Week 13

During the week we mainly focused on practicing the presentation for the final milestone. Additionally, I helped make sure that all of the appendices in the team report matched up correctly.

On Wednesday we ran the presentation in front of Amanda and Claire, who gave some feedback on it, but overall was good. We delivered the presentation on Thursday to the supervisors, which I thought went well.

Over the next week we will check through the final report before printing it, with the rest of the work focusing on completing the individual report

Week 12

As before, the focus of this week was to continue working on the final team report. I helped Nick create the figures and table list for the contents page, and also put the Appendix together, with feedback from the team discussing what should go in. In addition to this, I was also given slides on the milestone 4 presentation to begin practicing on, which includes the analysis section.

Week 11

This week we focused on finishing the draft version of the Team report, and had some feedback from Steve concerning section 7 and 8. Afterwards I helped Nick by adjusting some of the graphs in those sections.

On Wednesday, Claire and Amanda gave some pointers on how to write the individual report. On Thursday the external examiner visited the teams, and asked us questions on the project such as what the project was, what we were interested in and what we felt we had contributed. Overall I thought it could have gone better as I might not have given the impression on how much work had been done.

Week 10

During the second week of the Easter break, I focused on writing section 7, Analysis of results for the final report. Once done, and after I had gotten feedback from other team-members, I wrote section 8.1 of the critical assessment.

During this week I helped proof-read and work to finish the first draft of the team report.

Week 7

With the meeting last week with John Charlton, we had found out what tests to perform, but not really the main reasons behind them. On Tuesday we had a meeting with Stephen Manning, who explain to us the kinds of tests you usually do with statistical analysis. One of these mentioned was the Anderson-Darling normality test usually done to ensure the T-test data for the HR data was normal, which we had not yet done.

I ended up using software called Minitab to produce the normality tests, and that showed us that the 20+ hardcore demographic was slightly skewed on their base HR, which after discussing it with Steve on the Thursday afternoon, we decided we would take him out due to the student admitting to having a heart-condition causing a very high heart rate.

After discussing the content of our team-report, it was decided that I would be doing the results section, as me and Nick are probably the two who best understand the statistics side of the report in the team. Matt and Nick went through the basics of this section with me, where we discussed the layout of the section to be written over the second week of the Easter break.

Week 6

This week was the final phase of testing, and additionally began to analyse some of the results we had obtained. During the afternoon I and Nick discussed with Dr. Roger Jackson some of the statistics we were using to analyse the data. Consequently we were informed that we should be using a slightly different formula than we had been using. The following day we focused on trying to work out the statistics of our data, and splitting people up into their separate demographic, although we didn’t make that much progress due to me being unsure of how to properly analyse the data. As a result we had arranged a time to meet with John Charlton, where we could discuss the statistical analysis.

On Thursday we had a meeting with John Charlton, where we explained our test method and John managed to take us through the process of using SPSS to help analyse the data from the SAM form and heart-rate, in which we use a non-parametric test (the Wilcoxon signed ranks test) to measure the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance values of those who played the light and dark maps, with a paired T-test for the average base Heart Rate and those for the dark and light maps.

From these we managed to conclude that the data from the HR showed that it was significant to a 1/5000 chance between the dark and light map, and additionally the same for arousal and dominance on the PAD scale. The only one we can’t say is significant is the Pleasure, which could be due to several reasons, which we will focus on next week.

Week 5

Testing continued this week, while we were unable to get as many people on Tuesday, we did manage to record several participating in the test. I also began to tell the other team members what participants should be playing which level, as they were slightly unbalanced with more hardcore gamers playing the dark map first compared to casual gamers playing the light map first. I also created several frequency graphs, which shows what our ideal spread of results and the actual results of the participant responses.

The majority of Arousal and Dominance results fall into expected areas, with only Pleasure being somewhat different. One possible explanation could be that participants enjoy being scared more.

On Friday, Nick took over testing the participants with James and Matt, while I focused on the data collation and reading up on the book Andrew suggested for statistics