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Improving Gaming Through Biometrics
PreacherTom writes "Programmers have long used the feedback of gamers to determine how to improve what they put on the market. British company Bunnyfoot aims to take things to the next level. Their assessments take pains to record the heart rate, respirations, facial tension, and eye patterns of the test audience in order to fine-tune the games. If only their motives were completely altruistic: one of the primary goals of their project is to maximize the efficiency of embedded advertising." From the article: "What Bunnyfoot specializes in has implications for gaming that reach far beyond in-game ads. Being able to analyze the way a person reacts to a visual is thoroughly useful for gameplay as well. Their technology works as sort of a 'super focus group' allowing them to collect feedback on not only what the person mentions afterwards, but also how they react during the game."
And to think I thought games were fun BEFORE somebody figured out how to quantify why.
This does lend itself to some interesting new development paradigms -- "Hey, Tom, we really need to raise the average pulse rate of the player by about 2.5 bpms. Get right on that."
if you want to build better games, listen to players
how many companies spend millions on research but don't listen?
Words to men, as air to birds.
Now they can actually record my elevated heart rate, increased respiration, and increased tension right before I start swearing and throw their game out the window for embedding advertisements in it.
However, couldn't this be done by simply recording (video) the focus group as they play? I know it isn't as hightech, and you can't record heart rate and such, however you can generaly garner alot of indications about what a person is thinking/feeling just by watching them.
And it is a heck of alot cheaper, and you get a more natural response. People will not activly notice when they are being videotaped (assuming the camera is unobtrusive), but when you start cliping things onto their bodies, they tend to notice that alot more.
(note: I do not advocate secretly recording things, however the recordign set up can be unobtrusive)
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
...so if I snarl angrily and give the finger to the screen, with they finally get the message and stop throwing adverts in my face?
If this eliminates even 1 bad game, I think it will have been worth it. -wipes away a tear-
Seriously. This should be required so that boring, stupid games don't even get published. So they'll KNOW beforehand how horrid their games are.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
My guess is that they will find that nude characters evince strong reactions, increased heartbeat, faster breathing and perhaps even 1 handed surfing. They will recommend this to their clients. Blizzard are beta testign this idea by adding pretty Blood Elves to the World of Warcraft Horde.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
Browser's log: "Recording the heart rate, respirations, facial tension, and eye patterns of the test audience... Recording done... Analysis done... The audience is watching porn. Fatal error. Cutting net access."
-- Rastignac was here.
The best way to make a successful game is to be a gamer yourself, and make a game you yourself would have a blast playing. At the end of the day, that's all a game needs to be: fun.
Here's the three points a fun game should hit:
Easy to learn, difficult to master - Anyone should be able to intuatively figure out how to play within a few minutes, but the gameplay should have enough depth to show a differance between a beginner and an avid fan.
Sense of power - Your character/car/robot/whatever should over 'feel' powerful; this can mean anything in the context of your game, but players like to feel their better-than-average in the game universe.
Replayabilty - Self-explanitory.
Caffeine is my anti-drug!
Duranin - A NWN2 Roleplaying Persistent World
Advertising within a game has been a great money-maker for gaming publishers for a while now, and I can understand why they would want to have this data. If they are going to spend money on the ad, they want to make sure it generates revenue. But I like the development of Bunnyfoot in another way: It ultimately gives the power to the gamers to decide where and when the ads will show up.
Imagine if the gaming community had collectively decided to ignore the ads throughout the games, which was then recorded with Bunnyfoot's technology. Or, even better, they chose to react negatively to each ad. Perhaps the in-game advertisement industry will suffer and dwindle.
Granted, it would require a level of concentration that most would rather devote to the game, and would then ruin the game-play experience. This would then lead to a short-term frustration to the gamer, who may decide to just move on with the game and accept the ads as they come up. But imagine if they refused to enjoy the game? The gaming company would lose market share on a failed game, which would prompt them to find out why. If they find that it's because of in-game ads, then the next game will have less.
In order for this to work, it would take a lot of education of gamers, and a coordination of effort. Can the gaming community organize themselves to the point that gaming companies will start rethinking in-game ads? And perhaps the better question is, do they really want to?
They are aiming for
- replayability
- focussed attention
- increased heart rate and breathing?
Sounds like the next game they produce is going to be essentially just masturbation. more nude chixx0rs in games! w00t!
On the brighter side, it's got some seriously interesting MMOG opportunities.
-Styopa
Remember that this is done for the marketters, not for _you_. It may seem like they only want the best games too, but sometimes their interests and yours may diverge slightly. Think of having to choose between the following two games:
A. "The gameplay was fast-paced, interesting and with hardly any time-sinks. The players were busy and having fun at every step, and noone complained about their ability to suspend disbelief. However, they also hardly ever had time to throw more than a brief glance at our ad, if ever. In exit interviews half the participants said they didn't even think it was a real ad, but just some fictional company from that game universe, and that the billboards were just for flavour. The other half couldn't quite remember what product we're selling, and preferred to discuss such topics as, 'Duude, I blew that guy's brains out all over the fucking billboard!'"
B. "We had groups of 39 people at a time staring at the billboard for two hours straight, out of sheer boredom as they waited for the 40th guild member to join their MC raid. Better yet, they talked to each other about it too, once they ran out of other topics. Mostly about how it sticks out like a sore thumb in a medieval setting, but still they'll _definitely_ remember our brand after two hours of that. Two people actually typed the company URL in their browser, to pass the time away. And then they did it again when someone ninja-looted all the way to the first boss and they had to kick him out and wait for another guy for 2 hours straight... right in front of our strategically placed second ad. In exit interviews, people commented, 'Dude, you mis-spelled the third word on the fifth row of the fine print.'"
I know which one you'd prefer as a gamer, but now think which one will a marketting department prefer. Not quite the same, is it?
Also consider the sad tale of web advertising, and all the bullshit metrics they used as smoke and mirrors. See, the only thing that would actually measure the success of a marketting campaign is, basically, how many more people bought the product. Anything else, be it "clicks", "unique eyeballs", etc, is just prestidigitation and actually pretty much irrelevant. It's just there to sound like you have some scientific measurable criterion, but omitting that you have no idea what correlation (if any) there is between that and the actual goal of selling more products.
And you can see how irrelevant those are, in all the attempts to game the system. Fake UI, punch-the-monkey, outright redirects, etc, are just ways to inflate such a metric (e.g., "number of clicks"), without actually getting the user more interested in the product you're selling. There's a monster of a difference between (A) a user who was genuinely interested enough in your product to want to learn more about it, and (B) a user who was thinking he's punching the monkey to win some prize, and just closed the window when he was redirected to the company's page. But both look the same in aggregate "number of clicks" metrics, and it's very tempting to game the system that way.
So now think what will happen here. I can just see such bullshit metrics being used here too. "See, the users had a total of 100,000 extra heartbeats while viewing your ad, therefore you owe me a big pile of money." And the subsequent attempts to inflate those meaningless metrics without actually making either the game or the ad more interesting.
E.g., just include some incredibly frustrating minigame there, like Fahrenheit's interminable "alternately press two buttons a frillion times per second, and you fail if you missed even a beat in 5 minutes" sequences by the end of the game. _That_ will raise anyone's pulse and blood pressure all right. Especially by the time they fail the 6th time and have to replay since a savegame that was half an hour ago.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's not that simple. Those three points are not necessarily enough by themselves, and actually implementing them is a lot harder than being able to name them. E.g.,
This is a good principle, no doubt, but fine-tweaking it to actually work is another thing. E.g., how difficult to master is all right? How much mastering is _needed_? If you have to invest months to be able to finish an otherwise 10 hour game, most people will just get frustrated and hate it. If "difficult to master" isn't actually reflected in a minimum required mastery at some point, it might as well not be there at all. E.g., what's the point in mastering a double-grenade-jump if you can finish the game without it anyway?
And now that I gave you the questions, let me give you an answer too. And it's not the one you'd expect: at least for single-player games most people actually _don't_ want it to be necessary to master anything. The ideal game for casual gamers (and those are more than 90% of the market) should actually only create a smoke-and-mirrors illusion of the gamer being good at it. In reality, it should be perfectly possible for a quadriplegic on hard drugs to finish it just the same.
It's not even something new. See such concepts as "rubberband AI"/"rubberband physics" in driving games, or scaled enemies in RPGs, or Max Payne's outright manipulating the difficulty level, all to the same end: addapting the game to the player's skill level, instead of forcing them to master the game. You could miss half the side-quests in an RPG, and it will just give you an easier end boss. You could never learn to dodge or use cover in Max Payne, and it will just lower difficulty to the point where enemies become Humpty Dumpty with a peashooter to let you finish anyway.
Not only it can mean different things in different games, but it means different things to different people too. E.g., taking Bartle's 4 categories, "power" means:
- for a socializer: the ability to become a popular guy or gal, make friends, maybe organize a guild, etc
- for an achiever: getting in-game achievements. A high score, a gazillion gold coins in the bank, the deadliest sword in the game, the biggest castle in the game, a full tier 2 equipment set, etc
- for an explorer: discovering how the game works, and occasionally how you can use that knowledge to your ends. Discovering a piece of the story. Discovering a new area. Etc.
- for a killer: the power to annoy/harrass/humiliate other players, and maybe drive them to leave the game completely (effectively "killing" them off the game universe, hence the category name)
And that's just one such splitting players into categories. Other splits like "crafters vs adventurers" or "RP-ers vs min-maxers" introduce more differences in interests, and occasionally impossibilities to please everyone. E.g., to give crafters a sense of power and of being above average, you have to make their goods better than any loot in the game. But that also invariably creates a massive inflation, and cuts a lot of incentive from adventuring too: why bother collecting a full MC set, if any crafter could forge you better equipment? Which is why both Blizzard and Sony have effectively reversed an earlier attempt at pleasing the crafters, and in some cases made crafting just a money sink.
Actually, this is the least self-ex
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, since I've said that those three points aren't enough by themselves, here are a few more to consider:
1. Balance -- it's not just for Blizzard any more.
1.a. Not all classes should do the same, of course, but all should have a fair chance of completing the tasks ahead of them. A rogue may backstab, and a hunter may use their pet to avoid taking damage, and a paladin might win it by attrition, but all should have a fairly equal chance against an equal level opponent.
1.b. All classes should bring _something_ unique to a group, and combine in some way with other classes' abilities. E.g., take a hint from Blizzard. A paladin's auras and seals aren't there just to boost his own combat ability, but they can also boost the meatshield warrior to be a more robust meatshield, or the rogue into being an even better damage dealer, and the mage or priest into drawing less aggro and having more mana. And the mage isn't just a damage dealer, but can also take one enemy out of combat completely so the meatshield warrior doesn't get pounded into the ground prematurely, or slow down a fleeing enemy so the rogue can finish him off before he allerts others. Or the priest may be a "healer", but combine it with some paladin's holy damage boosts, and you'd be surprised how a holy/discipline priest can actually become a primary damage dealer in non-instance missions. Etc.
Few things are a bigger put-off than pulling a "wow, this combat medic class looks great" and then discovering that you've picked the pussy class which can't even go to the toilet on its own. Worse yet, discovering that while you can't solo it, everyone else doesn't have an incentive to group with you.
2. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid -- or let me rephrase it: if some option doesn't bring something unique to gameplay, it shouldn't be in the game at all. Having, for example, a sniper class and a martial artist class that both do exactly the same and fulfill the same role, only with the sniper being weaker and more expensive to play, like in AO at launch, should tell you that you have one class too many there.
3. Keep It New, Keep It Interesting -- a lot of the "but people get bored of our games after 5 hours" justifications of why games should be shorter, just prove that those people haven't understood much about game design. People get bored if they just have to do the same over and over again. Most successful games slightly shift focus, challenges and gameplay over the course of the game. It's that shifting focus and discovering new toys and new kinds of challenges that keeps it interesting.
E.g., in a city/empire builder you could start only worrying about taxes and placing the houses near a well, but by the end worry more about polution, religion, war, diplomatic relations, etc. You may even automatize some of the tasks which, at the start, you had to min-max by hand. E.g., even in a board game like Go, there are differences between the opening phase of staking your claims and generally avoiding getting bogged down in a combat for them (if your opponent gets bogged down removing your one piece in a corner while you claim the rest of the board, let him do so at his own peril), and the finishing phase where you actually fight it off and resolve any ambiguities.
Or in an MMO your fighter may start as just hitting wolves with a mallet until they fall down, and by the end of the game worry more about things like holding aggro, min-maxing their use of the rage bar, etc.
4. Avoid Disrupting Gameplay Or Social Mechanisms -- here SWG is the prime example. For a game and a designer which keep using the cheap excuse that players should create content for each other and leave the designers alone, its forcing people to play one character per server (ok, _two_ per server in the NGE) sure disrupts exactly that kind of social mechanisms. If you want to play more than one char, you'll perpetually be on the wrong server, compared to where other people play, effectively getting in the way of any l
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.