Continued testing of objecst semantics

On the 5^th November 2013, After putting up the posters around the university, I had 4 more players play the lighthouse level. One of the players was inexperienced, with the other being experienced, so it gave a good opportunity to compare their playing styles and see if there were any differences or similarities.

I had made a change to the map for this test, by placing some additional rocks on the stone bridge leading to the mine, to see if players made the association with mines and earthly-ness, or perhaps a kind of ‘anti-association’ with lighthouses and nautical-ness.

Out of the 3 experienced players, 2 of them went to the lighthouse first and the other the mine first. All of them wanted to interact with things in the environment, namely the deck chairs and the glowing gems, as was seen in the test where they were first used. One player at first didn’t want to go into the mine as it was to dark, yet another wanted to go down there precisely because it was dark. One of the players who went to the lighthouse tried to interact with the rocks first, and because nothing happened they became uninterested and went the other way. The sole player who went to the mine first do so because they thought that it would be a dead end, and thought that there might be something down there that they would of missed otherwise.

One thing that all three had in common was that they felt the path to the lighthouse was the ‘proper’ or ‘interesting’ way to go.

The inexperienced player ended up playing much in the same way as the 2 experienced players who went to the lighthouse first. She thought that the gems would somehow be interactive and felt that the lighthouse path was the right way to go.

During the day, I thought that the reason for the majority of the players being drawn to the lighthouse path may not have been due to the combination of the lighthouse image and the deck chairs, as none of the players cited that when I asked them. Instead it seemed that the deck chairs by themselves were interesting enough. I thought that this could be down to being a more social object than the rocks, as a chair could promise the existence of characters, and a purpose for the chairs to be there.

(In later tests, this idea comes up again, where a man-made structure placed in a natural environment made the nearby area seem to some players like it had a purpose, which could promise additional structures and objects of interest.)

However, at the end of the day, I was made aware of the fact that the lighthouse path had an arch in it, which as something that was tested in semester 1, was shown to attract players. I put the arch in to hide the lighthouse itself, as it was what Disney call a ‘weenie’, a highly visible landscape icon that draws people towards it, wanting to see it close up.  In my effort to avoid this, I ended up making it more attractive.

I had one of the testers test out some of the other tests:

First of all was the level which used a general aesthetic to communicate the goal to the player.

The level is an attempt to create the feeling of an apocalypse, with the environment created to look as bleak and depressing as possible. The level is in greyscale, it’s raining both visibly and audibly, characters are falling from the sky, there’s blood everywhere, and at the end of the streets the players it meet with a huge hole in the world, which they can choose to jump down or sidle around.

If they choose to sidle there is another very bright exit that looks like a door to somewhere.

The one player I had play it that day didn’t seem that involved with the game and its aesthetic. He thought it was ‘cool’, but didn’t feel like he should have been depressed or otherwise unhappy. He also thought that the falling NPCs ragdolling on the ground were funny, which didn’t help. And naturally the player decided to sidle round the hole to the non-suicidal bright exit. At a later date I had another player play it, and got the same results. From this I ended up feeling that the level was a bit of dud in terms of influencing behaviour. Maybe it would of worked if there was some sort of extrinsic narrative for the player to be invested in, but as it stands, it doesn’t look like basing the game around a particular aesthetic isn’t guaranteed, if at all, to trigger an emotional response.

This would be quite an interesting idea to base an artistic game around. If players aren’t going to be influenced by the general aesthetic, maybe a point could be made by having the world shoe one thing but have the aesthetic suggest something else.

I also had the player play a quick map edit I made to the ‘complex vs simple’ test I did in semester 1.

At certain points on the map, I placed post process volumes that tint the screen red. At first I do this at threatening areas, such as at the start with the spike pit, but later on I placed them in non-threatening areas. I wanted to see if this would be enough to affect the players decision making, and how strong it would be. If the player goes into a neutral area and due to the tint decided to backtrack, then we can say that the effect is very strong.

The player thought that when the screen went red, they were being damaged, as they were an experienced game player and nearly every modern shooting game today has a similar effect when the player character is damaged. In spite of this, the player didn’t seem to be heavily influenced by this. At one point in the map is a t-junction, where one side tints red and the other does not. The player at that point went down the red tined path, but kept on going, not really seeming to care. It was as if the illusion had evaporated for them., and thus the red tint became pointless.