Games are great platforms for research, and one of the reasons for this is that you can easily distribute experiments and gather great data quickly. If you’ve got ten minutes to spare, you can help out two great research projects right now just by playing a couple of games.
The folks over at NC State (who are hosting this year’s AIIDE conference) are doing an experiment with choose-your-own-adventure games and player/narrative relationships. Click through a questionnaire and then play a CYOA game and help them understand how people relate to choice and stories in games. I’m loving the work in the CYOA format that’s going on these days.
Next up is ITU Copenhagen – I believe this is some PhD or Masters’ thesis work on player perception. Having played this one myself I’m very excited to see how the data for this comes out. Warning: at the end you’ll be asked to copy a numeric string for the questions. Please write this down by hand or something! My Mac fumbled the copy-paste and ruined my participation for me.
Apologies for the lack of screenshots – I didn’t want to reveal anything about the studies in case it ruined part of it for the researchers! Please consider taking part in both of these projects, and help make their work even stronger.
About the second one : My Copy-paste didn’t work too (I use a PC). For others : take a screenshot of the endscreen before the questions !
The first one, to me, was a bit weak. Like, weaknesses in the writing itself pulled me out of it, making it a bit hard to me to believe what was going on. The choices felt rather weak and basically like choosing between two vaguely different shapes of red most of the time. I think I would have significantly changed what my thoughts on it all were, had the writing – and the writing alone – been better. The actual chain of events I was exposed to (I didn’t try it multiple times and can’t say how much it would actually have mattered, but I assume, for the most part, it would have basically been the same thing. I was able to easily see how the other choice could have lead to the same thing with minor changes) could be kept the same.
The second one was weird in other ways. I wonder how it even would be evaluated. Open-ended surveys always are great for being more specific but they also are really hard to analyse. And in this case, I almost had nothing to go off to find an open-ended response. I certainly didn’t come to a single conclusion. It was a lot of maybes. I suspect this to be the point of the study though. I’m curious what the end result will be.