Experiment Number 01 - Side A

So today I got a couple of people to have a go at Experiment Number 01, only three people at the moment but moving on to get more soon. One of the players was a non-gamer and I will leave this person to write about in the next post about this experiment, to see if I can get any more participants similar to them.

Anyway..... here we go....

Experiment Number 01 - Part A

Experiment Number 01 is a very basic challenge. The player starts in a square room with graffiti on them, there are no doors or windows. The player is given the task of getting out of room. Already this can be quite confusing. Hidden with the environment are hints, these are portrayed in a vague manor through the graffiti. However, the graffiti also has distractions to make the player think more into the meaning of their surroundings. The only way a player could get out of the room was by walking from a specific location to another, while tripping two triggers to change the collision of a wall along the way. These locations were marked but not easily interpreted in that way.

So the hints are as follows:

Arrows - So arrows mean in, general terms, this way. 

X - Right then. X or a cross can be interpreted in a few different ways. 

One of these is plain and simply WRONG. Another could be stop as well as X marks the spot. 

Montee - This is not a hint at all. This is just my name.

I put this in as a way of making the player second guess their thoughts 

and think in to it what was right and wrong. 

But mainly just to confuse them.

Another thing to point out is my choice of colours for the graffiti. Green is the universal colour for GO and CORRECT. And Red is the opposite - WRONG and STOP. I used these colours to again, make the player think more about the means of their surroundings.

This is a plan of the walls to understand what the player was looking at and what the hints looked like:

Now on to the Test Subjects. Each player had the same room nothing changed. 

Test Subject 1

First up was Jay. To start off with, he was just confused. He did exactly what I expected a Gamer to do and that was hug the wall and walk around the perimeter of the room as if to find a gap in the wall. This is quite strange when you think about it. He began to just run against the walls in specific points. One of these were the corners (something that I had expect also), as well as the areas that the graffiti was on the walls which from the looks of it went from the most likely to be the exit to the least.

He seemed then, to just stop and think for a few minutes. Looking from wall to wall to wall to wall. After a while he started to move about a bit more trying some of the things he had tried before as well as moving in sequences from one piece of graffiti to another. Quite often he would come back to the big Montee scribbled on the wall and just walk into it. Like as if he might have triggered something to happen. 

I asked him what he was thinking about and he just said  that he was trying to understand the meaning of the symbols but was getting confused as to what specifically some of them were telling him, or if they were just distracting him. This was really only a few minutes in. He was explaining to me the different thinks about what he was thinking the solution was and what he was being told by the environment to do. He understood that the Arrows where telling him that the second wall was significant in the solution but was not sure this was the exit. Or more so, if it was then how. He kept hinting at this point that he thought that line of sight was the answer (which was right in a way) and that the crosses were a link some how (which was right).

The funny thing was he was looking at the the smaller X (Wall 4) pretty much on one of the triggers (unknowingly) and explaining that he thought he need to look at it to trigger something. At the same time he was moving backwards from that trigger towards the exit wall where the other trigger was, which in turn changed the collision on the wall behind him. Out he popped on the other side of the wall all confused like he didn't understand. At the time he was just about moving through the wall, he was jesting at the idea of the crosses indicating a location to move from and then to. Which was completely right.

He told me that he was expecting something visible that indicated he had achieved something. Rather than something that was just so unexpected that it confused him more, and making second guess what he was doing and thinking in the moment it happened. In total he took around 8-10 minutes to finish, be it accidental or not.

Test Subject 2

Next up was Josh. Josh was the one I thought would get it fairly quickly. I guess I was wrong.

Josh had very similar approach to Jay but look around to get his bearings first for quite some time. He then proceeded to walking into walls corners and then circled the room hugging the wall. He then adopted an approach where he would use the graffiti as some sort of combination of directions he was supposed to walk in, often ending up with him walking into against the corners again. Another was zig-zaging between walls.

I ask what was going through his mind, he explained that he was thinking about the signs and what the mean. Saying he could figure out which meaning the symbols had, bring up the notion that red is stop and green is go, as well as the X marking the spot. Josh also mentioned that the arrows being a notion to go in a certain direction and red be stop was confusing him about if it telling him to look at something or not to.

One thing I noticed from Josh playing was that he payed the most attention to the biggest thing on the wall. That being the biggest Montee on wall three. I noticed this with Jay as well but Josh seemed to linger around it. Often using it the starting and/or ending point of movements or ideas for a solution.

At certain times through the experiment he did actually do the correct thing (walk from the highest crosses location to the other) but it didn't register. I think this was because of the speed at which he did it, but could also be the size of the hole or triggers being too small. What I found really strange though, was that out of all the solutions he thought of or tried he only tried three times. I don't know why this was. Maybe he had this idea that it was just too simple of a solution or it just wasn't prominent enough.

In total Josh took around 25 minutes to complete the experiment, which I wasn't expecting for anyone at all. maybe apart from non-gamers.

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I was really shocked how difficult Jay and Josh found this. I have a few ideas and thoughts about where this might lead next but I want to gain more Test Subjects gamers or not.

See you on Monday! :)