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."

Comments

Re:use your ears, not your instruments

[Longtime_Lurker_Aces]

Proper research is just a better version of listening. They are listening to user feedback as well as taking specific measurements to quantify and corroborate the statements.

Research > "listening". If you listen to people they'll tell you "Opposites attract" and then 5 minutes later tell you "Birds of a feather...". What people say is full of inconsistencies and errors, thats why we do research.

Re:This is great!

[MeanderingMind]

Cars: Check
Guns: Check
Soda Machines: Check
Stores: Check
Signs: Check
Billboards: Check
Radio: Check
Outrage at the Needless Violence and Gratuitous Sexual Overtones: Check
Brands: Negative

You can have a game with things that could potentially be branded without real brands. A lot of games, GTA for instance, take these objects as an opportunity for parody and satire. While advertising in games has been done for a while in cases where it would appear in real life (sports games dating back before the PS1 even), the issue is more advertising where it doesn't belong. Sprite has no place in Middle Earth, Cheeze-its no home on a Protoss Carrier and Toyotas no niche in Final Fantasy.

This is for marketting, not for YOU

[Moraelin]

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.

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.