Psychology in gaming — posing a research question
I haven’t made use of mind maps often before; I’ve drawn them up and found it helped only slightly, with expanding on basic ideas. However — personally — I’ve found it was never anything groundbreaking for me, despite all I’d been told about the proven merits of visual concept mapping. Not say it’s a useless concept, it definitely works really well for many creatives, it’s just not for me.
So I ask myself, why not change things up a bit? Behold, linked below is my playable mind map, as a fresh way of visualising ideas. Check it out!
I decided to turn my mind mapping exercise into an interactive somewhat-exploratory experience! Because of the chunk of extra effort in creating this, it made me consider my research points much more carefully — needlessly branching out would have increased my (albeit self-inflicted) workload. I believe this resulted in a very different personal experience for my drawing out ideas.
My ideas branched into only 14 nodes, but I’m perfectly satisfied with this number. It is a very calculated and succinct result, with each idea being much more carefully considered, opposed to the more typical mind mapping experience of branching out wherever the mind goes, on a whim.
For our upcoming assignment I need to select a research topic, and the mind mapping exercise was to assist that process. My chosen category is one that I find deeply interesting; psychology within gaming. My mind map initially asks (very broadly), how does gaming affect us? I tried my hardest to boil the answer to this question down to three categories:
Imagery
What we see and how our brain interprets these messages; shape, colour, motion.
Immersion
What grabs our attention and keeps hold of it, what makes us care, what parameters are used to measure and define the ever-elusive state of immersion that all creatives seek to impart on their audience in some form.
Interactivity
What we control, what makes us feel in control, and how this contributes to the imagery and state of immersion we experience.
Each of the above categories all fell under the proverbial ‘psychology umbrella’. Interesting as this entire area of research is to me personally however, in its current state it was far too broad to tackle in my upcoming two-week-part-time project. I would never finish to a meaningful degree, so I had a choice to make, and I wanted to choose one particular area of psychology (in a gaming context) that I could make a fun small project out of — much like my mind map concept. Colour psychology seems the obvious one to go after, but it’s been done to death, more so than the other mentioned areas at least. After much deliberation I landed on the keyword ‘motion’ — how does our brain subconsciously process the patterns we see?
For the sake of discussion and pursuing this line of thought; let’s say witnessing a firework has an ‘energising’ effect on our mind. One might think it is the audible crack which typically accompanies a firework display, that induces this adrenaline-like effect. It’s also a fair train of thought to believe the bright colours, or the speed of the sparks play their own roles in dictating how we interpret what imagery we see. I’m here to explore the idea that it is the pattern of artifacts spreading outwards from a central point, that plays a key role in this complex equation in our subconscious. Yes, all of the above factors certainly all matter to a degree, but would it still have the same effect if a firework ‘pattern of motion’ happened underwater, with bubbles in place of burning sparks? My hunch says yes, but these are the questions I’m keen to research and learn more about! If everything I believe on this topic has been wrong up until this point, then I’ll still have learned.
From a design aspect, Kosara (2007) says that the goal of visualisation is usually to communicate a concern, and isn’t necessarily about displaying data. Many examples of this are present in many modern software and interface applications — most notable being a simple dot moving in a circle is proposed to reassure users, that everything is functioning as it should.
Have you ever wondered why most modern loading icons are the same concept, a spinning circle graphic?
In The Affective Affordance of Motionscape (2014), Feng speaks of the fundamental motion properties including path, curvature, speed, shape, and direction. “We’ve learned that [these properties] are significant contributors to the affective impression of motion.” Feng goes on to breakdown many findings, amongst them; motion textures with fast speed were found to be more exciting, urgent, and threatening than those of a slow speed.
The more I read on these topics, the more solidified my budding research question became, until it became:
“What patterns of motion can have an energising effect on witnesses, and why?”
The facts and research are out there; they largely seem to support the ideas and beliefs in my mind’s eye. I have populated my bibliography with what I’ve been reading in the meantime, included with my references (though not strictly APA standard) are open-access links to the referred readings. I’m just being helpful here!
Bibliography
Feng, C. (2014). The Affective Affordance of Motionscape (Doctoral dissertation, Communication, Art & Technology: School of Interactive Arts and Technology).Available at: http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/14331/etd8422_CFeng.pdf
Kosara, R. (2007, July). Visualization criticism-the missing link between information visualization and art. In 2007 11th International Conference Information Visualization (IV’07) (pp. 631–636). IEEE. Available at: https://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/academic/courses/11w259/Kosara_IV_2007.pdf
Lockyer, M., Bartram, L., & Riecke, B. E. (2011, August). Simple motion textures for ambient affect. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (pp. 89–96). ACM. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Riecke/publication/220795249_Simple_Motion_Textures_for_Ambient_Affect/links/09e4150c622422705d000000/Simple-Motion-Textures-for-Ambient-Affect.pdf
Milam, D., El-Nasr, M. S., Moura, D., & Bartram, L. (2011, October). Effect of camera and object motion on visual load in 3d games. In International Conference on Entertainment Computing (pp. 113–123). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. Available at: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-642-24500-8_12.pdf
Subyen, P., Maranan, D., Schiphorst, T., Pasquier, P., & Bartram, L. (2011, August). EMVIZ: the poetics of movement quality visualization. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization, and Imaging (pp. 121–128). ACM. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Diego_S_Maranan/publication/220795270_EMVIZ_The_Poetics_of_Movement_Quality_Visualization/links/56b4b82908aec41daa2063d1/EMVIZ-The-Poetics-of-Movement-Quality-Visualization.pdf
