Spatial HUD in Heavy Rain

Upcoming game Heavy Rain features a UI completely freed from a conventional HUD, with occasional button prompts in an overlay manner, yet in the game world as they can be occluded by in-game character models. This information will apparently be harder to see as the character becomes stressed.

The game also features UI elements presented spatially, not entirely dissimilar to the holograms of the Dead Space UI.

"With a quick movement of the right analog stick we activated his ARI, casting a green hue over the environment. Clicking the right stick sent out a "pulse," revealing evidence – footprints, liquids, airborne particles – invisible to the naked eye. We walked up to tire tracks, pressed a button, and Jayden touched them with his special ARI glove. The system analyzed the tread pattern and confirmed a match to the model of car used by the killer." - Joystiq.com


For a game pursuing immersion as heavily as Heavy Rain, I think the UI design choices are quite interesting. Gameplay video at http://www.gametrailers.com/video/new-character-heavy-rain/49590?r=1

Interesting game design perspective

This Gamasutra feature has an interesting model of the game design process. The model is a kind of pyramid with the concept at the top followed by paradigms, features, mechanics and finally interface. However, the author also notes that interface choices create an "upward" influence on the mechanics.

Early analysis of the 3rd test, Part III

Discovering affordances on your own might strengthen the game experience
In line with the results of the first user test, there were some claims made during the third user test regarding the joy of discovery. Two of the persons taking part in the third test didn't mind that it was hard to discover which objects that could be smashed to pieces, with one claiming that the discovery of this affordance is rewarding enough to compensate for the lack of affordance amplification. Another participant had some complaints about the fact that the game didn't make him aware of the possibility to break apart objects, but suggested forcing the player to discover the interaction by "locking him into a room" with a breakable object, rather than using a UI affordance amplifier. Note: the remaining two participants didn't find the affordance hard to discover.

Regarding the breakable boxes in Dead Space, another test participant claimed the boxes to be too attention grabbing. He wanted a more subtle affordance amplification, as he - as well as the other participant - found the rewarding feeling of discovery strengthening for the game experience.

Once again, this suggests that sense of freedom is important for engrossing oneself into the game experience, and that dumbing down the gameplay by being to explicit might take players out of the game experience. Personally, I think that this might be especially relevant considering optional affordances.

Early analysis of the 3rd test, Part II

Continuing on last weeks post, here's two additional conclusions from the test.

Attitude towards hand-holding depends on player type
As in the second user test, two groupings among the participants can be noticed. This time, the participants could be divided into those who prefer the Resident Evil 5 approach of amplifying affordances with explicit button prompts throughout the whole game, and those who thought that the button prompt approach might be ok in the introductory part of the game but not justified later on. Perhaps not very surprisingly, the person that spent most time on games in the former group (two persons) spent about 2h/week playing games while the latter group (three persons) consisted of players that could be described as hardcore gamers.

Accordingly, hand-holding seems to be preferred by players with a causual perspective, while experienced players might accept a tutorial approach of button prompts in the beginning of a game but might be taken out of the game experience if these button prompts are persistently used.

Design mistake: Introducing interactive objects while player interaction is blocked
One of the first things the test participants encountered in the Dead Space session was a box with a twinkling green light. This box immediately caught the attention of every participant in the test - the moment they saw it, they tried to interact by pressing buttons or pushing it around, without any response. These boxes are in fact destroyable and are encountered throughout the whole game, however during the first minutes of the game the player's ability to interact with the environment is limited and this interaction is blocked.

While the appearance of these breakable boxes - containing items like ammo and health packs - easily catches the player's attention and hence could be seen as a design success (if this is the aim), introducing them when the player is not able to interact with them is a risky design choice. When the test participants were finally able to use the full range of actions (shooting or foot stomping to break boxes), their interest for the twinkling boxes had been lost; two out of five persons did not break any box at all throughout the session, and the only participant discovering the affordance instantly when permitted by the game was familiar with Dead Space.

While these results might not be as homogenous as the results from the Resident Evil 5 session, it seems quite unnecessary to introduce interactive environmental elements during moments when player interaction is blocked. The undesired effect of this might be that the player draws the conclusion that objects are not interactive despite the fact that they're clearly communicating the affordance, and hence from that point make no further attempt of interaction.

Early analysis of the 3rd test, Part I

(test description)

Non-apparent affordances are hard to discover without proper amplification

In the introductory Resident Evil 5 chapter that was included in the test, there was several possible interactions with objects - affordances - that was difficult for the participants to discover. In an action scene that was a part of the session, the player is able to block the doors of a shelter by pushing shelves in front of them. This affordance (that a shelf affords pushing) is not amplified at all. None of the test participants discovered this interaction.

Earlier in the same session, the player is introduced to breakable objects that contain usable or valuable items. This affordance (object is breakable) is amplified in three ways: 1) a "Investigate" button prompt when the player stands near the object (a wood box) and looks in its direction, followed by a textual message ("This box looks conveniently placed"); 2) a tutorial message popping up about one seccond after the box is "investigated" (press LB + RT to swing knife, hence break the box); 3) the player characters partner Sheva demonstrating the affordance by breaking objects randomly. The first two amplifiers is used only the first time a breakable item (a wood box) is encountered. The third amplifier occurs at random moments during gameplay, if the player happens to look in his partner's direction he see's the partner breaking an object.

Far from all test participants dicovered that certain objects were breakable. Only one test participant breaked the first box encountered (affordance amplified by "Investigate" message + tutorial message), and one other participant discovered the affordance later on during the game session when encountering a group of barrels (no amplification at all).

Apart from the "smash object to pieces" affordance, participants had problems discovering that a window afforded jumping through it when trapped inside a building. The affordance "jump through window" was only amplified when standing close to it, by a "Jump through window" button prompt. The problem was that the players rarely positioned themselves close enough to the window for the affordance amplifier to occur. This resulted in a state of confusion, when the players did not know how to escape the building. Only one of the participants discovered the affordance instantly.

It should be noted that if enough time passes by, the player's partner Sheva positions herself next to window and communicates by dialogue that the window is a way out of the building (an affordance amplifier as such). However this occurs after a significant period of time and the participants tended to find the way out by trial-and-error before it happened.

This somewhat falls in line with our hypothesis. The "break object" affordance was not discovered by the majority of the test participants, resulting in poorer interactivity with the game geometry. The "Push shelf" affordance was not discovered at all, also resulting in the players missing out on possible interaction with the environment. The "jump through window" affordance was only discovered instantly by one test participants, for the majority who didn't this resulted in a state of confusion until the affordance was found by trial-and-error. Note that decreased immersion/engrossment isn't necessarily a direct result of the player missing out on optional affordances such as breaking boxes or pushing shelves, but might be an indirect result as affordances are hopefully put into the game to flavor and enrich the game experience. For affordances required to make progress through the game (jump through window) it should be important not to frustrate the player and force him/her to rely on trial-and-error, which might take the player out of the gameplay experience.

3rd user test: Description

So we're officially done with user testing, after some struggling with the third and final user test.

The third user test consisted of two gameplay sessions, in which the persons taking part in the test experienced the first ~20 minutes of Resident Evil 5 and Dead Space respectively. During these sessions, observations were made of what the participants interacted with in the environment. Both sessions were followed up with questions regarding the way the game eases player interaction with objects and the environment, if this is positive or negative for the game experience, and if the diegesis of the UI solutions affects the game experience. As in the first test, the participants were asked to rank the two games according to 1) usability (how much the game eased interacting with the environment), and 2) immersion/engrossment (to what extent this strengthened the game experience).

The aim of the test was to prove our hypothesis regarding spatial interaction; the amount of affordances deduced from an 3D game space is aways greater than the amount of affordances actually allowed by the rule framework (in other words, code) - only certain doors can be opened in Mirror's Edge yet some of our participants in the first user test tried to open doors that could not be opened - hence UI designers must amplify affordances allowed and supress non-existing but deducable affordances. This to enable as rich spatial interaction as possible, and avoid having the player try to do things not allowed by the rule framework which might block the players precense within the game world.

As in previous tests, we can notice a number of interesting trends in the results, which will be posted shortly.

Lots of interesting reading!

I found this site with the collected works of post doc Rune Klevjer - who has spent most of his academic carer looking at FPS games. I have yet to read his dissertation but I already feel it's a shame we did not find this earlier!

Measuring player engagement

Yesterday, I came across a company appropriately named Immersyve, measuring "customer motivation and engagement" in "interactive applications". For video games, they have developed a methodology called PENS:

"video game developers can now employ our Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) methodology, proven to predict sustained enjoyment and engagement much more accurately than most in-house methods and basic usability testing."

It is explained more elaborately in a PDF found on their webpage.

Week Summary: 11/5 - 15/5

We interrupted our planned user study for last week half-way through, as the questions were formulated in a way that demanded a bit too much introspection and interpretation of the test participants. We judged it to be worth the time to rethink the test, so this week we are back with the same test, but new questions that put less mental demand on the participants answering them.. which should give us much more qualitative results.

Simultaneously, the outline for the thesis report draws closer to what we think will be the final form, and we've produced some text as well.

Week Summary: 4/5 - 8/5

Another set of user tests have been performed, this week regarding the player-avatar sensory link and especially the way FPS games communicate the feeling of being damaged, and how this is connected to what we call meta-perception. Some of the early conclusions from this test can be viewed in the previous post.

For next week, we will hold our last set of user tests, concerning player interaction with the game space/world, how affordances allowed by the rule framework is communicated by games (Dead Space and Resident Evil 5 are the games used for the test), and player attitude towards different UI strategies regarding this. On monday we will also have a short meeting with Staffan discussing the report outline for the thesis.

Until then, take care and grow lots of plants in case of a zombie invasion!

Early analysis of the second user test

In this test, the “feeling of being damaged” part of the player-avatar sensory link was tested, by letting the test participants experience the way FPS games communicate damage to the players. The participants once again experienced four gameplay sessions, but this time four different games; Battlefield: Bad Company, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Halo 3, and Killzone 2. After each session, questions were asked regarding how well the game communicates the feeling of being damaged, and how this affected the game experience. For the games containing an overlay health bar or digits indicating level of health (Halo 3, Battlefield: Bad Company) the test participants were asked about how the diegesis of the UI element affected the attitude to this information. As in the first test, the participants was asked to rank the four games solutions according to 1) how well the game communicates the feeling of being damaged, and 2) to what extent this strengthened the game experience.

The results from this test is slightly more scattered than from the first one, but nevertheless a number of trends can be identified here as well:

Communicating the feeling of being damaged in an accurate way enhances the game experience.
The test participants were asked to rank the games included in the test according to 1) how well the game communicates the feeling of being damaged, and 2) to what extent this strengthened the game experience. While players ranked the games quite differently (more on this below), they ranked the games in the same order for both question 1 and 2. This indicates that communicating the feeling of being damaged in a accurate way strengthens the game experience.

The player attitude towards different strategies for communicating the feeling of being damaged is affected by the player's earlier experience with games.
Some of the test participants opinions seemed to be heavily influenced by the games they have played before. Two out of the five test participants had played earlier games in the Halo series extensively, but were not very familiar with the other games tested. Both ranked Halo 3's way of communicating the feeling of being damaged high, while other test participants placed Halo 3 in the last place when asked to rank the games.

Non-diegetic and meta-perceptual UI elements (image filtering and full-screen image overlay) does not break immersion/engrossment, despite being outside the diegetic part of the UI design space.
As in the first test, no participant questioned about the non-diegetic nature of the health digits in Bad Company or the health bar in Halo 3 (which could be argued to be diegetic if one is familiar with the Halo fiction) mentioned this as a immersion/engrossment breaker. No participants was taken out of the game experience because of the overlay nature of perceptual emulation either. Once again, genre conventions was mentioned as a reason for accepting this kind of information. Instead, players mentioned loss of control or unclear communication of the higher end of the health spectrum to be breaking the game experience.

Meta-perception can strengthen the feeling of being damaged, hence enhancing the game experience.
A majority of the test participants (the three persons that didn't favor Halo 3's way of communicating the feeling of being damaged) seemed to think that meta-perception (image filtering and full-screen image overlay) affected their game experience in a positive way. Some however had issues with meta-perception that was used to the extent that it causes a loss of control over the situation (for example image blur), while others seemed to find it irritating that it only made them notice the low end of the health range (critical health level) and that it was hard to notice it when it was used to indicate being hit by fire. Generally, the participants seemed to think that the Killzone 2 approach was a good way to go, with the overlay blood stains symbolizing both being hit by fire and eventually critical health level when the perifery of the screen is covered with blood, without causing loss of control with blur or fading out the screen.

Week Summary 27/4-30/4

Another short week (and another sweet holiday!). This week we finished our first batch of user tests (5 of them). This resulted in both an interview study and in a lot of interesting observations.

Now we have again secured a Playstation 3 in order to conduct the next set of tests - concerning "meta (or "in game") perception". These tests will start on Monday.