Notes for Cavas

Below is the document I typed my notes in as I thought and read about this psychology stuff. It is non linear. I'll summarize in prose.

The final product will be an interactive, free, browser game you can complete in < 20 minutes, which produces a personality analysis based on how the user played the game. The purpose is for the user to have a fun experience in playing the game, and learn something about themselves. The standard of quality is to have high referral rates to peers upon completion of the game, in curiosity to what archetype the user's peer receives, to judge compatibility, based on the fact that we have been accurate with their own analysis.

An important quality of the game to achieve is the immersion into the world we build. It is a must that the players are more immersed into the gameplay rather than the pondering of how the choices they make will affect their final analysis. To simulate the real world behaviour most accurately, I find that we must induce pressure in decisions. We can create pressure with the idea of limited resources, which create the need for choices to be made. As a bare example, the player could have limited attention bar, and must choose between listening to a crewmate rant about their day, or use it to maintain the solar panels.

To generate accurate analysis, it would be unwise to create a new framework. We are no psychologists. Instead, we should wrap our final analysis around existing frameworks. As an example, we can package characters in the game we build, around different personality types on MBTI. Archer could be INTJ, exhibiting conservative traits, and less spontaneous.

Additionally, in using a framework, we can then build scenarios in the game that wrap around the questions that the quizzes ask as well. As an example, instead of asking, "do you like to plan ahead", the user will be faced with limited resources, and will need to make the choice between just straight sending it into the mission, or compromise in spending some resources first to plan, before going on a mission. I will call these substitution scenarios, "proxies".

I sifted through different frameworks, and each have their own merits. Of all, I found HEXACO to be a good median between being overly broad (which would limit crazy predictions) and overly fine (which also limits crazy predictions, because you might straight up be wrong). I encourage you to try and take some of these to see what the questions are like, and to reflect for yourself as well.

Returning the discussion back on gameplay and mechanics, it's important that we minimize cognitive processing for the user when making a choice. The best indicator of minimal extra processing, is how little prose we have. If we need paragraphs of lore for the user to make one single decision, that is wasted cognitive processing. Instead, if it were as simple as, 10% attention span left, cut wood or sleep, and it can give us the same information about the user, then you'd much rather have that. Basically, given the 20 minute constraint, the gameplay must be dense in information return in comparison to cognitive processing.

A little more on discussion of game design and software logistics before I pose questions to you. I imagine the user to be able to interact with a world we draw up digitally, through wsad, and toggles for decision, and some keys to interact with objects in the world. Most will be hand illustrated from us, authentically. Storylines and ideas will be drafted from us as well, visualized in a document we share and edit. To make accessible, I imagine it to be browser based.

Hopefully that briefing now gives you and understanding with what my vision is. I'll ask you some questions now that I hope you can ponder on. Do not bother answering if you think that this project has gone in a direction you are completely uninterested in taking, we should reconsider the project scope if that is the case.

The question to you now is, what game design mechanisms can we use to gamify abstract ideas such as attentiveness, and empathy?

For example, a standard question on these personality tests are, "I empathize with others when they feel upset." How do you create a proxy for that, in a game scenario, if we are trying to immersive?

All that follows below is the random set of notes I had while looking. I quite like the idea of this project.

Theme ideas

Hitler Time travel

exploritory where we have the user go through a game sort of thing, managing people.

i have an idea of the "proxy", which is to ask questions or examine behaviour, that is indicative of the psychology of the person, without explicitly stating. and example would be, instead of directly asking whether the user is confrentational or not, we could have them choose a weapon for their army, deciding between bows for long range, or swords for short range hand to hand combat. we hedge on our belief that confrontational people are more likely to choose swords. using this system, we are disguising the true intent of figuring the person out.

A Successful Setting / World building

The created world should be self contained, small crew, a journey of some sort, limited resources, and forcing decisions to be made, with some sort of time pressure. Then you can see how players perform under these circumstances.

Lean heavy into visuals. Maximize the return ratio between the information you get from the user about them, in comparison to how much cognitive processing they have to do. For example, 3 paragraphs of lore for one decision is not worth it. Instead, a few ticking timers of depleting resources, and seeing what the user does in the situation, would return much more.

Reuse characters. Removes the need to retell lore.

ask question about how many things were present previously, about a certain detail..

Local divergence that converges in storyline seems like a good idea.

for repetitions, we can have day cycles, so some similar patterns occuring in days, and nights. like 3 decisions in the morning, 3 during travel, one big one at night.. repeat the days a few times, accumulating to some final..

Possible telling scenarios

Crew member broke rule to save lives. punish or not?

just have colliding values. Compassionate choice damages chances of success of mission.

Economics sits on the idea that there is limited resources in the world. Hence we need to make decisions. So the idea of scarcity, and fininteness in our resources forces decisions to be made.

Let's say even, the crew is panicking, and then reassuring them would require resources. so do you reassure them or not?

The final product

Hopefully its like a 15-30 minute quest/game that someone can play, immerse fully into, good aniimation design, sound design, story and narrative is good. The analysis at the end is thorough, and can teach the person who played something about themselves, and how the world works as well.

I'd like everyone to enjoy the game as well. hopefully no such thing as failing -- like everyone comes out of the game happy.

Possible frameworks to abide by

We are not reinventing psychology frameworks. Instead we should base the final 'diagnosis' off of a framework, and wrap the explanations withint our world building, in that certain framework. So, instead of, "You are INTJ", you can say that "In situations where there is stress, you like to plan things out before diving in."

Possible frameworks: MBTI, Hexaco, The Big Five.

I've taken tests for all three described above. I liked hexaco for how robust it felt. the big five feels too vague in categories to be able to make concrete claims, even though the scale is continuous. Eventually we'll have to bucket the continuous scales into words to describe as well, anyways, and I find that difficult.

Each have their own merits, and psycological validity for researchers as well. I'd like to go with things that are truly based, not something like horoscopes, pseudo science. Of course I'd like to be able to make claims that are like, "WOW, THAT"S REALLY ME!" as well. So it's a choice on a spectrum. Should research more into this.

Another possible idea, go on the formal testing sites for these personality tests, and then wrap the situations in gameplay. Here, for this idea, I found the research paper/scoring metric map for the HEX thing. I like the quiz, it just may be some times difficult to create proxy scenarios in game that reflect someone's honest answer. https://hexaco.org/downloads/ScoringKeys_60.pdf

Look at time spent as well, to see if they appreciate beauty. For some reason i can't fathom yet, a lot of these psychology tests ask about whether you'd appreciate poetry or those things. hm.

I don't know how well this applies, but i'm curious, a lot of the questions ask about other's perceptions of oneself. Does it have to do with making you think about how people percieve you, instead of just what you think? Maybe. It works pretty well too.

Final analysis presentation tips

Explain values and philosophies, instead of rigid rules. Not, "You are a planner", but "You like to live staying organized".. i guess just less rigid boxing someone in a role, I don't want to do damage to somebody after they play this :((

Packaging it in a world-role archetype would probably be accessible to everyone, and it makes it easy to interpret, and each role can have its uniqueness. after all, being irreplacable and valued is what everyone wants to feel. and i think we can make that happen, while giving valuable insight.

samples

This one's quite cool: https://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com/

Thorough ideas of implementations

It is easy to fall trap to vaguely thinking about an idea, hand waving through the logic and agree that it works. To avoid the negligence in logic, I'll thoroughly write out some game mechanics.

Planner character

This idea is for a small crew, with pressure in time. We have a character who values thoughtful planning and action. One of the scenarios is that, time is ticking, and a plan needs to be made on how the route will go. The planner is taking their time, and for each second they think, the player is losing some sort of resource. However the rate of success increases. Then just check if the player intervenes at all in the planning, or just waits..

Here's a good design philosophy. There should not be an ultimate end goal in the game that is "success, you've survived the storm". A singular valid goal leads to preference in game literacy rather than true values. It should be, the decisions you make in the 20 minutes of the game will lead to a different type of base after the storm, and everyone's bases are different.

We can base some scenarios off of psychological dilemmas. Prisoner's dilemma, Veil of Ignorance

This is more and more becoming branching into another game, where it's like designing a society, and then seeing what type of leadership style you're more like.

Refined direction, v1

You're traversing a journey, collecting items in a finite inventory as you go, trying to exhibit your true self as much as you can in the collections of items. At the end, we can perform an analysis on your journey, and the final objects you have ended the journey with, to analyze what type of person you are.

v2

The game is, "what's wrong with you?"