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Measuring Engagement In Games
Gamasutra is running an article written by Tim Hong of EmSense in which he describes the research his company did into the physiological reactions various games engender in players. In addition to outward cues like breathing and movement, EmSense also scans brainwaves and heart activity to provide a more complete picture of how a gamer is responding to what he sees and does. They collected hundreds of hours worth of data and made comparisons among a variety of shooters, such as Gears of War 2, F.E.A.R, and Half-Life 2. They found some interesting information on how pacing, tutorials, and cutscenes can affect a player's level of engagement with the games.
While this could no doubt lead to some more interesting shooter games (a welcome change since it's been a while since an FPS not made by Valve has really struck me as top-grade), I'd personally be more curious to see the difference in engagement across genres - FPS, RTS, RPG, etc. I know that I personally get much more engaged into RPGs.
One of the most engaging games I have played this year. I don't play too many games, but the single player campaign in modern warfare was extremely appealing to me. [I played COD 1 and then COD4 was the next COD game I played]
.............
NOTE: SPOILERS BELOW
SPOILERS BEGIN...............
The initial mission where you need to escape a ship which is drowning and make a desperate attempt to jump into the helicopter, being assassinated at close range and unable to do anything about it, the nuclear explosion thing, crawling in a field with just a sniper rifle and tens of troupes walking around you and the way the climax plays out with Price throwing you a gun, having to take headshots before finally killing the main antagonist.. Call of Duty 4 impressed me so much that I don't even want to buy COD 5 just in case it ruins the experience I had with COD 4.
END OF SPOILERS
... and I shall strike upon thee with great vegeance, furious anger and a slightly positive karma.
Those guys just realised that storytelling in videogames is important, they must be genius !
They were actually surprised to see that people did react strongly when a seemingly important NPC gets killed. I guess they didn't play the original Half Life were people didn't want to get barney killed, even though the character has no consistence at all.
I can't believe it took all those measurements for game people to realise it, but it's still good news that someone is noticing.
With all the comments like "Predictably, Gears of War seems to get it right.", it seems to be more of a GoW praise article stating that this game has no flaws, but all the others do.
Also, the summary has a small error, article talks of games from 2007, namely GoW, not GoW2.
"They were actually surprised to see that people did react strongly when a seemingly important NPC gets killed. I guess they didn't play the original Half Life were people didn't want to get barney killed, even though the character has no consistence at all."
Of course I wanted Barney killed. That purple dinosaur has been vexing me for years.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Hundreds of hours? What does that translate to in number of players, distributed on age-groups and types of games? I could of course read the article, but experience makes me suspect it is unlikely to tell me. Even if is only about one type of game, or simply one game, full stop, "hundreds of hours" doesn't seem like much of a sample in statistical terms, which would make their results seem a bit dubious.
What I feel is the problem here is that there are far too many reports of results that have little weight on their own. This doesn't make the individual pieces of research invalid, but it does mean that we can't really conclude much from the results until enough projects have been conducted and somebody has done the proper "meta-research" on the combined dataset.
Wow, well um, really tell us what you think of COD4. :) Don't be shy. Everyone here seems more interested in the games they play which is cool and not the article, it was interesting reading the findings. I really don't play online games, so I really don't have anything more to contribute. :)
That's funny. I played it on 1680x1050. *shrug*
I bet his problem was he played it on the Xbox360, and we know of course that has mediocre graphics.
I thought it was a good game, played on the PC at least. Admittedly, I only really played the single player mode as I was unimpressed with the multiplayer.
I wonder if this is a case of "I hate the game because I bought the competing game" or "I hate the game because it isn't shiny, and I just on the shininess not gameplay."
This is not the funny you're looking for.
CoD * sucks
(totally biased comments ftw)
I'd agree with this - take Oblivion as an example; one of the most engaging games I've ever played. Although as it is first-person in nature, you could argue that the results from this test are just as relevant, even if it isn't a shooter per se.
Personally I'd welcome more research in this area, because it would help me buying games I like. Getting close to 40 and having slow reaction times (in other words, I suck at almost all kinds of games), I personally prefer less "engaging" games in the limited time I can spend on games. Recently, I've bought the Orange Box and had to stop playing the Half Life 2 series after a sort while---great game, but much too stressful.
if you want engagement in a fps its got to be multi-player action(who likes killing bots?), and your opponents have to be at your level or higher, and most importantly you must thwart that damn cat from jumping up on the keyboard. Cartmen voice: NO Kiddy! Thats a Bad KIDDY!
Mediocre graphics? I can think of games from two generations ago with excellent graphics. We've gotten to a point where processing power is irrelevant when it comes to visuals.
Haha, yeah, it took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, then I remembered: "Oh, yeah, some people actually play FPS games other than Perfect Dark and Goldeneye on a console. That must suck." :P
Yeah..... That's a much better article :)
P.S - I know... I'm sick.
I am -so- glad someone finally put this in writing. Hopefully every game developer from here out will read this article and have some clue how to keep a gamer entralled.
Some games already do it, and others utterly fail. At this point, I only have time to play the games that succeed at this (the ones that fail just can't keep me playing... There's always something better to do.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I think there is too much in this that's subjective though. One person may find a game highly engaging and allow themselves to become immersed, while someone else just plays games and ignores/doesn't allow themselves to get into it.
A simple movie example would be Blair Witch Project. There's nothing actually gorey/freaky in it, but if you allow the atmosphere and story to pull you in, it's very scary. On the other hand, I know several teens that told me it was completely lame/unscary because of that lack of visual content.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
So when is the study planned for Japan's h-game market.
Kind of on-topic but this is fascinating... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3gu0iu0xwls&fmt=18
So...
8 games for 90 minutes comes to 12 hours. 300 / 12= 25.
25-30 "male game players in the 18 to 34 year-old demographic" played 8 FPS games for 90 minutes while being monitored in following fashion:
Of course, you COULD HAVE set aside 15 minutes and read through those whole 5 pages of text.
Might have even picked up some insight from it, instead of just cold and dry numbers.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I think this article explains the success formula for the 3D shooter games, when all they are is more-of-the-same. Just look at how many of the top 3D shooters are sequels to previous versions (hint: all of them). I like to play them from time-to-time, but being older than the control group in this study, I play for different reasons. Sure it's fun to shoot stuff up, but how fun can that be after 15 years? Pretty stuff on the screen gets old too, especially when the game play sucks.
I find the cinematics and historical aspects of the WWII shooters to be the most engaging. Otherwise, you are just running around shooting stuff, which is why I really don't like playing them online. I see the younger generation loves this sort of immediate engagement, however, and they are the ones buying the games (presumably).
Now get off my lawn.
1280x1024 for me on a 19" LCD monitor. Yeah! :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
They are measuring "emotional engagement", which, if correct, is still not a measure of "fun".
For instance, the reason engagement may have dropped for Halo 3's cinematic sequences, for me, is that combat up to that point had been intense enough that the cutscene was a chance to relax for a moment. So, less adrenaline, maybe even less emotion at the moment, but I'd still consider them to be some of the best cutscenes -- particularly the random Cortana moments.
Halo 2 even moreso -- I wonder what kind of reading they got from "Return to Sender".
Similarly, while it is nice to have a given boss exist only once, that doesn't necessarily mean that subsequent battles are not fun -- why else replay a game, for instance? Just because the novelty is gone doesn't mean the fun is.
It just goes to show that you cannot provide a single measure as to the quality of a game.
That said, ever since my first Gauntlet kill in Quake 3, I've always felt it extremely unsatisfying when a shooter doesn't provide some sort of meelee weapon. I love Nexuiz for what it is, but I would love it even more if, when I somehow managed to get in close behind someone, I could hit them with something more fun than shotgun alternate fire.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While showing that I am a geezer (geek-wise), the only game I think I really got deeply emotionally involved in was the PC game Aliens vs. Predator(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_versus_Predator_(computer_game)). It was always when playing against the Aliens, be I Predator or Colonial Marine. It's interesting that the movies don't get me all wound up and involved or sitting on the edge of my seat. This game though....There were times when I was truly scared, and paused the game. Especially when playing late at night.
This was such an unusual experience for me as I have never been afraid of the dark, or really scared by any movies. Probably because I started watching 'monster' movies and such at a very early age.
I still have the game....Maybe I'll pull it out and see how I react to it. If it'll play on XP that is....Maybe look into the sequel, tho I don't know if it is similar as it was produced by a different game design house.
comes from a sense of being tied to the game. I've only felt this when playing hard-core on battle.net. For those who don't know, in hard-core, when your character "dies", it is completely wiped-out. When you've got an attachment to the character in that all you've been doing can be completely lost, there's more "engagement" and you really do feel true fear of loss.
- Dodged the RPG that's COMING RIGHT AT ME!!!
- Rotated the camera angle for fifteen minutes trying to look up a hot high-elf babe's robes
- Leaned left, right, and back while in a dog fight with a MIG
- Had their tummy do flip-flops when the character on screen jumps of an impossibly high cliff/building/etc
- Jumped waaaaay back out of the way when the spooky creepy wet-haired Japanese girl comes crawling out of the monitor
OK, I made that last one up- but if she ever does come crawling out of the monitor I'm gonna run like heck and not care who hears me scream like a girl.
I apologize for being unclear, I was making fun the previous post, and I'd thought I put in a sarcasm tag with regards to the Xbox360 crack.
I don't have one, and I don't really care how good the graphics are or are not. His post was simply criticizing a game because it ran in 600p, regardless of the games merits with regards to game play.
For consoles, I play games on the Wii, with its 480p graphics.While I am underwhelmed with the graphics often (relatively poor anti-aliasing among other things) that doesn't mean I enjoy the games any less.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
Different development houses. Infinity Ward (CoD 1,2&4) has a substantially different feel than Treyarch (CoD 3 & 5)
Reviews tend to agree with my opinion that Infinity Ward just does it better. Can't wait till their turn in a year or so.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
As a games developer, when I read that I'm curious about a few things.
- What do the engagement charts look like for other genres (RPG's, RTS, MMO, Barbie Horse Adventure, etc)?
- Does the art and animations affect the results? I mean, is it the action of throwing a grenade that players get attached to? Is it the animation and the way your player throws it? Do you get similar responses when you throw a known human grenade versus a fictional type (such as Halo's plasma grenades)?
- What do engagement charts look like in multiplayer? I would assume they would be higher many times as you realize you are playing against human players. But then I gotta ask if the players still stay engaged even when the other players are wiping the floor with them?
- This is perhaps the most important piece of research they can find... Are players finally sick of WW2 shooters? (joke sort of) Anyways, as I said, I'm really interested and want to know more details! I know Valve has said they are interested in this tech, especially since players when giving feedback are fairly ignorant to their own thoughts and feelings. It's wierd to say, but if you can explain why something is fun, then that's great. Many people can't. I'm sure if playtesters asked why they have more engagement throwing a grenade than a warthog, I'm not sure anyone would be able to answer since they may not even realize it.
the cake is a lie !
Whoa! New troll! This I haven't seen in a long time. I wonder how long it'll take to mix up with the nigger owner's manual, Barack O'Bongo, and that tired old one with the public library and the shit eater. Interesting times are comming for those browsing at -1.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.