Weekly Report 3 – 20/10/09

The highlight of Team Mercury’s group progress this week has been conducting meetings with Dr. John Charlton and Andrew Williams. We met before our meeting with Dr. John Charlton on Wednesday October 14th to discuss what questions we could ask, acknowledging the fact that Paranoia wasn't exactly his area of expertise. We met Dr. Charlton is T2-012 at 12:30pm. He told us he had forwarded our email to someone with more experience in this field - Pam Ramsden (pm2@bolton.ac.uk).

He made it clear that what our study was aiming for wasn't the literal, clinical definition of paranoia as creating that kind of paranoia is highly unethical, and if actual games did create that sense, they would be illegal. Rather he believed our topic title referred to the more general meaning of paranoia - a sense of expectancy. Until then, we were unsure of what side of paranoia the topic title referred to, so this was useful and relieving information! However, our research into the clinical side of Paranoia will probably still be useful in recreating that sense of expectancy.

He told us to define the psychological state we are aiming for, and then make a questionnaire with clear psychometric properties (all the questions/items are measuring what we're aiming for). He gave us an example of how to conduct one, by having tester's play a game that does create a sense of paranoia/expectancy and a game that doesn't but from the same genre and then have them fill out a questionnaire before and after the test about how they felt and how the test made them feel, similarities and differences etc.

John also informed us that we would have to establish the validity of the questionnaire, proving that it does measure paranoia/expectancy. This can be done by 'T-Tests' which calculate statistics, means and standard deviations of the results and any fluctuations in those results. We will have to establish the reliability of the questionnaire if we aren't getting fluctuations from the ‘before and after’ questionnaires. We will have to establish its internal consistency and its psychometric properties - it must be fit to measure paranoia/expectancy.

Another idea John proposed to us was that we could have a validation test and an experimental test, where half the testers play the paranoid game first, then the non-paranoid game, whilst the other half play the non-paranoid game first and then the paranoid one. This is counter balancing which contributes to both sets of scores. We also discussed the idea of measuring heart rates and palm sweat with the equipment currently available to us. Dr. Charlton mentioned that these could not really measure what we specifically wanted, as they can be relevant to any means of arousal, however in combination with our questionnaires we could legitimately link their heart rates and sweat with paranoia/expectancy. This is called converging measures.

In terms of ethics, as we had agreed upon the non-clinical side of paranoia, and just wanted to induce a sense of expectancy which is often referred to as paranoia, Dr. Charlton said that a simple informed consent should be enough, e.g. "This might scare you, do you still want to do it?" He also recommended "SPSS Survival Guide for Psychologists" by Nicola Brace, Richard Kemp and Rosemary Snelgar and referred to us to the 'Psych-Info', 'Scopus' and 'Psych-Articles' searches on Bolton Uni's Athens page which came up with a manageable and highly relevant selection of studies and papers on our subject.

On Friday 16th October we met Andrew Williams for the first time and we explained our topic and progress to him. Having another opinion on the issue was highly beneficial, and he had some new ideas such as having tests where someone may act as a bot, or have some kind of ‘murder mystery’ theme to our tests. He also informed us that our Design document and pitch can just be ideas and comparisons, not everything has to be fixed and decided upon – the experiments will need a solid basis however our methods can change.

Team Mercury will spend a few more days finalising research into areas such as lighting, colour, narrative, level design and various books such as ‘Creating Emotions in Games’ by David Freeman and ‘Understanding Paranoia - A Guide for Professionals, Families and Sufferers’ by Martin Kantor. Then we will begin focusing our findings into a solid basis for experiments which will pave the way for a design document and pitch.