Weekly Report 4 - 25/10/09

On Friday 23rd October the team had a meeting with Pam Ramsden, a specialist in areas such as paranoia thanks to Dr. John Charlton who forwarded on the team's email requesting advice. She started by saying it is hard to make a link between video games and paranoia based breakdowns as the breakdowns don't tend to happen when playing a video game but afterwards when the emotions are taken out on others. Also, everyone has some paranoia, called "healthy paranoia" e.g. stranger danger. Whilst too much paranoia is abnormal, having none whatsoever is also just as abnormal.

Certain personalities react differently to paranoia, e.g. "stimulus seekers" like to be scared and force themselves to watch slasher films, go sky diving etc. They are mostly males. Others require the situation to be real or believable thus allowing them to think it could happen to them and project themselves into the situation e.g. The Twin Towers and terrorism led to paranoia which affected travel and tourism. Paranoia can lead to clinical syndromes such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

She made useful suggestions to base our experiments on, such as:
The deliberate triggering of paranoia such as a maths question that says 'correct' when answered incorrectly and vice-versa. This can lead to confusion over trusting one's own judgement which can lead to different reactions like judging themselves negatively or being frustrated and blaming something else.
OR
Triggering the player's avator to be in danger.

The team will have to take a personality measure in order to acquire a good idea of what to expect from test individuals. Pam offered to send the team the personality questionnaires she uses. Pam explained about certain things humans are programmed to fear, e.g. the dark and the unknown are innate fears. There are also sounds humans are programmed to fear such as screams, sirens etc. If the team's tests can play into these fears and make it believable so that the testers can project themselves into the situation, then maybe the team can create paranoia. One team member thought of designing the test in the layout of Bolton University as that would be the only common factor between all of the testers.

Pam gave her own defintion of paranoia - it is the fear of what is about to happen. Fear itself is a fear of the current situation as it is happening. Paranoia is a fear of the potential of a situation. Pam clarified that we will need some kind of ethics form that must be submitted through the course leader, aka Brian Morris.

After the meeting with Pam Ramsden, the team met Brian and Phil for a weekly update. They liked the fact the team had come up with two solid bases for experiments and offered their own ideas such as the locked door theory, where in a game environment, the tester is tasked with locking all the doors, whilst being questioned if they actually did lock all the doors, or if they are told they would teleport out when all the doors were locked but when they are all locked, they don't teleport thus creating a sense of doubt, or creating a script that unlocks some of the doors they have locked.

They also thought of changing the amount of doors to lock in each task and then questioning the tester to see how many doors they think they locked. They mentioned the fear of failure and humiliation - if the team told testers their results would be made public would that create paranoia? Essentially they were talking mostly about mind games.

On Sunday, a team member brought over a rough base of a Design Document and Pitch and the team went about creating a contents page that was relevant to the team project. The team discussed which ideas to go with or combine but an issue arose over whether the team wants the tests less like a test-like game environment and more like a proper game experience that can also perform the tests, or a test-like game experience that focuses on what's being tested solely. Both had valid points.