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Jon Michalik (.com)

[Multi]Tasking the Player's Mind

1/31/2015

1 Comment

 
I've been diving a bit into the broader reaches of design recently, taking a look at how design is applied outside of games. Being a web developer during the day calls my attention to making a site visitor's experience a good one. I've found myself reading a lot into how humans interact with things and attempting to put my own mental models together of what other peoples' mental models might be. I look forward to actually getting good with this, as it is a skill that would seem to predict what a person expects of something before they even see it, a great boon to any designer. One such user experience topic I've heard pop up a bit is on the not-so-existence of multitasking, which is what I'll be getting into here...

Kinda sorta definition

Multitasking is never really concretely defined in any of my reading, but the definitions all seem to revolve around the idea of a person or thing performing more than one action at a given time. I'll go a step further, saying that there are two categories of actions that people and things can do: mental and physical. I really don't think this is cheating the definition as a person's center of thought, the brain, is generally in control of both mental and physical action in humans. The part of the first definition I have a hard time getting my head around is with regards to the time that passes between two actions taken. I find it really minimizes how much we can discuss as multitask-able actions if a second, millisecond, or frame is the window humans actually have to do two things simultaneously. I also believe that most research around this topic revolves around scenarios where people do more than one thing over a period of time. So...for purposes of keeping pace in this post, we'll define multitasking as follows:

The ability of one person to perform more than one action, mental or physical, over the course of a given period of time.

At the end of the post I'll have a neat twist on this, as well, so bear with me.



Games tend to force people into scenarios requiring multitasking

Be it for better or worse, video games put players in scenarios that fit that definition constantly. To cite a pretty recent example that I was having a lot of fun with:


Picture
The above pictured scene is from a quest I was playing in 2K Games' Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. At first glance, it doesn't look like a lot is going on, but let me discuss something about this game that really redefined movement for the series up until this point. The game takes place on the other games' planet, Pandora's, moon. The gravity here is low, allowing for high jumping. They amplify this experience by giving the player an item called an Oz Kit, which allows for 2 interesting abilities: double jumping and butt slams. This scene utilizes butt slamming, which is performed by crouching while in the air. This quest also utilizes a jump pad, essentially a launcher to gain even more ridiculous heights.

To get to my citation, this quest wants you to set yourself on fire, launch off the jump pad, and butt slam onto the tiny hoop on the opposite side of the basketball court (I won't delve into how one gets to this quest, it's actually quite funny, but irrelevant). This may sound like a sequence of events, and to be fair, the setting yourself on fire portion is achieved before entering the execution of the slam dunk. After being set aflame, you launch off the jump pad for a single attempt at this action. This jump pad is less reliable than others in the game, forcing you to adjust your movement in midair, both by looking with the mouse and adjusting player location with the WASD keys. There are cameras constantly flashing, intentionally distracting the player, all the while the fire effect is disrupting the player's UI. The mind is effectively purposefully ignoring extraneous sensual input, keeping the mouse moving to keep a constant eye on the hoop, slightly tapping four other keys to adjust positioning while judging when the right point to hold down the crouch button is. That is a lot of processing going on!

The first time I did this quest I think I was at it for about fifteen minutes. I was still new to the new aerial controls and I'm not terribly great with first-person shooter controls to begin with. This felt like a nightmare trying to coordinate my mind to do all of the things necessary up until the final push of the crouch button. This screenshot was taken on a second play-through where I was much more comfortable with the controls, and it still took multiple tries, yet far from an autonomous response at a player perspective. Games do this kind of thing all the time, and while seemingly frustrating, they're still quite fun. It's cool to challenge yourself physically and mentally in these scenarios, which I'm certain are well thought out while being designed. They're intentionally expecting players to attempt multitasking to accomplish goals like these.

Apparently this is bad for you 

This kind of activity is supposedly bad for the human brain. Studies have shown that prolonged multitasking can show regression in the mind to the point of displaying up to 15-point drops in IQ. It's something that was always thought to be recoverable, similar to a brain drain after pulling an all-nighter, but MRIs performed on individuals that multitask show lower brain density in regions controlling cognitive and emotional control.

This seems a little scary after accepting that players enjoy being put into physically and mentally challenging situations that encourage attempts at multitasking. These studies are actually a little inconclusive as to if multitasking is the cause of brain damage or if existing brain damage is amplified by it. In either case, there is plenty of research taking place that is doing a pretty decent job at showing that multitasking has negative effects on temporary, and potentially long-term, human cognitive ability.

But wait...gamers are benefiting from this exposure 

If games, some of which employ the need to multitask a lot, do this, why are players so efficient? The U.S. Government went through big phases wondering if virtual training sessions were effective for dealing with real-world scenarios. Turns out their research goes even further than just their virtual training exercises.

Studies show that video game players perform 10-20% higher in areas of perception and cognitive processing than non-game players. It's also proven that players exhibit greater short-term memory, can focus for longer periods of time, and have a larger field of vision. This may not directly contradict the studies that say multitasking is bad for brains, but in an environment where that type of activity is commonplace, the brain actually grows.

You can't deny some things proven are indeed true 

So, we come to a little bit of an impasse. One of the most multitask-heavy mediums is showing growth in the same cognitive regions of the brain that studies also show being reduced by multitasking. What makes games have a positive outcome out of all of this activity? Perhaps the problem-solving aspects outweigh the multitasking negatives? But these scenarios players are tasked with solving involve both thinking and acting on something very quickly over a given period of time.

The other side of the coin, how research is carried out regarding multitasking outside of games, is kind of interesting and may shed some light on this anomaly. Whenever I'm reading about multitasking research, humans are generally asked to carry out tasks that have absolutely no relation. Things like read this book and speak this poem, write this paragraph and boil this egg, eat this taco and drink this water; but those are the kinds of things people are asked to do.

But guess what...

Games are applying this differently 

Think of just about any wartime first-person shooter. The player is acting as a soldier on a front line of some sort. This is a pretty advanced time setting, so the soldier has their vitals displayed before them. They are receiving mission critical advice from their superior while the map next to their vitals is updated with the location of the next target to reach, all while fending off enemy troops and constantly considering when the opportune time to move and reload is.

Granted, most players don't actually take in all of this at once. But they do take in more than the average person would be taking in doing office work. The mission's success is dependent on being able to survive these scenarios, so as long as game's like these are beaten, players are utilizing a good chunk of this information coming in at them. You might notice that games do this quite often, and after getting used to the style of immersion the game offers, the player is able to comprehend and continue on. What these tasks are doing are working together to aid the player in the execution of said tasks.

Through cooperative cognitive processing


I just made that phrase up, but it sounds about right. Games give players lots of tasks. A good amount of games, and a great deal of mainstream ones, have a lot of tasks being given very quickly. Each of these tasks that the game is asking the player to perform have tells and helpers to assist the player in ultimately reaching the goal. Left thumb to position and right thumb to look, accomplishes the goal of targeting the enemy. Some games will offer a “soft” targeting lock to assist in getting the player there, rewarding them for getting in the ballpark of the zone necessary to complete the goal.

Reaching the next target area is similar in that the player knows they have to go somewhere. Their communications unit just displayed the objective, the goal: reach the extraction point. The map next to their vitals display pulses the general area of the target point while the radar is picking up nearby enemies. They're coming in fast and blocking the best path to the player's goal and a fight breaks out. Their partner communicates alternate paths that the player can take all the while trying to survive the fire fight.

These scenarios put the player into very difficult positions that will require them to fight, move, listen, and plan nearly simultaneously. The player is immersed in these scenarios and ultimately comes out on top. And these kinds of situations are actually increasing the player's cognitive ability. The secret here seems to lie not necessarily in multitasking itself, but in what these tasks are trying to accomplish. When every action a player takes is toward a common goal, the ability to handle multiple tasks becomes both easier and beneficial to cognitive function.

Conclusion 

I said there would be a twist by the end, so here it is. Multitasking isn't a real thing. Humans have one brain. One processor.  It's not [yet] possible for a human to send off signals to do things in complete simultaneity. Even activities like snapping your fingers together with both hands are just very quick back-to-back electrical signals running across synapses telling your hands to do things simultaneously.  While the action is seemingly in sync, the precursor to that, very likely, is not.  Human brains are just so fast that it's really hard to catch that there are gaps in action, both mental and physical. What people are actually doing and researching is the ability to swap between actions very quickly.

I don't think this is discouraging, though. Really, all of these signs point to games using this ability in ways that nurture player growth in and out of the game world. Game developers put a lot of thought into how many tasks is too many, and how the game can assist the player in achieving the goal these tasks are meant to reach.

And games aren't the only medium doing action-swapping correctly. Mediums such as music also employ doing things in a multitask-able manner. Think of any drummer you've seen perform. I'm a percussionist so I can tell you that every limb is needing to work on its own accord. But each of those actions performed together allow the drummer to reach a goal: the groove.

I'm not reaching for any real statistics for this one, but people who play games and people who play music tend to be very cognitively efficient. I don't think that's a mistake. I think the way both types of people employ their brain has a high impact on this outcome. As long as developers and composers consider the concept of actions that reach a common goal, multitasking seems to be a fine way to challenge and mold a more efficient human.


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Sociology, Game Design, & Multiplayer

5/13/2014

2 Comments

 
I was recently pointed to a call to write blogs regarding Local Multiplayer posted by Gamasutra, and I find it to be crazy well-timed as I’ve been in a discovery resurgence of great local multiplayer indie titles. I’ve thought about why these games aren’t online, and being a self-proclaimed game designer myself, I’ve gathered a few thoughts on why there is this accepted resurgence in a world trying to be completely in the cloud…

We Live in a (Dis)Connected World

Let’s face it; we live in a world where it’s completely okay that we don’t necessarily have to talk to each other to talk to each other. We don’t have to be next to each other to see each other. We don’t have to be on the same continent as each other to play games with each other. In a lot of ways, this is an incredible thing. People may say that this kind of “social” evolution through technology is disconnecting us at a relationship level. I can’t believe this for a second, since as a child I only knew the people on my block. I would never have known that you could communicate with people across the world by the time I was an adult. It’s quite literally mind-blowing when you stop to think of just how much ground people have covered as far as communicating with others. I’ve met plenty of humans (and I say this to reaffirm that people you meet online aren’t fake…well most of the time) from all over the United States and even from other countries thanks to online gaming and social settings on the internet.

BUT!

While all of this is fine and dandy, there’s something that this interconnectivity shouldn’t be affecting…

Good, Solid, Thoughtful Game Design

First and foremost, I think it’s worth pointing out that game development isn’t this magic thing. You don’t just say, “Hey this idea would make a great game!” and *POOF* you’re enjoying the fruits of your magical labor. I’ve failed enough in creating games to know this not the case. People envision a game, and what’s the first thing they want? Everything. No game would be good if it had everything! No person is perfect because they can’t be great at everything either. We do have excellent humans that are good at specific things, though. Games that specialize in a certain aspect of art, performance, music, and importantly design tend to be more successful than those that don’t. Games that have the player character horizontally jumping great distances and dropping them in numerous vertically escalating levels is poor design. Having the player character needing to solve complex puzzles to reload their gun in a fast-paced first-person shooter is poor design. Having a game where the premise involves twitchy, lightning fast, decide-your-fate-at-the-drop-of-a-hat gameplay that includes being played in an environment where dropping frames is an inevitability is…you guessed it…poor design. A game developer’s biggest goal is (or should be) to deliver a fun experience to the player. It takes good design to begin that journey, and sticking to that design to ultimately end that journey. People may want everything in their games, but someone has to draw the line in order to ensure a fun experience in every scenario, in this case that’s the multiplayer environment.

Envisioning the Difference

*You’re playing Samurai Gunn with your friends in your living room. Everyone is on the edge of their seats, spouting all manner of trash talk. It’s getting down to the wire; everyone is reasonably within winning range. Swords are flying in the game while peoples’ arms are flailing in the living room. Your buddy closes for the last kill and fires his last bullet! You expertly swing your sword at the last moment and score the game-winning kill by deflection! But wait…*SHOWDOWN!* and everyone clamors to their controllers as you struggle to get back to yours after some manner of victory dance. 3 people are in on it, and the screen goes dark. All you see is the slashes of your enemies’ swords in the darkness, as all your friends tense up around you. You can feel the concentration exuding everyone in the room. When suddenly…*SLASH* and it’s all over. You sit dethroned from the former victory as your friend relishes in his comeback! Oh the humanity! But you jump right back into another match. No hard feelings, laughing hysterically over everyone’s actions and reactions from the previous battle.*

Aside from the obvious reasons of frame-dropping, varying internet speeds, and connection reliability that define why a fast-paced game like Samurai Gunn is not online, it’s the kind of environment described above that gives it all its glory. You can’t physically interact with everyone like that online. You can’t see the look on your friends’ faces as you strut your best victory pose, and they can’t see you after taking it back. That kind of scenario is exponentially more difficult to replicate in an online environment, and if I’m looking for have the most fun while playing that game, I couldn’t think of any other way except for local multiplayer. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be calling hacks over a headset, sitting there hunched over in a chair, staring at my monitor in dim lighting, just waiting for the next match to start if I wasn’t actively involved in every game. There’s this unseen aura that accompanies a local multiplayer environment that makes playing the game infinitely more fun, especially in this setting. And why would a game designer want to give you the option to not have the most fun you could possibly have while playing their game?

Target Audience & Everything

The other thing that people want besides everything these days is “everywhere.” We might as well throw this into to mix too: “If I can’t have it then it’s not good.” This ideology pops up a lot recently and it’s honestly quite irritating. When developers create a game, they know from the get-go that they are making this game for specific people. There are lots of ways to diversify who your game is intended for. One of the hardest creative decisions is based on genre. This is the idea that a game is intended for people who like certain styles of play. Let’s say Activision is changing it up and comes out with a puzzle game up the alley of PopCap’s Bejewelled franchise. One of the first reviews on a fictional blog site somewhere is from “FPSFreak88” who, after browsing his achievements collection on Xbox Live holds trophies for every Call of Duty game out to date and nothing else, is posting about how the new game is horrible and Activision needs to get its act together and start releasing 3 new CoDs every year instead of 2. This person tried the game likely because he is a fan of Activision, but didn’t like it because it wasn’t a part of the genre we know him to enjoy playing. This is not because Activision “needs to get its act together,” it’s because Activision was targeting an audience that he is not a part of. But because he’s not getting everything everywhere, there is some inherent problem.

This scenario does not only apply to genres in games. One of the other primary audience targeting concepts revolves around platform. This is not on the creative side as much as a game’s genre, but players out there still want everything everywhere. A new Final Fantasy game is exclusively coming out for the PS4 and every Xbox One owner just bought a one-way ticket to forum town to demand everything everywhere (and no worries, Wii U owners will get some crazy spinoff where the main character is a chocobo).

This is all kind of beating around the inevitable bush that I’m standing next to and pointing at vehemently: multiplayer is part of audience targeting too. When a game comes out with “online-only” play the first thing people want is everything everywhere. When a game conversely only offers “offline-only” play the first thing people want is everything everywhere. When a game developer is envisioning their game, they have to think of who will have the most fun playing it, what they’ll be having this fun with, and how they will be doing it. Game design requires a crazy amount of balance, and if the person doing the envisioning believes that their game is best suited to only support local multiplayer then let them express themselves in that way. If you believe that this game would be great online then go try it yourself. Walk in their shoes, and find a way to express yourself through the “magic” creation of games. They put a lot of thought into what their genre and target audiences are, let them express it.

Painting with Everything Everywhere

As silly as it sounds, if the industry’s players and critics were fine art critics walking through a museum and everyone took them seriously, the end result would be a museum full of puke-colored canvases. You can only put so much “everything” into something before it isn’t what it was meant to be. Local multiplayer paints an incredible picture in today’s remote access world. It offers a chance to interact on a level that is impossible with an online experience, and when a game is designed to harness that capability from the beginning, the result is truly remarkable. I fully support this resurgence in local multiplayer and hope that if developers believe their game to be best-suited being played surrounded by people plugged into the same machine then all the power to them.


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The Nature of Immersion

9/1/2013

0 Comments

 
I have a programmer friend that I work with, both full-time and as game-development greenhorns. We often get into really interesting debates that revolve around the design of video games, and it often turns into a round table discussion between two people very quickly; an open forum for thoughts and observations about the games we play and games we ultimately wish to make. As far as memory serves, they’ve never actually been at a round table, but usually a coffee table. A relaxed setting of back-and-forth conceptualizing and de-serialization of the phenomena that we experience in the field we admire most: video games. I’m bringing the conversations to this community, so please use this blog to share your own thoughts on the topics I set up (Because my thoughts are definitely far from end-all-be-all!).

When You Use a Word Too Much…

This week, I noticed myself being torn by the sheer amount of times I hear the word “immersion” come up when describing video games. It could be that Spring and Summer are wrought with game conventions and conferences, and “immersion” has been a keyword when describing a good game for generations now. Everywhere I turn, I hear people spouting the word, toting it around, as it has become a requirement for your game to have this word associated with it in some way, shape, or form. And why wouldn’t you? Everyone knows the word. We all consider it a baseline for a quality gaming experience. When students are learning about the industry, it’s the first “I” word they learn. To make a good game you have to make your player feel like they’re an integral part of it. And not just pushing buttons and making things happen, but actually believing they are a defining factor in the events that go on within your game world.

What tears me, though, is not the word itself, but rather the lack of definition that the word needs to make its point clear. Yes, the player will be a part of this game; but how? What is your game doing to immerse the player? It’s easy to say the person playing this game will be a part of the game, but what is the mode, what is the type, what is the genre of immersion that you are offering to the player? There is a lot of room to further describe the player’s potential influence on and within the game world. This level of descriptiveness, I believe, is easily overlooked.

But Why Do It to Begin With?

Now, I suppose one of the major questions (before I delve into specific types of immersion) would be, “Well, what’s the point of describing it? The player will be playing the game and they’ll figure it out for themselves, right?” This has a lot of truth to it, but when you advertise and pitch your game to other people and you limit yourself to simply noting the high-level genre while throwing the general term, “immersion,” out there, your game really isn’t being done justice. Unless that’s all you thought about when you conceptualized your game, then I guess that’s all you need; but I’m going to take a leap of faith here and guess that most designers have a hook, something that makes your game different than everything else. Using this hook is a great way of describing the type of immersion your game specializes in. It further defines your game and gives the people listening to your pitch/advertisement something to remember; something to relate the game to. When using it in tandem with the base term “immersion,” you’re not only selling a feature of the game, but letting your players know exactly the feeling you’re trying to have them realize while in the game world.

A Couple Examples…

This may be an oversight in the mobile market, but games that use your finger as a control to slash things have a surprisingly deep type of immersion related to them. The feature is so simple, too. A touch screen requires your finger to come into contact with it in order to manipulate the device’s interface. When you go into a game that utilizes this functionality, you’re not just looking at something to feel a part of it; you, yourself, are actually an extension of the game. Your finger has become the blade that cuts the objects. It’s not just pressing a button to get a reaction, you are doing it yourself in much the same manner you would do that in reality. The simplicity of these types of games gives the player the cut-and-dry of how they’d actually perform the task in reality, no strings attached (unless the game has you slashing strings, I guess!). The control type is the primary feature, but it doesn’t quite tell you why it’s so immersive. This technique is something I call “Extensional Immersion.” So it’s not simply a Mobile game; it’s a Mobile super-genre that utilizes an Extensional Immersion sub-genre.

That type of immersion is very different from the immersion I personally grew up with playing loads of RPGs. The RPG genre is a fairly robust one to start with. You’ll see it pop up alongside other, more specific, genres (Action RPG, Puzzle RPG, MMORPG, etc.). Once you get to the granular super-genre, how else do you describe it to your players? Let’s take the approach we just took with the Mobile genre. You’re making an MMORPG and it takes place in a very large, lush environment. Let’s also say that your world also has some lore behind it, and your target players happen to be familiar with this world. You design the game with that in mind and reflect the environment to line up very well with how the lore portrays it. The feeling, the immersion that you want your players to feel is one of existence in the world they know. When they get into the game world (after the learning curve stage that most games have initially), your players know exactly where they are in the world at almost all times. They hardly need the map you provide after a while because the world is already so familiar to them. You’ve successfully brought the world your players were expecting, as they came into the game, to life. I like to call this sensation “Spatial Immersion.” The feeling you get when you navigate through a game world at the level that you know how to navigate through the city you live in. This delivers the MMORPG super-genre with a Spatial Immersion sub-genre to it.

The How-and-Feel Formula

Now, this solves two issues that I often think about: the overuse of the general term of “immersion,” and (something I haven’t expressed yet) the market saturation of known game genres. By utilizing your hook, your unique design factor, as a type of immersion, you actively tell your audience what the game is and how they will be involved in the game world. It’s a simple formula that you’ve probably caught onto with the examples above, but you just take the high-level game genre as a “how you’ll play the game” and take the immersive hook as the “how you will feel when you play the game.” Granted, this formula can be hard to apply to all games, and it involves really getting into your design and making a point to get your players to not only play a certain way, but feel a certain way. This breaks up the monotony of people saying, “My game is immersive,” forcing them to think of how it is immersing the player. It’s a pretty good test to see if you’re succeeding on delivering to your players the experience you actually set out to deliver to them, as well.



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