the detachment between the player and the character that they were controlling affected the results of previous experiments. He also recommended that I look into how the camera is positioned; how framing the information differently can be used to guide.

With the levels I have been making thus far all using a first person camera, I have become too focused on how the player interacts with the world as if they themselves were part of it. Instead of just looking at how different stimuli effect players, I’m now going to look into is how these stimuli are presented to the player, and how that changes there reaction to them.

In the level with the wooden bridges vs the vine bridges, players only went over the bridges if after they noticed that they were being laid out across gap that they otherwise couldn’t get past. It was the context and position that the vines were in that clued players into their functions. Also, in the ‘dark vs light’ level, the fact that the choice between going down a dark path or a light path was presented as a T-junction, and therefore presented as an explicit choice, might be the reason why so many players decided to go down the dark path, against popular wisdom. Players’ had mentally modeled the environment as a binary choice.

In an average game, choosing between dark or light areas isn’t presented as a choice, but rather as part of a wider more flexible environment. Light is used to literally light the way, and very rarely will a level be designed so that a dark area is a choice with consequence, it’s usually use to indicate dead end space. In this sort of environment Players’ don’t model it as a binary choice.

I think I made a mistake to say that players are drawn to dark as much as they are to light. It’s much more complicated.