NES Games and Statistical Analysis

szadig writes "The New Gamer has published an article which tackles the topic of averaging gameplay. The accompanying video features 15 different players simultaneously shooting their way through the first stage in the NES game Gradius. From the article: 'The average time taken to kill the end level boss was 20.055 seconds, with the fastest player finishing him off in a mere 10.01 seconds. Six people finished the boss off at nearly identical moments. It would seem that the boss, bored with the player, actually self-destructs after 27 seconds. Beyond the almost perfectly synchronized explosions, further proof of this self-destruction can be found in the videos: no 10,000 point bonus (given to players when the boss is defeated) was awarded to these six players and, in a few of the runs, the boss detonated when there wasn't a single bullet near it.' Can we apply other statistical methods to gameplay?"

Comments

You know..

[Headcase88]

Getting 15 people together to do a statistical analysis to find out whether a boss self-desructs isn't quite as efficient as just having one person avoiding the boss for a while and just seeing whether it blows up or not.

A lot of the other stuff in the article was interesting though... looks like he put a lot of effort into it.

Re:You know..

[denmarkw00t]

Its actually pretty interesting. Alot of today's gamers aren't as familiar with the 2D environments and simple gameplay - fly and shoot. It presents quite a change of pace for the average gamer and, if someone really takes the time, those statistics could be valuable. Maybe there is some way to compare them to similar gaming tasks in today's realm of quality graphics, crisp sound and interactive gameplay. I think it's a good starting point for learning alot about how the mind of the gamer works - including how well patterns are processed and stored, how gamers approach games differently based on appearance.

There are plenty of good reasons to have this kind of data recorded, not just for a plug on /..

Re:Mirror

[Psycosys]

Why would you have to compile BitTorrent? It's written in Python thus interpreted.

Stastical Analysis

[queenb**ch]

It would seem to me that you'd need a sample size bigger than 15 in order to be considered "stastically significant". I would recommend conducting such tests with a far larger group of testers, or at least with the same people more than once so that you gather enough results to be somewhat conclusive.

2 cents,

Queen B

Disassemble

[Dan East]

Why not disassemble the game and take a look at what the program is designed to do?

Dan East

Re:Another interesting "average"

[grumbel]

Depends, if the players try to do the same thing the average would probally be a almost perfect play of doing whatever the players were doing. If however one player decides dodge a rock by flying over it and another by flying under it, well, the average rams them directly into the block, not so good.