SynapticNulship

Games are not just for fun anymore—and indeed “fun” is not a good enough description for the psychology of gameplay anyway. Designers are trying to “gamify” applications which traditionally were not game-like at all. And this isn’t limited to just the Serious Games movement that’s been around for several years. This is a type of design thinking that has spread from the gaming world and is now merging with the User Experience Design / Interaction Design world.

Beyond the hype and mistakes of gamification that might be going on right now, there does seem to be a design thinking emerging with the intention to increase engagement and motivation of products. I assume the business angle is that this of course can result in more users and keeping users longer.

Dustin DiTommaso, experience design director at Mad*Pow, presented “Beyond Gamification: Architecting Engagement Through Game Design” yesterday. As I already mentioned, he says how “fun” is not a good definition. His main psychological theory (at least for this presentation) is Self-Determination Theory (SDT). What follows are my notes based on DiTommaso’s presentation (hopefully I haven’t butchered it too much).

Games keep people in intrinsic motivation. There are three intrinsic motivation needs (these terms are directly from SDT):

1. Competence
2. Autonomy
3. Relatedness

Competence

This is about meaningful growth. Good games achieve a path to mastery. The user experiences increased skill over time. There are nested short-term achievable goals that lead to success of the overarching long-term goal.

The experience should be that of a challenge. If you’re familiar with Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow, it is similar (or perhaps exactly the same) as that.

As with most good interaction design, there has to be feedback. Specifically, there has to be:

1. Meaningful information
2. Recognition
3. Next steps

Action-Rules-Feedback loop

On the meaningful info item: Progress should be made visible. But, rewards have to be meaningful. Rewards for meaningless actions are not good in the long term—-users will hack (or “game”) the system if they get bored and/or detached.

Screenshot from Rockband 3 (developed by Harmonix)

DiTommaso says that you should strive for “juicy” feedback. For example, the interface for the popular video game series Rock Band is entirely “juicy” feedback. Visual Thesaurus is a good example of juicy feedback that is less flashy than Rock Band.

Failure should be allowed in a graceful manner if it provides an opportunity to learn and grow. This might sound weird for interaction design where usually you don’t want users to fail at all. Mad*Pow supposedly has done research to back this up.

Autonomy

The game belongs to the user. Choice, control, and personal preference lead to deep engagement and loyalty. There has to be the right feedback for the type of autonomy for a given user. Experience pathways can be designed “on rails” to limit or give the illusion of freedom.

To motivate sustained interest the game should provide opportunities for action. For example, on a ski mountain, there are literally multiple pathways, and multiple levels of difficulty.

Relatedness

This is about mutual dependence. We’re intrinsically motivated to seek meaningful connections with others.

A game should provide meaningful communities of interest. The users should somehow be able to value something in the game beyond the mechanics that run the system. The users should get recognition for actions that matter to them. And they should be able to inject their own goals. An example of a system that allows user-customizable goals is Mint.com.

It’s also worthwhile to think of non-human relatedness. Dialogues between user interface avatars and humans actually matter and affect motivation. They are a type of relationship. So scripts, text, tones, etc. are very important.

Conclusion

This is my rough interpretation of DiTommaso’s “Framework for Success” intended for designers and related professions.

1. Why gamify? Consider the users and the business cases.
2. Research the player profile(s) (perhaps game-oriented personas?). This research can and should inspire the design. What are the motivational drivers? Is it more about achievement or enjoyment? Is it more about structure or freedom? Is it more about control of others or connecting with others? Is it more about self interest or social interest?
3. Goals and objectives: What’s the Long Term Goal? What steps? Etc.
4. Skills and actions: consider what physical, mental, and social abilities are necessary. Can the skills be tracked and measured?
5. Look through the lenses of interest. The concept of “lenses of interest” comes from Jesse Schell. The list of lenses provided by DiTommaso are:
   • Competition types
   • Time pressure
   • Scarcity
   • Puzzles
   • Novelty
   • Levels
   • Social pressure/proof (the herd must be right)
   • Teamwork
   • Currency
   • Renewals and power-ups
6. Desired outcomes: What are the tangible and intangible rewards? What outcomes are triggered by user actions vs. schedules? How do users see and feel incremental success and failure on the way to the Ultimate Objective?
7. Play-test and polish: Platforms are never done. This isn’t really specific to gamification. I would say this is about the general shift from waterfall to iterative development methodologies (which I have used successfully in my own work). This can even extend out to the actual end users—they can be involved in the loop and even expect updates for improvement.

Image Credits:
1. Nightrob
2. Dustin DiTommaso / Mad*Pow
3. IGN
4. Mount Sunapee

In 2003 I started looking at the science of emotion in order to determine if it would be useful for robots. When I had to do an English paper that year (middler year writing at Northeastern University) I decided it would be something about emotions, but I wasn’t sure at first what the specific theme would be. One question I had was, why do people often associate emotion with spirituality (or do they)?

Is it simply that some people never bothered to consider how emotion works, so it just gets classified with other mysterious phenomena like spirits? Or is it because religion has laid claims to human emotion?

I figured it wouldn’t hurt to talk to a religious leader to get the theological point of view. I was aware of the Unitarian Universalists which have a mixture of various faiths and “spiritual” members that aren’t hardcore religious. I had a meeting with the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church of Harvard Square in Cambridge MA, who at that time was Dr. Thomas J.S. Mikelson. I didn’t record the meeting unfortunately (I couldn’t afford recording devices back then). I was pleased to find that he seemed to be familiar with some of the emotion books I was reading back then by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio.

If I remember correctly, Mikelson told me that the word “spiritual” is actually relatively new. Or perhaps the modern usage and popularity of it are new. I’m not sure about its popularity, however, according to the Oxford English Dictionary [1], “spiritual” has been used in most of its current senses since at least the 1300s. The exception is the sense of “spiritual home”:

(with no religious connotation), a place or milieu, other than one’s home, which seems especially congenial or in harmony with one’s nature, or to which one feels a sense of belonging or indebtedness.

OED’s earliest quote of “spiritual home” is from 1932. As an aside, it’s too bad that the usage of “spiritual” to mean “Of transcendent beauty or charm” is obsolete (according to OED):

1481 Myrrour of Worlde (Caxton) ii. iv. 69 Ther ben yet plente of other places so delectable, so swete, and so spyrytuel that yf a man were therin, he shold saye, that it were a very paradys.

The word “emotion” cropped up in 1579. First we see these now-obsolete usages:

1. “A moving out, migration, transference from one place to another.” (1600s)
2. “A moving, stirring, agitation, perturbation (in physical sense).” (1600s-1800s)
3. “A political or social agitation; a tumult, popular disturbance.” (1500s-1700s)

Then we get to a modern usage starting in the 1600s:

Any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental state.

Here are some quotes:

1660 Bp. J. Taylor Dvctor Dvbitantivm (R.), The emotions of humanity..the meltings of a worthy disposition.

1762 Ld. Kames Elem. Crit. ii. §2. (1833) 37 The joy of gratification is properly called an emotion.

Then we get to an even more modern usage from psychology:

A mental ‘feeling’ or ‘affection’ (e.g. of pleasure or pain, desire or aversion, surprise, hope or fear, etc.), as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness. Also abstr. ‘feeling’ as distinguished from the other classes of mental phenomena.

The quotes for that start in the 1800s:

1808 Med. Jrnl. XIX. 422 Sea-sickness..is greatly under the dominion of emotion.

1841–4 R. W. Emerson Friendship in Wks. (1906) I. 81 In poetry..the emotions of benevolence and complacency..are likened to the material effects of fire.

1842 C. Kingsley Lett. (1878) I. 61 The intellect is stilled, and the Emotions alone perform their..involuntary functions.

1871 J. Tyndall Fragm. Sci. (ed. 6) II. xi. 231 He..almost denounces me..for referring Religion to the region of Emotion.

1875 B. Jowett tr. Plato Dialogues (ed. 2) I. 249 The..emotions of pity, wonder, sternness, stamped upon their countenances.

It’s interesting to see how the concept of emotion seemed to come from movement and disturbance, changed into personal mental disturbances, and then became distinguished from conscious cognition.

I’m leaning towards the premise that most people don’t care how emotions work or why there’s a concept of spirituality and use them as umbrella terms to cover a wide range of stuff without much regard for details or theories.

But was there ever a thread in history that that really tried to associate human emotions (even if that word wasn’t used) with intangible spirits or gods?

I suppose the other frail connection that might exist in people’s minds between emotion and spirituality is due to the never-ending attempt to preserve something special or divine about humanity. Some will always grasp for some lifeboat that is supposedly unique to humans and not available (at least not as much) to other animals or machines, such as “emotion” or “feeling” or “intelligence” or “winning at Jeopardy”…

References:
[1] Oxford English Dictionary, Second edition, 1989; online version March 2011.

Image credit:
Beinecke

I noticed today that Kyle Munkittrick posted about Sherry Turkle’s concerns about people having emotional attachments to machines (The Turkle Test).

Love at first sight?

Turkle, who’s been at MIT for a long time, is not against machines or emotional machines. She’s skeptical of taking advantage of the human tendency to be social and have emotional attachments to machines which merely pretend to be social or pretend to have other emotional capabilities.

As Kyle says:

Yet these lovable mechanoids are not what Turkle is critiquing. Turkle is no Luddite, and does not strike me as a speciesist. What Turkle is critiquing is contentless performed emotion. Robots like Kisemet and Cog are representative of a group of robots where the brains are second to bonding. Humans have evolved to react to subtle emotional cues that allow us to recognize other minds, other persons. Kisemet and Cog have rather rudimentary A.I., but very advanced mimicking and response abilities. The result is they seem to understand us. Part of what makes HAL-9000 terrifying is that we cannot see it emote. HAL simply processes and acts.

Kyle’s post was apparently triggered by this recent article: Programmed for Love (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Turkle has a new book out called Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

I haven’t read it yet, but it supposedly expands her ideas into the modern world of social technologies. As for the robots such as the aforementioned Kismet and Cog, Turkle’s been talking about them since at least 2006 if not earlier, and Kismet and Cog are ancient history (from the 90s). The Programmed for Love article says Turkle was using Kismet in 2001; it wouldn’t surprise me if that was Kismet’s last experiment before being put in the MIT museum.

Kismet

I mentioned Turkle’s point of view in my article “Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Robot?” that was published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology (it was originally written in 2006 but didn’t get published until 2008).

Image credits:
1. Contra Costa Times
2. Jared C. Benedict

Does a hill feel steeper when you are already exhausted?  Does a hill appear steeper when you are afraid to roll down it?  Is it true that baseballs appear larger to players when they are hitting well? You may have some suspicions that your perception is greatly affected by your context and may not always be correct.

Psychologists Dennis R. Proffitt (University of Virginia) and Jessica Witt (now at Purdue University) have done performed some interesting experiments in recent years dealing with perception and action.  Christof Koch, professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology and popular writer, described some of them in his column in the July 2010 issue of Scientific American Mind [1].

In the slant experiments [2], subjects were asked to estimate the slope of a hill with two different visual tasks:

1. Visual matching: Adjust a line on a flat disk to indicate the slant.
   

2. Haptic: Adjust the slant of a movable board with your hands without looking at the hands.
   
   

Koch didn’t mention this, but according to Witt and Proffitt, the two tasks in the experiment are supposed to be absolute, in that the slant of the hill is measured of itself, not compared to anything else.  They had a third task used in previous experiments which was relative in that it compared the slant to the ground plane.  So the new “absolute” disk was introduced to attempt to filter out task differences from the results.

Experiment 1 had the subjects look at the hill head on (pitch).  Task 1 (matching) was not very accurate: 31 degrees was perceived steeper, around 50 degrees, and 22 degrees was perceived as steeper also (in between 30 and 40 degrees).  However, Task 2 (haptic) was accurate.

In previous studies, visual matching and verbal reports were even more inaccurate when the subjects were encumbered, tired, unhealthy, or elderly, yet the haptic task was not influenced.

In experiment 2, the subjects could see the slant of hill from the side (a cross-section).  Yet they still over-estimated the slant with visual matching despite that they could actually hold the disk up in their visual field and match the line to the slant.  The haptic tasks were still accurate.

The researchers concluded that these results support the theory that we have two independent visual systems, one for explicit awareness, and one that is visuomotor for immediate actions.

As Koch explains [1]:

Proffitt argues that perception is not fixed: it is flexible, reflecting a person’s physiological state. Your conscious perception of slant depends on your current ability to walk up or down hills—hard work that should not be undertaken lightly. If you are tired, frail, scared or carrying a load, your assessment of the hill—the one that guides your actions—will differ from what you see. Not by choice, but by design. It is the way you are wired.

The Enactive Approach to Perception

I am reminded of the book Action in Perception, in which philosopher Alva Noë said [3, p.228]:

Perceptual experience, according to the enactive approach, is an activity of exploring the environment drawing on knowledge of sensorimotor dependencies and thought.

It seems that the slant perception experiments mesh with the enactive approach.  Again, from Noë [3, p.105]:

To see that something is flat is precisely to see it as giving rise to certain possibilities of sensorimotor contingency.  To feel a surface as flat is precisely to perceive it as impeding or shaping one’s possibilities of movement.

But, you might argue, the enactive approach doesn’t account for why Task 2 (haptic) is more accurate–wouldn’t the enactive approach predict that Task 2 is as skewed as Task 1?  However, one of the things Noë attempted to argue was that we always have dual experiences even if we don’t realize it:

1. How things are to us in experience.
2. How things look.  Normally this is transparent, but one can, with some effort, see how things present themselves visually, e.g. when an artist is painting a depiction.

So, this hypothetical solution indicates that the Task 2, operating on the action-oriented visuomotor stream, provides data as one can achieve with the techniques of artists.

Turning the Tables
Koch started off his column by invoking the two vision systems theory (which is what the slant experiment was trying to prove) [1]:

As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two vision systems that work in parallel. Both are fed by the same two sensors, the eyeballs, yet they serve different functions. One system is responsible for visual perception and is necessary for identifying objects—such as approaching cars and potential mates—independent of their apparent size or location in our visual field. The other is responsible for action: it transforms visual input into the movements of our eyes, hands and legs. We consciously experience only the former, but we depend for our survival on both.

So isn’t that enough of a description–doesn’t it annihilate the enactive approach?  Noë addressed the two visual systems theory, but spent little more than a page on it, dismissing it as orthogonal to the enactive approach.  Noë states that both visual streams depend on deployment of sensorimotor skills [3, p.19].

However, the slant perception studies actually lend support to the enactive approach–there are sensorimotor relations to both the visuomotor stream and the explicit awareness stream.  The awareness perceptions are modulated by sensorimotor skills as they apply to a person’s current context, which is why Task 1 results in inaccurate perceptions.   Meanwhile, the visuomotor stream is tied into in a quicker, tighter loop that skips the slower type of aware perceptual processing that the other stream uses, which is why Task 2 is accurate.

In other words, both visual systems use sensorimotor skills, but in different ways, thus giving support to the enactive approach.