After purchasing my iPad2, one of the very first things I did was start to download all kinds of mobile apps. I had never owned a smart phone, and I had never played any Facebook game other than Rainbow Unicorn Attacks (Always I wanna be with you....).
At this point, I had been designing mobile games for months. Immediately, it became very clear to me that I hadn't the foggiest idea what I was doing.
I asked my teachers to delay several assignment due dates for me as I set out to figure out what casual gaming was all about. I had formed countless opinions concerning what made a good casual game, and all of them proved wrong.
I had to study mobile games; my target audience is non-gamer women aged 30-55. Mobile devices are the only potential gaming system they'll ever had. So I had to figure out why they placed- what pleasure they got from their games- and I had to try and see if I could find any casual games I liked so that I could relate to them. That's not to say that my ideal casual game is their ideal casual game... Only that I needed a control before I could study my variables
I initially assumed that Pocket Frogs was going to be my favorite game. I like artificial life games, and this game let me collect and breed frogs. A Chinese business woman in my demographic couldn't put the game down for two hours straight. Yet later on I grew irritated with the game and deleted it.
What happened?
The Chinese business woman I mentioned didn't look for /games/, she looked for time wasters. The primary mechanic for the frog game was mindless and tedious. It didn't require any planning, coordination, learning, creativity, or skill. But that's okay- the people who buy it re trying to blot out boring parts of their lives from their memories. Instant motion, instant gratification, with no memory, no past, no future- that's as pleasurable as it would be for an earlier generation to plop down in front of a TV and zone out.
And yeah. That IS something people need. I can try and woo them into liking games with more substance... Which Pocket Frogs tries to do by giving long term breeding rewards in exchange for short term mindlessness... And that's a completely valid game. It's not like I'm saying "I found out they were really all fake gamers who just like mashing buttons". No, these people are some of the hardest to design good games for...
Because you actually have to get at the heart of instant pleasure, and design something that gives it. They have no patience. They give you twenty seconds maximum to present them with a good product. They are extremely picky, they cluster on certain games and share through word of mouth, and they can play hours each day on commute. These people need a service games provide, and they are a very finicky market with high standards- THEIR standards, not the average gamer's.
Everyone has a different technique for zoning out, and mine wasn't games, so I didn't enjoy Pocket Frogs. I prefer to daydream or pet my cat. Everyone needs zone-out-time now and then and games can be a good medium for delivering that experience. Still, there are countless different kinds of games, and since there's no need for my to specifically gravitate towards a game I find no pleasure in, I think I'll just ignore zone-out-games for now and focus on the genres I do like ;)
For awhile I played Tiny Monsters and Dragonvale and enjoyed both. I played for several months actually, each. I just uninstalled Tiny Monsters. I will keep Dragonvale.
Both games involve maintaining a park of fictional creatures to earn gems, food, and money. They are breeding and collection games. I have never paid a dime for either. These games make money by letting you hurry up your progress. If you are patient, you get everything free. If you don't want to wait, you pay.
At first, Tiny Monsters, which is essentially a clone of Dragonvale, was winning. It was more directed. The graphics were much better, and that is extremely important to my target audience, who thrives on first impressions and visual appeal. It had more variety. It was newer. The interface was sleeker. The company had a lot of similar products on the market already to draw in audience members from.
As time went by, however, a marked difference emerged. Tiny Monsters fell behind. Way behind. I started to resent playing it. At first I thought this was just because Dragonvale was older and had more content. Then I played Tiny Zoo, which had a lot of content, and grimaced in distaste.
I just uninstalled Tiny Monsters today, after months of trial period. I will continue to play Dragonvale.
What happened?
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Dragonvale and Tiny Monsters both make money based on a mixture of hiding a player's net ROI (or lack thereof) through incremental purchases, and relying on player impatience. They tap into the player's need to collect something. Their gameplay is almost identical.
The pleasure they give, I have decided to call the 'Water Your Plants' plesure, or the 'Morning Routine' plesu. It is the simple pleasure of going wbout your house every morning, watering all of your plants, and then checking up on how they are doing. Now and then they give you good or bad surprises by wilting or growing flowers. After watering them you put them out of sight and out of mind till the next morning, when you come to check up on them again.
This is pleasurable. It's a routine that involves minimal effort, over a long period of time, with a low fuzzy hum of pleasure being delivered in a small dose each morning. These games give that pleasure. Once or twice daily you log on,check your monster park, make some adjustments and plans for the next day, look at any special offers, and then tuck it out of sight and out of mind for the rest of the day. If you really get addicted to it and want to 'garden' nonstop, so to speak, you'll get impatient with the gme's pace and strt paying for a few things.
But if all this truly is the same, how could Tiny Monsters make me angry, and Dragonvale give me pleasure?
Easy. The symptom is a difference in pacing between the games. The cause is a difference in ideology. The creators of Tiny Monsters know that people pay money to collect things, so they withhold everything as long as possible to try and get the player to buy. Dragonvale gives the player everything the player wants, one item at a time, and waits only long enough for that 'victory' to be enjoyed before delivering the next item.
In Tiny Monsters, end game monsters yield less 'bang for your buck', slowing down collection progression to a rate of a single new monster per week, and an equally long time maturing them to adulthood. I still haven't gotten all of them even in baby form, and there is never enough food. Farms don't produce enough crops, so I can't get high level monsters, so I can't afford more habitats, so I can buy more baby monsters.
In Dragonvale I had a single high end monster very quickly. I get four new monsters a day, and one of them is usually either neat, or the monster I was actually looking for. Simple game play additions really extend the options available to me. Basically I can start collecting wherever I want, whatever I want, and get it fast. But to get one of everything, I have to work at it. And to get multiple of anything, I have to plan.
Both games release numerous new creatures per month. In tiny monsters, twenty new monsters will come out before I can even get the first parent monster i need to even breed the final monster i want... And it will take days to get it to adulthood. In Dragonvale, I can make a choice as soon as it comes out whether I want to focus on it, or work on another project.
Dragonvale gets pacing right. There is a lot more 'land' in the game, a lot more 'projects' I can have going on at the same time, a lot of different things I could work on, and most importantly, I can get what I want relatively quickly. I have freedom in how I want to play. I can check up on the game once per week or once per hour, and there exists a play style that will suite me. Tiny monsters has only one setting: be on it all the time, so that you'll get bored. Or, never get on, and never have enough resources, and you'll still get bored. Then you'll buy something.
I don't have to buy anything, Tiny Monsters. I bred twenty giant flowering tree dragons. And you know what? if I ever do get every dragon in the game, all I'll do is sit down and start twiddling with everything to get it perfect. I will start decorating things and trying different combinations of dragons till I find a play mode that pleases me. And with new dragons coming out every few weeks, there will always be a new toy to play with.
I do not make micro transactions, so I am not either game's target audience. But I am an important audience. I am the audience that goes out and tells everyone else about a great game I've found. I am the Critic. I am the audience that knows the company's name, researches them, and realizes they aren't a one trick pony or copy cat, but rather a talented group of creative fellas who makes high quality good games for every audience.
Tiny Monsters, you fail. Dragonvale, you graduate with honors. Pocket Frogs? Eh. You weren't the game for me, so I couldn't judge you.
Dragonvale makes me happy, because my plants are always bright and chipper.
Casual gamers are not fools, or suckers, or easy to swindle. They play a game to /get/ something out of it; they don't play games to give designers money. Tiny monsters is run like a pyramid scheme. Dragonvale is a game.
If you like mindless games, try other games by Backflip studios. Paper toss and their ninja game are phenomenal. Unlike Tiny Monsters, Backflip doesn't treat you like a sucker who pays to collect things... They treat you like a person who has a need, a need for fun games... And they understand that they have to give you good products to fill that need if they're going to expect you to buy anything.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
On Norman - Part Two
Norman didn't just talk about affordances, although frequently that's what we remember him for. In his book he lamented that he was remembered for bad doors, but either that was some time ago, or among a community to which I was not a part of, as I have never yet heard anyone refer to anything as a 'Norman Door.' Throwing the word 'affordances' out like a buzz word is one of the easiest ways to pretend you know a great deal about Norman! Although, to be fair, the difficulty in affordances is not in understanding what an affordance is, but in applying it to your current situation to understand how you should design something.
But enough about affordances; I told you, already, he's talked about other things!
In "The Design of Everyday Things" Norman talks about several concept, affordances included. One of the other big topics he hit on was natural mapping. Or conceptual mapping. Or mind mapping. Or mental mapping or- gosh darn it, I'm just not sure what to call it any more. Conceptual, mind, and mental mapping all seem to be words for more or less the same thing, if you ask me!
Usually, a conceptual map is a diagram for understanding the relationships between items, in which case we could say Norman is talking about conceptual mapping because he is pretty much laying down his observations in diagram form. And a mind map is a brainstorming tool. And a mental map is one's understanding of ones sociocultural and spacial position in the world.
The reason I take the time to point these out is because almost all of them are addressed when one is in the interactive entertainment field, and I feel it is very important for me to set the record straight. Donal Norman did talk about other forms of mapping- his famous 'trying to get the temperature right in the freezer and the refrigerator' example was one such instance- but Natural mapping is one of those other buzz words we associate with Norman and which needs to be addressed in any lengthy blog post about him.
Natural mapping is the idea that components of a system should share easily observable properties that help a user correctly and intuitively guess the relationship between them.I say 'guess' because when we use non-dangerous controls, we tend to grab- without thinking- whatever control seems most natural to us, and attempt to operate it. If we are unsuccessful, we will proceed to try a few more options before actually bending our brain to the problem. Humans are not meant to think about their activities 24-7. Some things need to be doable automatically.
In most of his examples, these shared properties are a spatial map. That is, good natural mapping in these instances means that a spatial understanding of one part of a system should also apply to to second part of the same system. For example, a user, upon assessing the controls for an object, should be able to make an internal map of their spacial arrangement, and then apply that same internal map to the actual objects. This helps the user understand which switch controls which. Creating an internal spatial map comes naturally to humans. If it is ignored, we just never learn the correct controls for something (For example, I cannot tell you right now which of the light switches in my home controls which light- and I only have two light switches. Period.) If it is violated we will almost consistently attempt to input the wrong controls.
Natural mapping can also work for non-spacial relationships; for example, if I love chocolate and hate seaweed, I might keep chocolate near the good controls and canned seaweed near 'bad' controls (like scram-switches).
Natural mapping is likely similar to the 180 degree 'line' in cinematography that it is 'illegal' to cross via cut, and is still uncomfortable to cross via dolly/pan.
For me, natural mapping meant that even though it would look nice if all of my 'journal' pages were on one side of the interface, and even though I never want to cover my whole screen by having journal pages on both sides of the interface, tab-like menu items on the right side of the interface could NOT summon journal pages on the left side. I tried to do this for awhile, only to surrender to the inevitability of that which Norman observed first: its best not to agitate the user by providing unnatural and nonsensical motion. Instead, I opted to close any journal pages on the left hand side of the screen before opening journal pages on the right, and vise versa.
Due to the low gaming experience of my audience, natural mapping is actually a very important concern, particularly concerning the fact that some 'gamer' conventions are not particularly natural- and also because I am working on the iPad where many 'naturalistic' gestures are possible (and where it is equally possible to mangle them). The traditional, gamer, buttons-and-joystick combo, for instance, is exceptionally awkward for my player; while the mechanics inherent in the Sims for iPad is a perfect research model: it was already crafted specifically for my audience, after all!
But enough about affordances; I told you, already, he's talked about other things!
In "The Design of Everyday Things" Norman talks about several concept, affordances included. One of the other big topics he hit on was natural mapping. Or conceptual mapping. Or mind mapping. Or mental mapping or- gosh darn it, I'm just not sure what to call it any more. Conceptual, mind, and mental mapping all seem to be words for more or less the same thing, if you ask me!
Usually, a conceptual map is a diagram for understanding the relationships between items, in which case we could say Norman is talking about conceptual mapping because he is pretty much laying down his observations in diagram form. And a mind map is a brainstorming tool. And a mental map is one's understanding of ones sociocultural and spacial position in the world.
The reason I take the time to point these out is because almost all of them are addressed when one is in the interactive entertainment field, and I feel it is very important for me to set the record straight. Donal Norman did talk about other forms of mapping- his famous 'trying to get the temperature right in the freezer and the refrigerator' example was one such instance- but Natural mapping is one of those other buzz words we associate with Norman and which needs to be addressed in any lengthy blog post about him.
Natural mapping is the idea that components of a system should share easily observable properties that help a user correctly and intuitively guess the relationship between them.I say 'guess' because when we use non-dangerous controls, we tend to grab- without thinking- whatever control seems most natural to us, and attempt to operate it. If we are unsuccessful, we will proceed to try a few more options before actually bending our brain to the problem. Humans are not meant to think about their activities 24-7. Some things need to be doable automatically.
In most of his examples, these shared properties are a spatial map. That is, good natural mapping in these instances means that a spatial understanding of one part of a system should also apply to to second part of the same system. For example, a user, upon assessing the controls for an object, should be able to make an internal map of their spacial arrangement, and then apply that same internal map to the actual objects. This helps the user understand which switch controls which. Creating an internal spatial map comes naturally to humans. If it is ignored, we just never learn the correct controls for something (For example, I cannot tell you right now which of the light switches in my home controls which light- and I only have two light switches. Period.) If it is violated we will almost consistently attempt to input the wrong controls.
Natural mapping can also work for non-spacial relationships; for example, if I love chocolate and hate seaweed, I might keep chocolate near the good controls and canned seaweed near 'bad' controls (like scram-switches).
Natural mapping is likely similar to the 180 degree 'line' in cinematography that it is 'illegal' to cross via cut, and is still uncomfortable to cross via dolly/pan.
For me, natural mapping meant that even though it would look nice if all of my 'journal' pages were on one side of the interface, and even though I never want to cover my whole screen by having journal pages on both sides of the interface, tab-like menu items on the right side of the interface could NOT summon journal pages on the left side. I tried to do this for awhile, only to surrender to the inevitability of that which Norman observed first: its best not to agitate the user by providing unnatural and nonsensical motion. Instead, I opted to close any journal pages on the left hand side of the screen before opening journal pages on the right, and vise versa.
Due to the low gaming experience of my audience, natural mapping is actually a very important concern, particularly concerning the fact that some 'gamer' conventions are not particularly natural- and also because I am working on the iPad where many 'naturalistic' gestures are possible (and where it is equally possible to mangle them). The traditional, gamer, buttons-and-joystick combo, for instance, is exceptionally awkward for my player; while the mechanics inherent in the Sims for iPad is a perfect research model: it was already crafted specifically for my audience, after all!
On Norman - Part One
There is such a great deal to say about Mr. Donald A. Normal, the writer of The Design of Everyday Things; some of it good, and some of it bad. He recently spoke at TED, an event at which he admitted that while usability needed to be a strong focus of HCI, beauty was also important.
Donald Norman's ideas, set forth in 2002, are now fairly common. What's more, they seem so blatantly obvious that it is strange to read a book about them, as if I were reading a book describing describing how the sky is blue, and grass is green. It takes a problem, a conundrum, a task-that-wants-not-to-be-solved before Norman's words, buried somewhere in a young designer's skull, start to breathe life into solutions.
I will divide my blog up into two sections. In the first, I shall discuss affordances; and in the second I shall discuss mental mapping/conceptual models.
Affordances can be summarized in a few neat words- so neat and so few that it's initially difficult to understand why they should inspire me. Affordances are the attributes of an object that hint at what can be done with it. Or, put in verse, an object has well-designed affordances if- by looking at it- the user can determine how to use it.
Well duh. This applies on so many levels. For example, don't design a door who's handle statistically causes a first time user to apply force in an incorrect direction to open the door. Don't design something to be indistinguishable from an 'enemy' in game if it is killable and you don't want people to kill it. Clicking on a crosshair should not cause my character to jump- ever. A crosshair means aiming. A button is something I can click. A scroll-bar can be moved up and down.
To me, this all really just sounds like "Don't be stupid. Here are some rules you can give your boss/programmer/self-absorbed teammate who's currently being stupid."
Well, that has merit on its own. If only designers know entry-level designer material (like don't make a stove look like a toilet), sometimes we are taken for granted and ignored. Real research and conventional wisdom that skews our way can help us be successful.
But that was not the end of this story.
What if I apply the idea of affordances to women and feminine products? Now of course I know that with non-gamers as my target audience, my interface has to be ten times as obvious as ever. No shape can be strange to the average web-user; no control can be more than one or two steps away from whatever real-world or online activity these women are already engaging in.
But that's not what I mean. I mean, what if I apply the idea of affordances as a fuzzy logic/boolean variable concerning whether a product is considered 'feminine' or not?
I have stumbled upon a big idea. How do women buy products? An affordance is something about a product that hints as to its use; but the use of an object cannot be fundamentally seperated from its user. It seems to me that affordances can send off social/cultural signals, as well as physical ones. And why not? Humans are pattern matchers after all. Perhaps a given affordance says: "I am unisex, I am for children, I am for old people, I am for people with short hair, I am for men, I am for people with large breasts, or I am for women.
That's it! There are things about products that act as affordances to signal which operators are intended to act upon those products. A shooting game's affordances, may specify a male actor is preferred; a bottle of Dove Herbal shampoo boldly assists a woman in navigating through shelves and shelves of hair-care products to find it.
What does this mean? This means that the products women buy may not necessarily have the same attributes that women prefer. Any given woman may prefer to use a very powerful men's dandruff shampoo, but the signals in the hallway have called her to the curvaceous, baby blue, Aussie shampoo bottle.
This goes back to the old pink & purple debate. Toys for girls are pink and purple because toys for girls have always been pink and purple. The pink and purple helps moms and daughters locate the 'girl' side of the toy aisle. That girl grows up identifying with these symbols, and eventually internalizes them and perpetuates them on to her own offspring. Its not like pink is naturally feminine; but it does serve a useful function of providing clear color dividers between one side of the toy store and the other.
So how does one apply information of this nature?
First, identify products that women buy. Look at their websites, brand labels, and advertisements. Does this tell you what women like? No. But it tells you what visual clues women are going to be looking for when they try to determine the gender of a new product. For instance, the outside of a barbie horseback riding game may be gratuitously pink to signal itself as a toy for girls. On the other hand, the inside of the game may be surprisingly pink-free.
Why did the outsides and insides of the game have a different color scheme? Easy. The color scheme on the inside is the one the target audience actually prefers. The color scheme on the outside is not actually part of the game or the user experience, it is nothing more than a signal. It is a word-less sign of pink-dome, and it reads loudly: "I am for girls."
Certain objects have affordances that signal themselves to women. Almost all female products are targeted about clothing, the color white, clenliness, health, utility, social, children, home life, soft tints, and curvaceous lines. Check out a bottle of Suave shampoo. How do you know if its for men or women, if you don't read the label? There are glaring color and font differences.
Does that mean you have to make a white, cleaning, health-oriented, utilitarian, social based, can-play-with-children, helps you cook and clean, mauve colored dear-Abby game for women? Of course not. But at first glance, it needs to have the proper affordances to hint as to its intended operator. It must signal the woman. It must let her know that she is the intended operator, and it must work exceptionally hard to build her expectations concerning the game.
This is largely manifested in marketing and posturing, of course, but this also means the fonts, the character artistic style, the placement of the interface items, and in fact the overall metaphors used for designing and later skinning the game, all require a sensitivity to feminine affordances. It also means that as long as the shell builds up the proper expectations concerning the internal game, many of those affordances can later be discarded or modified.
For me, affordances are two things: the properties of Heros: Duelworlds that signal women to come in and give it a try; and the properties of the game interface that let her know what to do with the actual controls.
Donald Norman's ideas, set forth in 2002, are now fairly common. What's more, they seem so blatantly obvious that it is strange to read a book about them, as if I were reading a book describing describing how the sky is blue, and grass is green. It takes a problem, a conundrum, a task-that-wants-not-to-be-solved before Norman's words, buried somewhere in a young designer's skull, start to breathe life into solutions.
I will divide my blog up into two sections. In the first, I shall discuss affordances; and in the second I shall discuss mental mapping/conceptual models.
Affordances can be summarized in a few neat words- so neat and so few that it's initially difficult to understand why they should inspire me. Affordances are the attributes of an object that hint at what can be done with it. Or, put in verse, an object has well-designed affordances if- by looking at it- the user can determine how to use it.
Well duh. This applies on so many levels. For example, don't design a door who's handle statistically causes a first time user to apply force in an incorrect direction to open the door. Don't design something to be indistinguishable from an 'enemy' in game if it is killable and you don't want people to kill it. Clicking on a crosshair should not cause my character to jump- ever. A crosshair means aiming. A button is something I can click. A scroll-bar can be moved up and down.
To me, this all really just sounds like "Don't be stupid. Here are some rules you can give your boss/programmer/self-absorbed teammate who's currently being stupid."
Well, that has merit on its own. If only designers know entry-level designer material (like don't make a stove look like a toilet), sometimes we are taken for granted and ignored. Real research and conventional wisdom that skews our way can help us be successful.
But that was not the end of this story.
What if I apply the idea of affordances to women and feminine products? Now of course I know that with non-gamers as my target audience, my interface has to be ten times as obvious as ever. No shape can be strange to the average web-user; no control can be more than one or two steps away from whatever real-world or online activity these women are already engaging in.
But that's not what I mean. I mean, what if I apply the idea of affordances as a fuzzy logic/boolean variable concerning whether a product is considered 'feminine' or not?
I have stumbled upon a big idea. How do women buy products? An affordance is something about a product that hints as to its use; but the use of an object cannot be fundamentally seperated from its user. It seems to me that affordances can send off social/cultural signals, as well as physical ones. And why not? Humans are pattern matchers after all. Perhaps a given affordance says: "I am unisex, I am for children, I am for old people, I am for people with short hair, I am for men, I am for people with large breasts, or I am for women.
That's it! There are things about products that act as affordances to signal which operators are intended to act upon those products. A shooting game's affordances, may specify a male actor is preferred; a bottle of Dove Herbal shampoo boldly assists a woman in navigating through shelves and shelves of hair-care products to find it.
What does this mean? This means that the products women buy may not necessarily have the same attributes that women prefer. Any given woman may prefer to use a very powerful men's dandruff shampoo, but the signals in the hallway have called her to the curvaceous, baby blue, Aussie shampoo bottle.
This goes back to the old pink & purple debate. Toys for girls are pink and purple because toys for girls have always been pink and purple. The pink and purple helps moms and daughters locate the 'girl' side of the toy aisle. That girl grows up identifying with these symbols, and eventually internalizes them and perpetuates them on to her own offspring. Its not like pink is naturally feminine; but it does serve a useful function of providing clear color dividers between one side of the toy store and the other.
So how does one apply information of this nature?
First, identify products that women buy. Look at their websites, brand labels, and advertisements. Does this tell you what women like? No. But it tells you what visual clues women are going to be looking for when they try to determine the gender of a new product. For instance, the outside of a barbie horseback riding game may be gratuitously pink to signal itself as a toy for girls. On the other hand, the inside of the game may be surprisingly pink-free.
Why did the outsides and insides of the game have a different color scheme? Easy. The color scheme on the inside is the one the target audience actually prefers. The color scheme on the outside is not actually part of the game or the user experience, it is nothing more than a signal. It is a word-less sign of pink-dome, and it reads loudly: "I am for girls."
Certain objects have affordances that signal themselves to women. Almost all female products are targeted about clothing, the color white, clenliness, health, utility, social, children, home life, soft tints, and curvaceous lines. Check out a bottle of Suave shampoo. How do you know if its for men or women, if you don't read the label? There are glaring color and font differences.
Does that mean you have to make a white, cleaning, health-oriented, utilitarian, social based, can-play-with-children, helps you cook and clean, mauve colored dear-Abby game for women? Of course not. But at first glance, it needs to have the proper affordances to hint as to its intended operator. It must signal the woman. It must let her know that she is the intended operator, and it must work exceptionally hard to build her expectations concerning the game.
This is largely manifested in marketing and posturing, of course, but this also means the fonts, the character artistic style, the placement of the interface items, and in fact the overall metaphors used for designing and later skinning the game, all require a sensitivity to feminine affordances. It also means that as long as the shell builds up the proper expectations concerning the internal game, many of those affordances can later be discarded or modified.
For me, affordances are two things: the properties of Heros: Duelworlds that signal women to come in and give it a try; and the properties of the game interface that let her know what to do with the actual controls.
Relating Cognitive Models of Computer Games to User Evaluations of Entertainment --Piselli, Claypool, Doyle
Relating Cognitive Models of Computer Games to User Evaluations of Entertainment
By Paolo Piselli, Mark Claypool, and James Doyle
I think I have convinced my poor teacher that I hate any papers that aren't conducted according to rigorous scientific measures. It's not true, I swear! I'm just reluctant to take anything at face value without well reasoned support.
Can you blame me?
When I was little, my relatives still weren't sure whether DnD was evil or not, and my mom instructed me not to tell any of them, I was interested in it. Also, computer games didn't even have the reasonable-entertainment-pastime status that they have now. I grew up to strongly dislike opinions that have no depth. That is, anything that must be taken as truth, without examination.
I demand depth from writers. If you think your opinion is important enough that you are going to share it with me, then you better have thought about it and you better be able to talk about your thoughts. Why? Easy. If you can't talk about it, you didn't actually think. You just guessed.
I repeat. If you cannot talk to me about your thoughts, then clearly you must not have had any. You guessed. You made a quick decision, left or right, red or blue, tall or short, with a snap of your fingers. It doesn't even matter if you have been espousing your opinion for years, or even if you feel very strongly about your choice, that just means your stomach guessed for you and then you stuck to your guns.
Guesses are a necessary part of how we get through life, and even a well reasoned argument contains countless guesses and assumptions. But if your entire opinion is one big guess, and you are off sharing it with the world and trying to persuade others to agree with you, that means you randomly selected answer C on the test of life. You may be right. You may be wrong. But you are passing off a shot in the dark guess as Princeton Review studying material. Worse, you are telling me I'm wrong when I actually sat down and went through the hard work of studying for that test.
I don't necessarily prefer dry scientific papers. They are usually very limited in what they can talk about, they can't address interesting issues like ethics or culture. The things they can actually research, observe, or prove is actually quite limited. But I appreciate the level of structure and detail with which they document the author's intellectual processes.
As for the assigned reading, I agree with the authors conclusion and find it interesting. I think their reasoning process had massive holes in it and that it doesn't support their conclusion as well as they might like. But I love the fact that they talked about their thought process and reasoning in detail. Now I can replicate the same scenario in my head, and reach my own conclusions.
The authors did an experiment to try and understand cognitive arousal in relation to perception of enjoyment, but I feel they approached the issue incorrectly, and I wonder if perhaps they changed their tinting a great deal after they found no correlation between their initial data sets. To me, the authors did not test cognitive arousal, they tested memory. And possibly proved Norman right about spatial mapping. From the start of the paper they said they expected an inverted U curve to describe the relationship between cognitive arousal and enjoyment...
But they only tested two levels of cognitive arousal. Suspicious. I don't think you can plot a curve with two points...
Furthermore, the two levels required the recognition and recall of four and eight elements respectively. But if I remember my intro to design classes correctly, it's a rather well established fact that humans can really only recall five to seven pieces of information at a time. To me, the drop in performance they observed in the eight element level just proved that eight elements is indeed too many for the average human to recall. Maybe they initially set out knowing this? But the why only two levels?
The game they built was a boxing game. In the four element game, there were two punches, left and right, and two kicks, left and right. The buttons to control these were located in the corners of the num pad, meaning they spatially correlated with the four corners of the human body. Yet the eight element task could not benefit from this form of mapping. Is it any wonder performance decreased?
To me, cognitive complexity requires an understanding of a great many different mechanisms and rules, not the ability to remember what on screen animations require you to push which buttons. There is a reason we call these memory games, and not anything else. I had assumed cognitive complexity was controlling all of the widely disparate functional elements accessible from the drivers seat of a car, and required multi step problem solving. A mental model that is more than one step deep.
In any event, their data and conclusions were still relevant and interesting, provided you tint your lenses a bit to account for how you feel about their methods. They found their U curve in the relationship between degree of success and enjoyment, and the sweet spot that they describe is wholly relevant and permits a great many extra-games theories to be applied to games.
I also observed that players who played the complex variant rated the game much higher when it was complete than they did while playing it, or than the simple variant players rated it at the end. Achievement and completion are very relevant to us! So there you have it. I felt the authors used some flawed mental steps, but since they described them with such care and detail, I was able to draw my own conclusions and ended up agreeing with their final outcome. I also understand now where the holes in their research might be, and where further research may be necessary. It was a good paper, for all that it was dry.
Still I cannot help but reflect on the fact that it actually said very little that one could not guess, or that is not already reasonably well known by designers. This is a weakness of most areas of scientific research, which is of course why I stated earlier that I hardly confine my reading pleasure to research papers. Regardless it serves as proof of what we once could only claim to know, and I shall add it to my library of citations. B+
When I was little, my relatives still weren't sure whether DnD was evil or not, and my mom instructed me not to tell any of them, I was interested in it. Also, computer games didn't even have the reasonable-entertainment-pastime status that they have now. I grew up to strongly dislike opinions that have no depth. That is, anything that must be taken as truth, without examination.
I demand depth from writers. If you think your opinion is important enough that you are going to share it with me, then you better have thought about it and you better be able to talk about your thoughts. Why? Easy. If you can't talk about it, you didn't actually think. You just guessed.
I repeat. If you cannot talk to me about your thoughts, then clearly you must not have had any. You guessed. You made a quick decision, left or right, red or blue, tall or short, with a snap of your fingers. It doesn't even matter if you have been espousing your opinion for years, or even if you feel very strongly about your choice, that just means your stomach guessed for you and then you stuck to your guns.
Guesses are a necessary part of how we get through life, and even a well reasoned argument contains countless guesses and assumptions. But if your entire opinion is one big guess, and you are off sharing it with the world and trying to persuade others to agree with you, that means you randomly selected answer C on the test of life. You may be right. You may be wrong. But you are passing off a shot in the dark guess as Princeton Review studying material. Worse, you are telling me I'm wrong when I actually sat down and went through the hard work of studying for that test.
I don't necessarily prefer dry scientific papers. They are usually very limited in what they can talk about, they can't address interesting issues like ethics or culture. The things they can actually research, observe, or prove is actually quite limited. But I appreciate the level of structure and detail with which they document the author's intellectual processes.
As for the assigned reading, I agree with the authors conclusion and find it interesting. I think their reasoning process had massive holes in it and that it doesn't support their conclusion as well as they might like. But I love the fact that they talked about their thought process and reasoning in detail. Now I can replicate the same scenario in my head, and reach my own conclusions.
The authors did an experiment to try and understand cognitive arousal in relation to perception of enjoyment, but I feel they approached the issue incorrectly, and I wonder if perhaps they changed their tinting a great deal after they found no correlation between their initial data sets. To me, the authors did not test cognitive arousal, they tested memory. And possibly proved Norman right about spatial mapping. From the start of the paper they said they expected an inverted U curve to describe the relationship between cognitive arousal and enjoyment...
But they only tested two levels of cognitive arousal. Suspicious. I don't think you can plot a curve with two points...
Furthermore, the two levels required the recognition and recall of four and eight elements respectively. But if I remember my intro to design classes correctly, it's a rather well established fact that humans can really only recall five to seven pieces of information at a time. To me, the drop in performance they observed in the eight element level just proved that eight elements is indeed too many for the average human to recall. Maybe they initially set out knowing this? But the why only two levels?
The game they built was a boxing game. In the four element game, there were two punches, left and right, and two kicks, left and right. The buttons to control these were located in the corners of the num pad, meaning they spatially correlated with the four corners of the human body. Yet the eight element task could not benefit from this form of mapping. Is it any wonder performance decreased?
To me, cognitive complexity requires an understanding of a great many different mechanisms and rules, not the ability to remember what on screen animations require you to push which buttons. There is a reason we call these memory games, and not anything else. I had assumed cognitive complexity was controlling all of the widely disparate functional elements accessible from the drivers seat of a car, and required multi step problem solving. A mental model that is more than one step deep.
In any event, their data and conclusions were still relevant and interesting, provided you tint your lenses a bit to account for how you feel about their methods. They found their U curve in the relationship between degree of success and enjoyment, and the sweet spot that they describe is wholly relevant and permits a great many extra-games theories to be applied to games.
I also observed that players who played the complex variant rated the game much higher when it was complete than they did while playing it, or than the simple variant players rated it at the end. Achievement and completion are very relevant to us! So there you have it. I felt the authors used some flawed mental steps, but since they described them with such care and detail, I was able to draw my own conclusions and ended up agreeing with their final outcome. I also understand now where the holes in their research might be, and where further research may be necessary. It was a good paper, for all that it was dry.
Still I cannot help but reflect on the fact that it actually said very little that one could not guess, or that is not already reasonably well known by designers. This is a weakness of most areas of scientific research, which is of course why I stated earlier that I hardly confine my reading pleasure to research papers. Regardless it serves as proof of what we once could only claim to know, and I shall add it to my library of citations. B+
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Towards a Cultural Theory of Gaming: Digital Games and the Co-Evolution of Media, Mind, and Culture: Janet H. Murray
I originally read this paper last week, but no new readings were assigned this week yet, so I settled down to annotate the reading and then post on it.
I actually have comparatively little to say about the essay, except that I felt it had some valid points. The author primarily took the work of Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald (who wouldn't want a name like 'Merlin'?) and applied it to games.
Because I'm so used to the idea that games are valid, and that play is an integral part of human existence, It's hard for me to give a faithful and detailed account of all the points that Ms. Murray was mentioning. It's sort of like writing an essay about rain forest conservation. YES it's important and valid, but you sort of already know it all- or enough of it- already.
She makes an argument that play is fundamental not only to the existence of all higher order animals, but that it is one of the primary mechanisms, coupled with humanoid evolution, that lead to a rapid boom in intelligence => which resulted in the quick evolution of modern day human intelligence. So, differences in human play that set it apart from animal play resulted in human intellect.
The primary idea she took from Tomasello has to do with Joint Attentional Scene, which I have heard before in other contexts. Basically, many animals understand cause and effect. They know that if you push something, it can fall down. If they pee on the floor, they get punished. They can also register properties of things they see. A cat sees a fish, and instincts tell the cat that the fish may be good to eat. Often they are also social, and can reason about social causes, states, and relationships. Cause: Human is the boss Effect: Must do what Human says. But only humans will attribute effects to unseen, uncertain causes. For example....
A dog knows it is not allowed to pee on the floor. It knows if it pees, I will shout at it. Cause: pee on floor, Effect: I yell. It may understand other things about this situation. It may think Cause: I'm mean, Effect: I yell. It may understand the property: Floors are not for peeing on. It may even comprehend the more complex idea that Cause: I dislike it when dogs pee on my floor Effect: I will yell if the dog pees on my floor. As a dog, it most certainly understands Cause: I (Alpha) am in charge, Effect: dog (Omega) must please and obey me.
But a human can comprehend the fact that I do not like the smell of urine, or the hassle of cleaning up a mess, or that I like keeping a clean house, or that the carpet the dog peed on is particularly absorbent and difficult to clean odors from, or that I've had a bad day, or that I just got divorced, or that I'm bringing over a friend today to see my home and now my house stinks, or that I'm particularly unhappy about the peeing because it means my dog has a bladder infection and I'm stressed about bringing it to the vet's- even though I love the dog I'm overwhelmed.
This means that the human is aware of other entities as distinct agents, with distinct motivational forces. Humans then pass a great deal of information culturally from one another by understanding eachother's motivations. For example, if a mother's attention is on something, a child's attention will be drawn to that same thing. With this shared focus, the mother can then pass information concerning an object to the child. The importance of this phenomena to human intellect is justified by the fact that apes, if left unexposed to humans, do not exhibit Joint Attention for learning purposes. They do not point to objects, or bring one another to witness items or scene.
In addition, play, she explains through use of various sources, in all animals is a means for expanding one's conceptual understanding of the world, and building a model for how things work. It allows a creature to form mental models for future life use. These mental models may be of social relationships or social forces, or an understanding of one's own physical capacities. But in humans, games exhibit all the traits of a Joint Attentional Scene, which allows extremely complex cultural information to pass from human to human, even among children who have yet to reach speaking age. Play and the Joint Attentional Scene human phenomena combine together into a powerful learning tool.
She also talks about Merlin Donald to address the relationships between play and narrative in games (to address that age old narratology/ludology debate). Donald theorized that culture (in terms of the evolution o f human cognition) had four components, which had evolved chronologically along with our social skills, culture, and capacity for intellect. These are episodic culture (which is the most similar to animal understanding), mimetic culture, mythic culture, and theoretical culture. Episodic and mimetic are largely pre-language. Mythic culture involves the development of language and media, in which everything is explained with a narrative. Theoretical culture involves the abstraction of these narrative into a more formal and logical understanding, and is related to the development of writing and 'education' (as a system).
While I liked reading about Murray's theories and reasoning, and felt that they were very applicable and interesting to further our understanding of play, I usually refrain from permitting a one-dimensional definition of play. I do really like, however, that she explains play as a means by which creatures grow their own intellectual, cultural, and social abilities, not just their physical ones (as is often the case when play is linked to the development of survival skills). In Murray's estimation, play appears to be a medium for learning- and specifically, for learning abstract things (ie, even the dog's ability to understand social relationships, instead of just holding an internal list that looks something like: 1) 'you yelling => you spanking me' 2) 'me peeing=>you yelling'.
And that definition works well enough for her purposes. Productivity in experimental non-productivity, so to speak. But it does sort of violate the heart of play: which is activity for the sake of activity, and not for any external, meaningful reason. The distinction is what makes exercise 'work' and Dance Dance Revolution 'play.' Well, I reserve my judgement, and add her words to my repitoire of video-game-related-understandings.
I should note in one place she swapped definitions of 'myth' in her discussion of mythic culture, and started using it (and mythic culture) to mean real myths, superheroes, larger-than-life, exaggeration, etc; when previously it was defined as the explanation of everything using a story. However, this usage may be supported in Donald's writings, I'm not sure. For now I'll let it slide, as it was really minor and had no impact on her point.
I actually have comparatively little to say about the essay, except that I felt it had some valid points. The author primarily took the work of Michael Tomasello and Merlin Donald (who wouldn't want a name like 'Merlin'?) and applied it to games.
Because I'm so used to the idea that games are valid, and that play is an integral part of human existence, It's hard for me to give a faithful and detailed account of all the points that Ms. Murray was mentioning. It's sort of like writing an essay about rain forest conservation. YES it's important and valid, but you sort of already know it all- or enough of it- already.
She makes an argument that play is fundamental not only to the existence of all higher order animals, but that it is one of the primary mechanisms, coupled with humanoid evolution, that lead to a rapid boom in intelligence => which resulted in the quick evolution of modern day human intelligence. So, differences in human play that set it apart from animal play resulted in human intellect.
The primary idea she took from Tomasello has to do with Joint Attentional Scene, which I have heard before in other contexts. Basically, many animals understand cause and effect. They know that if you push something, it can fall down. If they pee on the floor, they get punished. They can also register properties of things they see. A cat sees a fish, and instincts tell the cat that the fish may be good to eat. Often they are also social, and can reason about social causes, states, and relationships. Cause: Human is the boss Effect: Must do what Human says. But only humans will attribute effects to unseen, uncertain causes. For example....
A dog knows it is not allowed to pee on the floor. It knows if it pees, I will shout at it. Cause: pee on floor, Effect: I yell. It may understand other things about this situation. It may think Cause: I'm mean, Effect: I yell. It may understand the property: Floors are not for peeing on. It may even comprehend the more complex idea that Cause: I dislike it when dogs pee on my floor Effect: I will yell if the dog pees on my floor. As a dog, it most certainly understands Cause: I (Alpha) am in charge, Effect: dog (Omega) must please and obey me.
But a human can comprehend the fact that I do not like the smell of urine, or the hassle of cleaning up a mess, or that I like keeping a clean house, or that the carpet the dog peed on is particularly absorbent and difficult to clean odors from, or that I've had a bad day, or that I just got divorced, or that I'm bringing over a friend today to see my home and now my house stinks, or that I'm particularly unhappy about the peeing because it means my dog has a bladder infection and I'm stressed about bringing it to the vet's- even though I love the dog I'm overwhelmed.
This means that the human is aware of other entities as distinct agents, with distinct motivational forces. Humans then pass a great deal of information culturally from one another by understanding eachother's motivations. For example, if a mother's attention is on something, a child's attention will be drawn to that same thing. With this shared focus, the mother can then pass information concerning an object to the child. The importance of this phenomena to human intellect is justified by the fact that apes, if left unexposed to humans, do not exhibit Joint Attention for learning purposes. They do not point to objects, or bring one another to witness items or scene.
In addition, play, she explains through use of various sources, in all animals is a means for expanding one's conceptual understanding of the world, and building a model for how things work. It allows a creature to form mental models for future life use. These mental models may be of social relationships or social forces, or an understanding of one's own physical capacities. But in humans, games exhibit all the traits of a Joint Attentional Scene, which allows extremely complex cultural information to pass from human to human, even among children who have yet to reach speaking age. Play and the Joint Attentional Scene human phenomena combine together into a powerful learning tool.
She also talks about Merlin Donald to address the relationships between play and narrative in games (to address that age old narratology/ludology debate). Donald theorized that culture (in terms of the evolution o f human cognition) had four components, which had evolved chronologically along with our social skills, culture, and capacity for intellect. These are episodic culture (which is the most similar to animal understanding), mimetic culture, mythic culture, and theoretical culture. Episodic and mimetic are largely pre-language. Mythic culture involves the development of language and media, in which everything is explained with a narrative. Theoretical culture involves the abstraction of these narrative into a more formal and logical understanding, and is related to the development of writing and 'education' (as a system).
While I liked reading about Murray's theories and reasoning, and felt that they were very applicable and interesting to further our understanding of play, I usually refrain from permitting a one-dimensional definition of play. I do really like, however, that she explains play as a means by which creatures grow their own intellectual, cultural, and social abilities, not just their physical ones (as is often the case when play is linked to the development of survival skills). In Murray's estimation, play appears to be a medium for learning- and specifically, for learning abstract things (ie, even the dog's ability to understand social relationships, instead of just holding an internal list that looks something like: 1) 'you yelling => you spanking me' 2) 'me peeing=>you yelling'.
And that definition works well enough for her purposes. Productivity in experimental non-productivity, so to speak. But it does sort of violate the heart of play: which is activity for the sake of activity, and not for any external, meaningful reason. The distinction is what makes exercise 'work' and Dance Dance Revolution 'play.' Well, I reserve my judgement, and add her words to my repitoire of video-game-related-understandings.
I should note in one place she swapped definitions of 'myth' in her discussion of mythic culture, and started using it (and mythic culture) to mean real myths, superheroes, larger-than-life, exaggeration, etc; when previously it was defined as the explanation of everything using a story. However, this usage may be supported in Donald's writings, I'm not sure. For now I'll let it slide, as it was really minor and had no impact on her point.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Gender Inclusive Gaming: Expanding the Market - Sheri Grander Ray
Today, instead of doing a blog post on an assigned reading, I'm going to talk about some material I picked up awhile back, but keep referring to constantly because of its usefulness.
When I first picked up Gender Inclusive Game Design, it was with a sneer of contempt. The cover art was kinda lame. The text was printed big and friendly, a few point sizes too large. The publisher is Charles River Media which, when it comes to game design books, is hit and miss.
Let me digress for a moment. There are only a rare few companies that publish books that deal with game design. And they are ALL hit and miss. There are so few books in the industry that you can't really fault these companies, as they're the only ones- period- who are making this material available in book form. On the other hand, a lot of their stuff tends to be fluff.
My Expectations
So, I picked up this book because I'm making a game for women. But I sneered. I sneered because I'm a prideful woman, I'm an alpha, I'm a yang, I'm going to own your butt in Starcraft and then dance on your shattered remains, I'm some kind of Xena Warrior Princes Feminist (in mental personification only, of course, I'm very weak physically ;)) who thinks we all should learn swordfighting and study the hard maths and sciences. I sneered because the very existance of such a book suggested that women and men were different. I sneered because I care about gender equality. I sneered because I hate any any all gender/sex-based cultural dimorphism, and this book was one I had to read because such dimorphism still existed.
I hated the book long before ever opening it. I didn't want to hear about how women weren't gamers, or women didn't like action, or women were opposed to violence. I felt that anything with meat in this book would be all about how women can't handle first person shooters and need nice happy games like Bingo; And if THAT wasn't the topic of the book, then it would just be a bunch of fluff talking about how women are misunderstood and marketing firms need to research them better.
My Life's Mission
Let me be clear: I believe men and women can- statistically- be on equal footing when it comes to video games. That we can both like the same games, play the same games, get the same pleasure out of the games- that games are a battleground on which gender stereotypes need to be battered down so as to cause positive changes in our culture as a whole. So the very IDEA of picking up a book that was going to tell me about how women were different from men was.... painful. The fact that it was written by a woman, who would be perpetuating gender inequality by writing it, made me even angrier.
I Read The Wrong Chapter First
It told me women responded better to more visual and auditorial 'bling,' like sparkles, and weren't capable of managing much on screen at once
I Kept Reading
Let me get something out of the way:
I Love This Book, And Continue To Reference It For Everything I Do
Alright, now that that is over with... I stayed with the book and kept reading it, because it was the only resource I had available. My initial impressions and assumptions were all wrong. This book was great.
The most important thing I have to say about this book is this: For the majority of its chapters, it studied the way women have become due to cultural factors, not the ways in which women naturally are. For example, I was used to hearing people talk about how women just aren't as good as action games as men. The author touched lightly on the evidence that might support such a claim, but also presented an alternative that absolutely blew my mind:
Women aren't bad at games. Women have less exposure to games. Less exposure means less experience. Less experience means an underdevelopment of gaming skill. Statistically, women are going to be worse at video games not because it is inherent to their gender, but because they weren't as well trained in how to play them.
And that simple idea grew in my mind, and reached all over the place, it took up .root in countless crevices, and supplied meanings for questions I'd never even thought to ask.
Why Don't Women Play Games?
Before I read this book, I always assumed that I played video games because video games were fun. Why wouldn't I play them? Now I realize that while this is true, there is a much more important, dominating reason why I play video games: When I was little, my father and grandmother played video games with me. I play games because I was exposed to games. Because they were passed on to me by my relatives, and later they were shared with my peer groups. In fact, I later sought out peer groups that shared the same interests.
And the startlingly obvious realization hit me: Entertainment pastimes are shared as a result of social influences. We are introduced to 'fun' by the people in our lives. Women don't play games, because people do not play games with women.
And yet, we have all these women sitting around, right next door to the hardcore gamers, bored out of their minds. What do women do for fun? Buy shoes? No, really, think about it. Men go shopping at a hardware store, or buy themselves new exercise equipment; you can't say that somehow shopping is women's form of fun like sports and games are a man form of fun.
The truth is that both women and men can shop for pleasure (Hardware, sports, exercise, cars, household appliances), preen themselves or their home for pleasure (Axe Body Spray, Hair Gel, Mowing the Lawn on the Riding Law Mower(depends on the man), Taking Care of his Car) , but they have special dedicated activities for fun (Sports and Games) that women have no counterpart for. When's the last time all the women in your neighborhood gathered together in a room to watch women's basketball? If you're like most women, the answer is: never. Why?
Did your dad play catch with you as a child? Mine did.
The first group of human beings to get video games? Engineers. Engineers are predominantly? Male. Engineers are peers with? Men. Engineers pass their luxury time activities down to? Sons. Sons are peers with? Boys. Rinse, Repeat.
Women don't play games because men do not play games with women. Or at least not early enough in their lives for it to matter.
This Book Is Old
This book was printed in 2004, and that's why I love it. It was printed before the casual gaming boom, when there existed no games for anyone even remotely of the female gender except for games bathed in gratuitous amounts of pink, and aimed towards six year olds. Now-a-days when people want to talk about female gamers, they jump immediately to casual gaming, and say that men are hardcore gamers and women are casual gamers, men like action and women like sparkles, or something of that nature.
But this book remembers what it was like before casual gaming. This book explains what the situation was, so that you can understand why casual gaming exploded: It was the first time anyone designed games specifically for non-gamers, and made them easily available to women who were only willing to give the games a few seconds to entertain them before throwing them away, due to lack of previous familiarity or trust in the medium.
And if you look at it that way, you can see that it won't be particularly difficult now for women to close the gap into mainstream gaming, if someone designs the proper games to lead them there, if proper games arise that are passed through their peer groups, and end up in their hands, and deliver entertainment fast enough for them to commit to sticking around for awhile. You can also see that clearly women needed something fun to do just as much as men did, and it's hardly a stretch to say that they can enjoy heart-pumping thrills that action games deliver.
I mean, women go to theme parks the same as men, and ride on roller coasters the same as men, right? And watch the same horror movies as men, right? This book answers that question. YES, women can enjoy action games, because YES women like thrills, but to get them into gaming, you need to attend to their game-skill limitations in today's present culture, and reel them in them through ease-of-use and word-of-mouth. You need to infiltrate their social circle. You need to let them know you're for them.
I Could Go On For Hours
This book is chalk full of interesting insights, and I'd be hard pressed to enumerate everything it said and everything I learned from it. I keep it checked out of the school library and reference it constantly. It's not a gender inclusive game design bible or anything, but it gets me thinking. It presents problems, to which I can dream up the solutions.
It helps me understand my gender. Instead of me getting frustrated with other women and just trying to make the games I like out of spite for gender norms, instead I'm able to see where other women are coming from, understand what I need to provide them, comprehend what they enjoy and what they fear, and figure out how to help them find my product.
I'm no longer a designer legislating what I want on to my audience. I'm no longer a serious game designer, forcing my message on you. Instead I'm a designer who can figure out how to give women something fun, how to make games their go-to for entertainment, and whose message will emerge naturally from the resulting games instead of ruining them. This book made me a better designer. It's not just my idea. It's my idea on your terms, with your needs, with your wants, with your limitations, with your strengths, in the way you want it, in the way you'll be able to appreciate it/enjoy it best.
A Couple Things I Learned
I learned that games are subconsciously designed to appeal to men; that the predominant design paradigms are paradigms that ward off women and draw in men (most of which happen without the designer even realizing it). I learned exactly what hyper-sexualisation is, and what to do about it.
I learned some facets of women that are partially nature, partially nurture: women tend to be better at parsing large amounts of static visual information than parsing small amounts of mobile visual information. That women tend to seek out motivation, explanation, planning, and compromise when it comes to conflict resolution, and therefore cannot be motivated by the sheer testosterone/estrogen rush of pitched combat as easily as men. They don't hate action or violence: but they want to use their brains and social capacities in order to solve problems, and they want to be told their motivation for enacting violence.
Mostly I knew that most casual gamers were women, but it never occurred to me that I could apply that fact in reverse. I mean this: when you think of women, you skew their skillset away from hardcore gamer towards casual gamer. To me that was big. You could stop saying "Women like this and that and the other" and start saying "Casual gamers like this that and the other, and since women skew towards casual gaming, you can apply lots of casual gaming principals to games-for-women- as long as you realize what you're doing- and achieve good results." Framing things that way took away all the negativity I felt towards Gender Inclusive Gaming. I understood for the first time that I wasn't designing my game for a gender, but for a newbie. I was making a gatewaydrug game.
I learned that the reason women have trouble independently penetrating the games industry, without peer introduction, has to do with social power and conflict-resolution tendencies. In most cultures, men will use aggressive behaviors to establish social dominance in a setting or conversation (including sexually offensive jokes). Not only will women not use these techniques, but they will typically either stop talking so as to resolve the conflict, become upset and offended, be the 'adult' of the situation and refuse to argue, or simply remove themselves from the aggressive environment to get away from the negative stimulus. Furthermore, gender stereotypes being what they are, because women are expected to be softer (or perhaps more mature?) than men, they are looked down upon if they employ the same aggressive behaviors as men.
This causes a migration of women from male-dominated environments to ones with less men, or at least where social aggressiveness is lower. For example: Women like action-adventure, but they tend not to display it in the same way as men. Not only do they tend to migrate towards representatives of the genre with better story lines, but they tend to latch on to unique representatives of the genre, or express it in different forums. Fanfiction.net is over 80% female, and the vast majority of fanfictions submitted to the site are submitted to fantasy, sci-fi, action, horror, or adventure genres. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and World of Warcraft all have large fandoms. 50 First Dates- A romantic comedy in an area you'd expect women to be posting in- has almost none. Fanfiction is an area where women found so few men, that they were able to step in and take it over as their own.
(This phenomena can be seen in other industries. For example, women latched on to Anime and Manga when they were introduced to American culture. Anime is a cartoon, and Manga is a comic book: but you still see that traditional cartoons and comic books tend to be for male dominated audiences. Women latched on to a new area, rather than trying to penetrate into the male-dominated one. Less women also tend to play first person shooters, which is a function not only of the lack of motivation for violence, but also possibly of the fact that shooters are often optimally played with headsets, where women might experience more sexual harassment as a result of revealing their genders, and furthermore the character avatars are almost always male))
I also learned that culturally, women are smaller risk takers. They prefer to know everything they need to know ahead of time. If they feel that they cannot obtain this knowledge, they are less likely to try in the first place. Women like to have a plan; men are happier to jump in head first. Casual Games mitigate problems caused by this, first by placing games in a safe environment (out of the arcade and into either the personal low-end computer, or the mobile device) where they will receive less social criticism in the event of failure, and where expenditures are low; secondly by lowering the consequences of failure in game; and thirdly by ensuring the controls are so simple that the woman can understand them within a very short time span, and is therefore willing to fool around with them.
Lastly I learned that the computer has historically been viewed by women as a productivity tool, and that programs designed for productivity, non-gamers and casual gamers tend to require only one capability of their audience: the ability to left-click.
When I first picked up Gender Inclusive Game Design, it was with a sneer of contempt. The cover art was kinda lame. The text was printed big and friendly, a few point sizes too large. The publisher is Charles River Media which, when it comes to game design books, is hit and miss.
Let me digress for a moment. There are only a rare few companies that publish books that deal with game design. And they are ALL hit and miss. There are so few books in the industry that you can't really fault these companies, as they're the only ones- period- who are making this material available in book form. On the other hand, a lot of their stuff tends to be fluff.
My Expectations
So, I picked up this book because I'm making a game for women. But I sneered. I sneered because I'm a prideful woman, I'm an alpha, I'm a yang, I'm going to own your butt in Starcraft and then dance on your shattered remains, I'm some kind of Xena Warrior Princes Feminist (in mental personification only, of course, I'm very weak physically ;)) who thinks we all should learn swordfighting and study the hard maths and sciences. I sneered because the very existance of such a book suggested that women and men were different. I sneered because I care about gender equality. I sneered because I hate any any all gender/sex-based cultural dimorphism, and this book was one I had to read because such dimorphism still existed.
I hated the book long before ever opening it. I didn't want to hear about how women weren't gamers, or women didn't like action, or women were opposed to violence. I felt that anything with meat in this book would be all about how women can't handle first person shooters and need nice happy games like Bingo; And if THAT wasn't the topic of the book, then it would just be a bunch of fluff talking about how women are misunderstood and marketing firms need to research them better.
My Life's Mission
Let me be clear: I believe men and women can- statistically- be on equal footing when it comes to video games. That we can both like the same games, play the same games, get the same pleasure out of the games- that games are a battleground on which gender stereotypes need to be battered down so as to cause positive changes in our culture as a whole. So the very IDEA of picking up a book that was going to tell me about how women were different from men was.... painful. The fact that it was written by a woman, who would be perpetuating gender inequality by writing it, made me even angrier.
I Read The Wrong Chapter First
It told me women responded better to more visual and auditorial 'bling,' like sparkles, and weren't capable of managing much on screen at once
I Kept Reading
Let me get something out of the way:
I Love This Book, And Continue To Reference It For Everything I Do
Alright, now that that is over with... I stayed with the book and kept reading it, because it was the only resource I had available. My initial impressions and assumptions were all wrong. This book was great.
The most important thing I have to say about this book is this: For the majority of its chapters, it studied the way women have become due to cultural factors, not the ways in which women naturally are. For example, I was used to hearing people talk about how women just aren't as good as action games as men. The author touched lightly on the evidence that might support such a claim, but also presented an alternative that absolutely blew my mind:
Women aren't bad at games. Women have less exposure to games. Less exposure means less experience. Less experience means an underdevelopment of gaming skill. Statistically, women are going to be worse at video games not because it is inherent to their gender, but because they weren't as well trained in how to play them.
And that simple idea grew in my mind, and reached all over the place, it took up .root in countless crevices, and supplied meanings for questions I'd never even thought to ask.
Why Don't Women Play Games?
Before I read this book, I always assumed that I played video games because video games were fun. Why wouldn't I play them? Now I realize that while this is true, there is a much more important, dominating reason why I play video games: When I was little, my father and grandmother played video games with me. I play games because I was exposed to games. Because they were passed on to me by my relatives, and later they were shared with my peer groups. In fact, I later sought out peer groups that shared the same interests.
And the startlingly obvious realization hit me: Entertainment pastimes are shared as a result of social influences. We are introduced to 'fun' by the people in our lives. Women don't play games, because people do not play games with women.
And yet, we have all these women sitting around, right next door to the hardcore gamers, bored out of their minds. What do women do for fun? Buy shoes? No, really, think about it. Men go shopping at a hardware store, or buy themselves new exercise equipment; you can't say that somehow shopping is women's form of fun like sports and games are a man form of fun.
The truth is that both women and men can shop for pleasure (Hardware, sports, exercise, cars, household appliances), preen themselves or their home for pleasure (Axe Body Spray, Hair Gel, Mowing the Lawn on the Riding Law Mower(depends on the man), Taking Care of his Car) , but they have special dedicated activities for fun (Sports and Games) that women have no counterpart for. When's the last time all the women in your neighborhood gathered together in a room to watch women's basketball? If you're like most women, the answer is: never. Why?
Did your dad play catch with you as a child? Mine did.
The first group of human beings to get video games? Engineers. Engineers are predominantly? Male. Engineers are peers with? Men. Engineers pass their luxury time activities down to? Sons. Sons are peers with? Boys. Rinse, Repeat.
Women don't play games because men do not play games with women. Or at least not early enough in their lives for it to matter.
This Book Is Old
This book was printed in 2004, and that's why I love it. It was printed before the casual gaming boom, when there existed no games for anyone even remotely of the female gender except for games bathed in gratuitous amounts of pink, and aimed towards six year olds. Now-a-days when people want to talk about female gamers, they jump immediately to casual gaming, and say that men are hardcore gamers and women are casual gamers, men like action and women like sparkles, or something of that nature.
But this book remembers what it was like before casual gaming. This book explains what the situation was, so that you can understand why casual gaming exploded: It was the first time anyone designed games specifically for non-gamers, and made them easily available to women who were only willing to give the games a few seconds to entertain them before throwing them away, due to lack of previous familiarity or trust in the medium.
And if you look at it that way, you can see that it won't be particularly difficult now for women to close the gap into mainstream gaming, if someone designs the proper games to lead them there, if proper games arise that are passed through their peer groups, and end up in their hands, and deliver entertainment fast enough for them to commit to sticking around for awhile. You can also see that clearly women needed something fun to do just as much as men did, and it's hardly a stretch to say that they can enjoy heart-pumping thrills that action games deliver.
I mean, women go to theme parks the same as men, and ride on roller coasters the same as men, right? And watch the same horror movies as men, right? This book answers that question. YES, women can enjoy action games, because YES women like thrills, but to get them into gaming, you need to attend to their game-skill limitations in today's present culture, and reel them in them through ease-of-use and word-of-mouth. You need to infiltrate their social circle. You need to let them know you're for them.
I Could Go On For Hours
This book is chalk full of interesting insights, and I'd be hard pressed to enumerate everything it said and everything I learned from it. I keep it checked out of the school library and reference it constantly. It's not a gender inclusive game design bible or anything, but it gets me thinking. It presents problems, to which I can dream up the solutions.
It helps me understand my gender. Instead of me getting frustrated with other women and just trying to make the games I like out of spite for gender norms, instead I'm able to see where other women are coming from, understand what I need to provide them, comprehend what they enjoy and what they fear, and figure out how to help them find my product.
I'm no longer a designer legislating what I want on to my audience. I'm no longer a serious game designer, forcing my message on you. Instead I'm a designer who can figure out how to give women something fun, how to make games their go-to for entertainment, and whose message will emerge naturally from the resulting games instead of ruining them. This book made me a better designer. It's not just my idea. It's my idea on your terms, with your needs, with your wants, with your limitations, with your strengths, in the way you want it, in the way you'll be able to appreciate it/enjoy it best.
A Couple Things I Learned
I learned that games are subconsciously designed to appeal to men; that the predominant design paradigms are paradigms that ward off women and draw in men (most of which happen without the designer even realizing it). I learned exactly what hyper-sexualisation is, and what to do about it.
I learned some facets of women that are partially nature, partially nurture: women tend to be better at parsing large amounts of static visual information than parsing small amounts of mobile visual information. That women tend to seek out motivation, explanation, planning, and compromise when it comes to conflict resolution, and therefore cannot be motivated by the sheer testosterone/estrogen rush of pitched combat as easily as men. They don't hate action or violence: but they want to use their brains and social capacities in order to solve problems, and they want to be told their motivation for enacting violence.
Mostly I knew that most casual gamers were women, but it never occurred to me that I could apply that fact in reverse. I mean this: when you think of women, you skew their skillset away from hardcore gamer towards casual gamer. To me that was big. You could stop saying "Women like this and that and the other" and start saying "Casual gamers like this that and the other, and since women skew towards casual gaming, you can apply lots of casual gaming principals to games-for-women- as long as you realize what you're doing- and achieve good results." Framing things that way took away all the negativity I felt towards Gender Inclusive Gaming. I understood for the first time that I wasn't designing my game for a gender, but for a newbie. I was making a gateway
I learned that the reason women have trouble independently penetrating the games industry, without peer introduction, has to do with social power and conflict-resolution tendencies. In most cultures, men will use aggressive behaviors to establish social dominance in a setting or conversation (including sexually offensive jokes). Not only will women not use these techniques, but they will typically either stop talking so as to resolve the conflict, become upset and offended, be the 'adult' of the situation and refuse to argue, or simply remove themselves from the aggressive environment to get away from the negative stimulus. Furthermore, gender stereotypes being what they are, because women are expected to be softer (or perhaps more mature?) than men, they are looked down upon if they employ the same aggressive behaviors as men.
This causes a migration of women from male-dominated environments to ones with less men, or at least where social aggressiveness is lower. For example: Women like action-adventure, but they tend not to display it in the same way as men. Not only do they tend to migrate towards representatives of the genre with better story lines, but they tend to latch on to unique representatives of the genre, or express it in different forums. Fanfiction.net is over 80% female, and the vast majority of fanfictions submitted to the site are submitted to fantasy, sci-fi, action, horror, or adventure genres. Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and World of Warcraft all have large fandoms. 50 First Dates- A romantic comedy in an area you'd expect women to be posting in- has almost none. Fanfiction is an area where women found so few men, that they were able to step in and take it over as their own.
(This phenomena can be seen in other industries. For example, women latched on to Anime and Manga when they were introduced to American culture. Anime is a cartoon, and Manga is a comic book: but you still see that traditional cartoons and comic books tend to be for male dominated audiences. Women latched on to a new area, rather than trying to penetrate into the male-dominated one. Less women also tend to play first person shooters, which is a function not only of the lack of motivation for violence, but also possibly of the fact that shooters are often optimally played with headsets, where women might experience more sexual harassment as a result of revealing their genders, and furthermore the character avatars are almost always male))
I also learned that culturally, women are smaller risk takers. They prefer to know everything they need to know ahead of time. If they feel that they cannot obtain this knowledge, they are less likely to try in the first place. Women like to have a plan; men are happier to jump in head first. Casual Games mitigate problems caused by this, first by placing games in a safe environment (out of the arcade and into either the personal low-end computer, or the mobile device) where they will receive less social criticism in the event of failure, and where expenditures are low; secondly by lowering the consequences of failure in game; and thirdly by ensuring the controls are so simple that the woman can understand them within a very short time span, and is therefore willing to fool around with them.
Lastly I learned that the computer has historically been viewed by women as a productivity tool, and that programs designed for productivity, non-gamers and casual gamers tend to require only one capability of their audience: the ability to left-click.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Playability in Action Videogames: A Qualitative Design Model - Carlo Fabricatore, Miguel Nussbaum, Ricardo Rosas
I liked this article. I liked this article so much that I actually don't even have much to say about it, that's just how much I liked it. It's like when an English teacher gives you back a paper; if it's covered in red ink you did a bad job, but if the page is blank and pristine you did a good job.
What Was It About?
Let's see, well, let me give you a basic synopsis of this article before I tell you why it was so awesome. It was published here as I believe part of a PHD Thesis, in 2002, in Human Computer Interaction (Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)
It's written by two computer scientists, one in Italy and on in Chile, and a psychologist in Chile. Most of the research appears to have been conducted in Chile. The authors explain in their abstract that the purpose of their work was to provide a game design reference. They wanted it to stick closely to real player preferences, and they used a qualitative but empirically rooted research process to find out what those preferences were. Since the scope was so broad, the article limited itself to studying the playability of a wide variety of action games; due to the dearth of female participants, their sample was entirely male.
Why Did I Love It?
It was well written. The writing was smooth, natural, and moved from point to point effortlessly. Each point was contained within a paragraph for easy reading. The paper was phenomenally structured. It was unambiguously clear. At no moment in time was I ever forced to reread a single sentence. A table of contents, an excellent abstract and conclusion, and various diagrams kept the scope, purpose, and point of each page, each paragraph, each sentence clear. This paper was a PHD research paper for goodness sake, and weighing in at a whopping 54 pages. Research papers can be some of the driest, most convoluted, jargon-filled, painful things in the world to read. This paper was smooth, pleasurable, and informative sailing.
One thing I hate about some academic papers is the way they meander around in a cesspool of opinions and implied subtitles. They're not clear. They feel like you just stepped into a room in the middle of a conversation. Without a full knowledge of their context, each text can deliver a multitude of widely divergent readings (Like, for example, did you realize I was using the art-historical definition of 'text' and 'reading' right there? No? Oh sorry then, you just walked in on the context of my life, but I'm writing an academic paper so I can be all coy and you can totally miss my point and that's your fault because you should be more informed on this subject before I'm willing to communicate ideas with you. ... Ya know or I could just briefly mention that Roland Barthes "From Work to Text" was required reading in my Art History Course and I thought his ideas were needlessly vague, in-the-clouds, and inapplicable, especially when read back-to-back with Foucault, who wrote pretty clearly and powerfully on power theory (which you may have seen referenced when discussing class, race, or feminism), but I digress!)
These kinds of papers are potentially useful (Oh my god I'm about to whip out HCI terminology) but they are very low in terms of usability, because they are not orchestrated/designed/written in such a way as to be easily used by the audience that wants to/needs to/could/should/would read them. They are more like fragments of an infinitely long Facebook conversation, and heaven forbid you not have access to the context ahead of time.
But Playability, the article I'm blogging on? Playability was clear as crystal. In the words of my English teacher (who was surely quoting someone else, and whom I regularly ignore), all papers should begin with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. In the introduction, you tell them what you're going to tell them. In the body, you tell them. In the conclusion, you tell them what you just told them. Playability followed this convention. It sat down and laid out all of its cards. It explained its purpose, its motivation, its layout, its limitations. It laid bare its entire internal structure. On thorough examination, I found that its internal structure was so thoroughly and beautifully logical, that it could have only come from the magnificent union of a computer guy, a psychologist, and a dedicated editor. I might as well have been reading the physical manifestation of Object Oriented Programming; Each section, each paragraph, was beautifully concise, encapsulated, functional, easy.
The argument as a whole was sound. The paper outlined a problem, explained its purpose, justified its means, described its process, proffered its findings, and enumerated its own shortcomings. Few to no faults were to be found (and I scoured, I'm a perfectionist like that.)
Furthermore, the authors did something phenomenal. Every time they sought to bring in theories, frameworks, or other cite-able information to support their case, they provided a brief and concise explanation of where that information had come from (like importing in a .h file as an interface! Ho-ho my comp sci metaphors are all over the place today! I can't help it, my more artsy metaphors aren't as useful in such rigid and structured papers!). This immediately set it leagues above other papers in my estimation, as I was never forced to pause in my reading to research other people, or try to decide which of their multitudinous theories the author was referencing at any given point in time. I could always check them out later, if I were interested.
What Was It's Structure?
The paper began with an abstract, a description of its authors, and a table of contents. The table of contents were organized down to three tiers. The upper most tier read: Introduction, Method, Results, Conclusions.
The Introduction was split into a description of the problem, preexisting information on the topic, and scoping the research that the paper was now offering.
The Method was split into a description of the framework, an explanation of data collection, and then a break down of the data analysis based on the framework (and it want point by point, in excruciatingly precise and elegant detail)
The Results were divided according to main and sub categories of findings. When I turned to look at the results, I found that the authors had organized their findings according to a categorical tree. For every given sub-category, the authors had supplied a diagram to illustratively describe the current page's place in the grand scheme of the research. It was a beautiful technique for helping the reader to visualize, track, remember, and parse their enormous quantity of data. Their entire paper could have been broken apart and accessed as part of a tree, with each section belonging to a node of that tree. T'was glorious.
The Conclusion was divided into the relevance of the work, and the boundaries of the research and perspectives for future studies. The paper made no bones about its own limitations, but offered itself as-nevertheless- one of the best and only tools available for its purpose.
What Was It's Content?
The authors briefly touched on existing design theories. Some of these theories had been offered forward by theorists working in edutainment (Malone was mentioned, I'm going to shelve his name for future reference since he appeared twice in such rapid succession :D), and others had been offered by entertainment industry professionals (They used Rouse- not because he was the most enlightening, but because he summarized everyone else the best ;) I always found Rouse a little dry).
The paper then suggested that the data in the first category was flawed due to it being too-specific and not representative of mainstream video games. The second category was flawed due to lack of empirical methodology. This is important! You could argue all day, either that industry professionals have a better sense of the truth than detached theorists due to personal experience, or that theorists have a better sense of the truth due to a better sense of perspective-> This paper resolves the conflict between the approaches by merging them. Walla. Lovely!
The authors described and justified their methodology in excruciating detail. They left nothing vague. They diagrammed samples of the exact and highly detailed and structural way they had broken down qualitative data, conducted their analysis, formed categories- even the way they broke down any given sentence or determined the relevance of each noun and verb to the overall game- was covered in thorough detail. They made sure that not only was their research repeatable, but that it could be used again in other contexts, or to extend the original research forward, with absolutely no ambiguity or confusion. Perfect. Perfectissimo.
Then the authors described their findings. Their findings seem absolutely obvious to a tried-and-true gamer (the author's concluding sentences even suggested that the work had more value in teaching design, academia, and communicating with non-game-professionals, than in boosting the performance of professionals) and yet at the same time seeing them laid out in detail provided structure to what game designers could always sense, but never before explicitly justify. The paper provided a list of prescriptions and recommendations for ensuring the play-ability of an action game, which could then be used by a designer as a mental checklist (not an exhaustive checklist, but more of a bare-bones, "Did I overlook anything really important and easy to miss?" sort of thing.), or to argue a case with non-gamers about why certain features were crucial to a game's success.
Their results, as a compilation, are an exhaustive resource on the narrow subject they cover. They could be used for an exhaustive playability analysis of almost any action game on the market- then or now- and be used as a reference point for understanding a game's successes and failures.
What I Got Out of It
The game I'm designing is a bit of a hybrid; It's not exactly an action game, but it should pave the way for casual gamers to migrate into the action genre. Reading these recommendations not only helped me think about what to do in my game, but also to think about my game in the context of the action genre. More importantly, as I'm going to be expected to carry out a lot of research in the near future, the paper was absolutely wonderful about taking a methodology framework and applying it to games for the purposes of research. I can use this paper as a reference, an inspiration- heck, even a guideline (if I wanted)- for how to conduct my own research. Previous to reading it, I was very hesitant about how to go about collecting my own qualitative data concerning video games. Now I have a much better idea of where to start, and where to go.
I Give This Paper an A++. Well done, Authors. Well Done.
(I could have given them an A#, but it wouldn't have been as trite/clever/whatever.) They are better writers than I have read in many a moon! They're certainly better at technical writing than I am- I wander all over the place! Good Job, Authors. I enjoyed this reading.
What Was It About?
Let's see, well, let me give you a basic synopsis of this article before I tell you why it was so awesome. It was published here as I believe part of a PHD Thesis, in 2002, in Human Computer Interaction (Copyright 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.)
It's written by two computer scientists, one in Italy and on in Chile, and a psychologist in Chile. Most of the research appears to have been conducted in Chile. The authors explain in their abstract that the purpose of their work was to provide a game design reference. They wanted it to stick closely to real player preferences, and they used a qualitative but empirically rooted research process to find out what those preferences were. Since the scope was so broad, the article limited itself to studying the playability of a wide variety of action games; due to the dearth of female participants, their sample was entirely male.
Why Did I Love It?
It was well written. The writing was smooth, natural, and moved from point to point effortlessly. Each point was contained within a paragraph for easy reading. The paper was phenomenally structured. It was unambiguously clear. At no moment in time was I ever forced to reread a single sentence. A table of contents, an excellent abstract and conclusion, and various diagrams kept the scope, purpose, and point of each page, each paragraph, each sentence clear. This paper was a PHD research paper for goodness sake, and weighing in at a whopping 54 pages. Research papers can be some of the driest, most convoluted, jargon-filled, painful things in the world to read. This paper was smooth, pleasurable, and informative sailing.
One thing I hate about some academic papers is the way they meander around in a cesspool of opinions and implied subtitles. They're not clear. They feel like you just stepped into a room in the middle of a conversation. Without a full knowledge of their context, each text can deliver a multitude of widely divergent readings (Like, for example, did you realize I was using the art-historical definition of 'text' and 'reading' right there? No? Oh sorry then, you just walked in on the context of my life, but I'm writing an academic paper so I can be all coy and you can totally miss my point and that's your fault because you should be more informed on this subject before I'm willing to communicate ideas with you. ... Ya know or I could just briefly mention that Roland Barthes "From Work to Text" was required reading in my Art History Course and I thought his ideas were needlessly vague, in-the-clouds, and inapplicable, especially when read back-to-back with Foucault, who wrote pretty clearly and powerfully on power theory (which you may have seen referenced when discussing class, race, or feminism), but I digress!)
These kinds of papers are potentially useful (Oh my god I'm about to whip out HCI terminology) but they are very low in terms of usability, because they are not orchestrated/designed/written in such a way as to be easily used by the audience that wants to/needs to/could/should/would read them. They are more like fragments of an infinitely long Facebook conversation, and heaven forbid you not have access to the context ahead of time.
But Playability, the article I'm blogging on? Playability was clear as crystal. In the words of my English teacher (who was surely quoting someone else, and whom I regularly ignore), all papers should begin with an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. In the introduction, you tell them what you're going to tell them. In the body, you tell them. In the conclusion, you tell them what you just told them. Playability followed this convention. It sat down and laid out all of its cards. It explained its purpose, its motivation, its layout, its limitations. It laid bare its entire internal structure. On thorough examination, I found that its internal structure was so thoroughly and beautifully logical, that it could have only come from the magnificent union of a computer guy, a psychologist, and a dedicated editor. I might as well have been reading the physical manifestation of Object Oriented Programming; Each section, each paragraph, was beautifully concise, encapsulated, functional, easy.
The argument as a whole was sound. The paper outlined a problem, explained its purpose, justified its means, described its process, proffered its findings, and enumerated its own shortcomings. Few to no faults were to be found (and I scoured, I'm a perfectionist like that.)
Furthermore, the authors did something phenomenal. Every time they sought to bring in theories, frameworks, or other cite-able information to support their case, they provided a brief and concise explanation of where that information had come from (like importing in a .h file as an interface! Ho-ho my comp sci metaphors are all over the place today! I can't help it, my more artsy metaphors aren't as useful in such rigid and structured papers!). This immediately set it leagues above other papers in my estimation, as I was never forced to pause in my reading to research other people, or try to decide which of their multitudinous theories the author was referencing at any given point in time. I could always check them out later, if I were interested.
What Was It's Structure?
The paper began with an abstract, a description of its authors, and a table of contents. The table of contents were organized down to three tiers. The upper most tier read: Introduction, Method, Results, Conclusions.
The Introduction was split into a description of the problem, preexisting information on the topic, and scoping the research that the paper was now offering.
The Method was split into a description of the framework, an explanation of data collection, and then a break down of the data analysis based on the framework (and it want point by point, in excruciatingly precise and elegant detail)
The Results were divided according to main and sub categories of findings. When I turned to look at the results, I found that the authors had organized their findings according to a categorical tree. For every given sub-category, the authors had supplied a diagram to illustratively describe the current page's place in the grand scheme of the research. It was a beautiful technique for helping the reader to visualize, track, remember, and parse their enormous quantity of data. Their entire paper could have been broken apart and accessed as part of a tree, with each section belonging to a node of that tree. T'was glorious.
The Conclusion was divided into the relevance of the work, and the boundaries of the research and perspectives for future studies. The paper made no bones about its own limitations, but offered itself as-nevertheless- one of the best and only tools available for its purpose.
What Was It's Content?
The authors briefly touched on existing design theories. Some of these theories had been offered forward by theorists working in edutainment (Malone was mentioned, I'm going to shelve his name for future reference since he appeared twice in such rapid succession :D), and others had been offered by entertainment industry professionals (They used Rouse- not because he was the most enlightening, but because he summarized everyone else the best ;) I always found Rouse a little dry).
The paper then suggested that the data in the first category was flawed due to it being too-specific and not representative of mainstream video games. The second category was flawed due to lack of empirical methodology. This is important! You could argue all day, either that industry professionals have a better sense of the truth than detached theorists due to personal experience, or that theorists have a better sense of the truth due to a better sense of perspective-> This paper resolves the conflict between the approaches by merging them. Walla. Lovely!
The authors described and justified their methodology in excruciating detail. They left nothing vague. They diagrammed samples of the exact and highly detailed and structural way they had broken down qualitative data, conducted their analysis, formed categories- even the way they broke down any given sentence or determined the relevance of each noun and verb to the overall game- was covered in thorough detail. They made sure that not only was their research repeatable, but that it could be used again in other contexts, or to extend the original research forward, with absolutely no ambiguity or confusion. Perfect. Perfectissimo.
Then the authors described their findings. Their findings seem absolutely obvious to a tried-and-true gamer (the author's concluding sentences even suggested that the work had more value in teaching design, academia, and communicating with non-game-professionals, than in boosting the performance of professionals) and yet at the same time seeing them laid out in detail provided structure to what game designers could always sense, but never before explicitly justify. The paper provided a list of prescriptions and recommendations for ensuring the play-ability of an action game, which could then be used by a designer as a mental checklist (not an exhaustive checklist, but more of a bare-bones, "Did I overlook anything really important and easy to miss?" sort of thing.), or to argue a case with non-gamers about why certain features were crucial to a game's success.
Their results, as a compilation, are an exhaustive resource on the narrow subject they cover. They could be used for an exhaustive playability analysis of almost any action game on the market- then or now- and be used as a reference point for understanding a game's successes and failures.
What I Got Out of It
The game I'm designing is a bit of a hybrid; It's not exactly an action game, but it should pave the way for casual gamers to migrate into the action genre. Reading these recommendations not only helped me think about what to do in my game, but also to think about my game in the context of the action genre. More importantly, as I'm going to be expected to carry out a lot of research in the near future, the paper was absolutely wonderful about taking a methodology framework and applying it to games for the purposes of research. I can use this paper as a reference, an inspiration- heck, even a guideline (if I wanted)- for how to conduct my own research. Previous to reading it, I was very hesitant about how to go about collecting my own qualitative data concerning video games. Now I have a much better idea of where to start, and where to go.
I Give This Paper an A++. Well done, Authors. Well Done.
(I could have given them an A#, but it wouldn't have been as trite/clever/whatever.) They are better writers than I have read in many a moon! They're certainly better at technical writing than I am- I wander all over the place! Good Job, Authors. I enjoyed this reading.
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