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

Week 4

The main focus of this week was to begin the testing of our artefact. We ended up using Nick and James’ laptop to run the experiment on, making sure 50/50 split between those who played the dark map and light map first. Testing participants had been split up between the team, while myself and James or Matt initially tested participants, Nick went about finding and organising people to participate in the test.

Additionally, I also began putting the results into MS Excel, to find out if any trends had begun appearing from the participants so far. So far thirty participants have been tested, with several participants showing the ideal answers for fear.

Week 3

This week was mainly for Nick and James to use for practicing their presentation, although I still gave feedback during these sessions. Minor changes to the graphs were also made, such as changing the scale of the graph (ranging from +4 to -4).

Following on from the presentation with the supervisory team, which I though Nick and James presented well, One of the supervisors mentioned the fact that the player’s flashlight could be turned on and off in the “dark” map. It was decided that it would be a good idea to make sure the flashlight was always on so that it would not affect a participants results during testing. Initially I went about searching the code used in Half Life 2, where I found that the command “sv_infinite_aux_power” could be used to stop the battery power from draining. The only other remaining problem was how to make sure the player’s flashlight could be turned on, and not turned off by the player. After doing more research, and some information from Nick, I found the command to turn on and off the flashlight, and simply placed a trigger within the level that forced the flashlight on, and by removing the key binding in the options, this prevents the player from turning it off.

Week 2

At the start of this week I was assigned to look in to the Self Assessed Manikin (SAM) method of processing emotional responses, and went about creating some simple graphs which showed which emotions each quadrant represented, using some of the PDF files on SAM we had found. The only problem encountered with this was the use of Dominance on the SAM form. After doing more research, it was determined that it separates the more subtle emotional differences such as anger and fear, with anger being more dominated, and fear with total control.

On Thursday we did some control testing using our two maps, although there were some initial problems that we managed to solve (such as running a map with no lighting compiled causes all other maps loaded to have no lighting). From the data we gathered from this control test, I put it into a graph which showed some unexpected results, such as those who played the map with full lighting compiled were more excited that we expected, although most of those who played the map with all ambient-lit lighting ended up closer to “calm” or “relaxed”. In addition to this I also created the Heart Rate (HR) graphs, which showed a slight difference between those who played the dark and light maps, with a small increase on those who played the dark map between their base HR and the average after completing the level, and a less noticeable, or even a decrease once playing the map with no lighting.