Make your own game or make your own reality bubble - Games for stress disorder therapy

I have been kicking around the idea of an article on how players create their own games within games or game environments.  This is a bit of a ramble to get some of the thoughts out on paper and explore the topic a bit.


Abstract

A game is, at its simplest an activity with a evaluatable objective performed within a play-space defined by the "Rules".  The "Objective" is imposed by the designer of the game. 

What happens when the player self-selects another objective but coopts the rest of the infrastructure of the game.  Is this a distinct, personal experience worthy of investigation or is this such a common behaviour that we (the players) do it as a matter of our basic function.  


A paralell topic that I have been exploring is the construction of, what I term, a local reality bubble.   This happens all the time around me.  Different people and groups of people define reality and share it.  This is normal human nature.  Reality is a construct that we define with our perceptions of the environment, imperfect memories, rationalisations about causality and communication with other agents within the same environment.  This is just neural nets playing together.

But every so often someone defines reality that conflicts markedly with the reality agreed upon by others who are perceiving much the same stimuli.  We will call the majority the "Normals" and the minory the "Crazys".  This is basic social psychology.  However, what happens when there are very few people in the two reality fields?  What happens when the populations are 1 & 1?  Which is the normal and which is the crazy? 

The key word is "Conflict".  No one cares when two reality bubbles differ but do not conflict.  Its just different and quirky.  The problem only arises when the members of the reality bubbles cannot accept that other people have a difference of perception/reality/belief as it fundamentally undermines their faith in their own construct.  Note this may be bi-directional or only uni-directional.  I.e Only one of the reality bubbles sees the conflict while the other thinks they are happily co-existing.    To borrow from highlander... "there can be only one!".



Anyway, back to the "Make your own game" thread.   I think its time for examples. 

For instance,  the game is "Hitman", the objective that is supported by the game infrastructure, the scoring system, the game environment and the narrative is that the player is on a mission to "hit" one of the fictional characters in the scenario environment. The player then needs to escape the environment and the scenario will end and the score be presented.  Designers objective complete.  No problem here.  This is entertainment if your taste runs to fantasy assasination.

Now we move into the realm of the player-as-objective-setter.

Within the scenario there are quite a few "self-selected" objectives that the player could nominate to pursue.  They might be variations on the origional scenario objective. 

"Do the hit but without killing anyone else"
"Do the hit, but use only a knife!"
"Do the hit in the fastest time possible!" 

The third one is often called a "Speed Run" and has been a popular exercise for a small sub-culture of games for many years.  They create and post movies, tips, maps etc of various games with the objective of completing the game in the minimum time possible. 

Another group of players are those interested in maximising their expereince of the designer-objectives.  These are the players who write and contribute to walk-throughs and exhaustive exploration of every fascet of the games to acheive a level of master of the designer-objective in all its subtlety.

But what about the players who elect to just wander around the game environment and spot butterflies?  For a game like "Hitman" which has quite a limited environment beyond that needed to support the assasination scenario, this will be a reasonably limited experience, but it is still a valid objective to choose to ignore the scenario and simply explore the little pocket universe of the scenario.  Look for the quirks and bugs that the designers have left intentionally or unintentionally.

So why are these self-selected objectives interesting?

What do they say about the player themselves?
What do they say about the game environments, designer-objectives and scenarios?
What are the implications for the business of game creation and sales?
How can these kinds of activities be encouraged, discouraged or manipulated?
What are the implications for more free-form play spaces that lack strong objective systems?

An interesting aside that I have been poking at for a little while is using games as therapy for people with stress disorders, such as post traumatic stress disorder.  But equally for people who have stress responses to long term experiences such as victims of domestic abuse, school and workplace bullying, stalking, ideological suppression, discrimination, persecution and other environmental stresses that create an on-going stress reaction and coping mechanisms that when transposed out of the stress producing environment are difficult to adjust.  (Ties into the reality bubble thread quite a bit)



The designer-objective

My observation (as a player and reader) is that having a designer-objective in a scenario provides both a guided experience and in these old days of limited development resources a way to focus the player on the good bits of the game and try to hide all the compromises.   These rationales have faded a little as the game hardware and software had improved with large open world games with spawling environments now being more common.  These often have a tangle of small and large missions and objectives, side quests, ethical systems and multiple "endings" that dilute the effect of having a designer-objective and may facilitate more players to self-select their own course through the possible play experinence.

However, contrast this with a play environment where there is a much lighter touch by the designer.  An example that springs to mind is "Minecraft", where there is simply a play space and a tool set.  Players self-select their objectives and there is little in the way of any scoring or feedback system to impose meaning on their behaviour.  There are a few environmental stimuli such as monsters that will intereact with the player if they remain static too long, but otherwise there is no impetus to do any particular thing in the environment.

There are a whole slew of derivative games and game editor that allow the player to construct their own environment and then experience it as they see fit.  What is there to learn from this that could be generalised?  Apart from the fact that there is a sizable population of peole who enjoy this as entertainment and find it a satisfiying use of their resources... there is probably little to conclude about the actual choices they specifically make.  There is a huge range of possible research into learning rates, curiosity and objective setting but thats another rant.

Getting back on thread.  What is the deal when a player chooses to enter a game environment with a strong designer-objective but chooses to ignore that imperative and do their own thing?  
I have experienced this in games when I get bored with the designer-objective, or the game system is flawed and the objective seems "broken".  I do not loose engagement with the game but tend to get creative and start looking for other things to do.  
How would this impact for people who want to re-write their reality bubble?  Would it provide a bridge that they could cross if they became familiar enough with the "scripted scenario" to loose interest and try something new?  Or would they continue to have such strong emotional reactions to the cues that they would remain trapped in the coping mechanisms that they are wanting to change?  In which case, simply remove the cues until they reach a level that they can suppress and change, then re-introduce them and allow them to adapt at their own rate.  My hypothesis is that given some control over the cues that they are reacting to, most people would be able to adapt with exposure to a different self-selected narrative.  They would then be able to get on with self-selecting their objectives rather than being trapped in the imposed narrative.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the number of cues required to trigger a stress response would be quite small in many people with strong stress reactions, so figuring out how to "turn them down" may take some creativity but should be do-able.

This should be quite easily evaluated with something like eyetracking and galvanic skin response.  Stress is usually not hard to measure, so inducing stress and measuring interventions to see if they are more or less stressful would provide some objective insight into how stressful a scenario or environment is.

The other side of this is the feedback system.  Designer-objective games often have an abstract feedback system using quantitative "score" mechanics.  These serve to re-inforce the objective and behaviour required to complete the objectives as defined.  How do you create an abstract feedback mechanism for a very personal experience? 

I think a blunt instrument approch is probably a starting point.  Simply get the player to self select a simple positive objective and count the time taken to acheive it and some sort of progress clock.  This makes the feedback system alway a positive.  Like a progress meter rather than having any negative re-inforcment. 

For a complex environment with many stress cues, it may take a more complex scoring system with some boolean scoring items which could be represented as "medals" or "Acheivments" which add some specifics to the general "progress" score to address very specific issues in the persons scenario.  These medals can then be further refined into a small progression to give them a small scale of feeback where the therapist sees value in getting them to attend specifically to an issue in a complex scenario. I.e the medal can be changed to a progression of medals (bronze, silver, gold..etc) to represent improvments on that issue.

Emergent intelligent behaviour in the hive

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=you-have-a-hive-mind

This is an interesting article on decision making in the bee hive.

The interesting aspects are both the mechanism and the result.

The mechanism of using inhibition to prevent deadlock is quite useful and I will play with it later.

The result however is even more interesting.  In the article they talk about the two groups of bee scounts returning from scouting and starting to recruit undecided individiuals.

If we assume that both scouting parties found suitable locations ( they were not unsuitable ) the question is if there is any mechanism to select between locations based on the quality of the locations or are they simply randomly deciding between locations that all exceed some minimum specification ( dry, enclosed, no bears?)

I would assume that a bee scout can only report on a single location at a time.  So, I would assume that if a scout is out looking, it will stop looking as soon as it finds a location that meets minimum spec. As there is no point keeping looking as it would then be making the decision of which was the location most worth reporting.

Another factor is distance,  it makes sense that two scouting parties depart at the same time and the one who finds the first viable location would return first. Thus they to recruit other individuals for a time period until the second party returns.  I would guess that this may be a factor and would favor moving the hive a short distance rather than a long distance.

Another bit of information that may play out is the strength of the scouts dance. If the scout is not feeling good about the location... they perhaps will not fully invest in their dance and so may be easier to inhibit.  This may be influenced by the stress levels of the scout. If they find a location and its a bit crappy and some of their fellow scouts get eaten... would they still dance as strongly?

If you think about that, the undecided individual has to make a decision.  Is what the scout tells me a better option than what I already know ( status quo)? Is what this scout tells me better than what another scout has already told me? (They can only get one lot of information at a time) Or is this better than what another scout may tell me in the future?

So there are still lots of aspects of the decision making process that are not clarified by this article. It just describes an anti-deadlock mechanism for group decision making.

Whole (mouse) Brain Catalog

http://wholebraincatalog.org/

This is the equivilent of fun reading for neuroscientists...

Text vs voice chat

http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/commentary/games/2007/06/games_frontiers_0617

Looking at the impact both socially and individually of the change from

Settings and options in software

http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/

This is a bit counter intuitive but obvious once you think about it. "Normal" users don't play with software options, they consider the system as a "black box".  This suggests something about their mental model of the system. My guess would be that their understanding of the functional model is very shallow and so they cannot understand the impact of a "general" option that would modify behavior across multiple usage sessions.  I wonder how familiar a users needs to be with a system before they would feel comfortable to modify the settings.

Programmers and such are in the minority and tend to fiddle with the options... who knew.  They tend to generalist about system behavior and become familiar with multiple similar systems.

Familiarity breeds ... familiarity....

The takeaway being that time spent exposing general settings and treating it as part of the UI for casual users are probably wasted.  Options need to be presented to users in ways that are part of  their sessional workflow and are "within context" for what they are doing "Now". Only familiar users will be able to form and thus wish to set a preference for some particular variant behaviour.

So no more hidden settings dialogs. 

Motivation and Connoisseur state

Had a thought...

If Maslow's hierarchy of need gives some indication of the various needs and motivations... what happens when someone fulfills their need to such a state that they are "sated" or cease to have any motivation to try to satisfy that need.  I.e

1. A person gets money to buy food.  Once they get more money and food than they want... then what?
2. A person wants respect... what happens when they have a surplus of respect?
3. A person enjoys wine and is motivated to get it.... what happens when they have had enough?  (Apart from a liver transplant...)

To state it simply, what do you do when you are completely jaded with your subject/resource/satisfying thing?

My thought is that there are two solutions:

1. Give it all up and do something else.
2.  Maintain the "surplus" state but find other aspects or properties of the subject matter to keep it interesting.

I would contend that very few people pick the first solution, I'm sure there are a few and they are probably interesting case studies for many reasons; the current topic however is the second solution set.

My guess is that these are the people who move into the "Connoisser" type of activities.  They become wine buffs or foodies or any of the other categories of people who are no longer trying to "fill the hole" in their lives but have the luxury of having "Enough and more".

So the thought was about what are the ways these people still engage with this subject or resource.  Do they motivate themselves by appreciating other properties of the thing? Do they start keeping score or develop some other abstract game mechanic based on properties of the thing to maintain interest?

Later... found a xkcd cartoon on the same topic... sorta http://xkcd.com/915/

Unspoken Truth about managing geeks article

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1

This is a good read. Lots to think about.


And from another point of view....

http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/

The effect of traffic roundabouts on driver attitudes

Had an idea on the way to work this morning. Traffic roundabouts are training drivers to be more opportunistic and proactive in contrast with traffic lights which train drivers to be passive and rules bound. (Also frustrated due to the lack of control and self determination)

I wonder what effect this has on their satisfaction with life beyond the road?

The perception of control is also interesting, in that generally  (on a flat roundabout) you can see everyone and know where you are up to in getting to where you are going. While with traffic lights, you never quite know if you are getting a fair deal.

Moving on...

Thoughts on the MySchool - NAPLAN argument

The teachers Union have been out played. There's no other way to describe it. They have played their one and only trump card and then been left like shags on a rock with nothing else.

If they really wanted to be players in the game (which seems debatable once a Union gets involved) they should have come up with a much better set of "trumps". For instance (in no particular order):

* Refuse to administer the test (their only idea)
* Administer the test but not submit the results
* Administer the test but corrupt the results
* Administer the test to only their best student and then copy the results for every other student in the class. (Obviously detectable. But still makes a point)
* Administer the test and report only the results for the worst result in the class.
* Do the tests themselves and leave the students completely out of it.
* Report their results - as they honestly think they should be reported. (Be that whatever it may be)
* Ask the politicians to personally administer the tests.
* Ask the students parents to administer the tests and submit the results.
* etc.

There are so many options for civil disobedience but they chose none of them. Which really suggests that the Union chose none of them. At the end of the day this says more about the Australian Education Union than it does about anything else in this debacle.

At the end of all this, I actually like the compromise that they have all arrived at. I think Julia has gotten the result she wanted, the Union got to feel like they mattered and the teachers are under the illusion someone is listening to them. I don't seriously think anyone is going to listen to a consultative committee... but if it makes them feel better, its done its job.

Good to see a politician who can get a result. Even in the face of bargaining with a Union with so little a clue.