Measuring Collaborative Fighting

Among the five virtual reality (VR) worlds I built this semester, this world solely focuses on the ‘hedonic’, pleasurable aspect of the game. Addressing this, I opted to measure this in a more non-obstructive way.

My Role
Game Design, Sound Design, Research Design, App Development

Team
Varun Girdhar, Meng Yu: game development, Play Wang: environment art, Jiayu He: system and animation

Location
Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University

Time
2 weeks + 1 week experiment

Deliverables

  • Unity Game with Vive trackers, 3d rudder

  • Hedonic questionnaire

  • Evaluation application Data Analysis

Table of Contents

Game Design

01

Research Plan

02

Questionnaire Design

Experiment and Results

04

03

How Did We Design the Game?

  • artwork by Play Wang

    Chaotic Theme

    We agreed to emanate the virtually engaging, chaotic environment located in a dark street (artwork by Play Wang)

  • Collaborative System

    We had the game designed to be played by four, two playing one character: Upperbody (vive trackers) to punch, Lowerbody (3d rudders) to position

  • Non-strategic, Freedom of play

    We focused on evoking players’ intrinsic fun and excitement

  • Full Soundscape

    I generated foley sounds for every player’s movement as well as music

Gameplay Video

We devised the view from each character’s perspective, so needed two monitors in total. The characters can each account for their health status and perspective.

Player’s View

Another view in terms of the player’s view.

Soundscape

Designed a full soundscape, recorded, composed, and edited for an immersive and stimulating experience.

  • Experience Design

    With this world, we were eligible to showcase the game at the annual ETC festival. Following are the experience layouts.

  • Concept Poster

  • Layout Plan

    Focused on delivering a short-term, yet stimulating experience for the four guests with a short rotation time

  • Concept Art

    Dark, Indian, Chaotic and Drunk

  • Gameplay and Emotion Map

1. Measuring Game Emotions

Previously, assessing and evaluating game experiences have focused on the emotions evoked from the game, and whether they conform to the intended scenarios and feelings. The methods include questionnaires, surveys, in-game behavioral data, and interviews. In short-term experiences, pleasure overpowers the game features in assessing the game, and in particular instances where the game is short-term and pleasure-focused, more subtle, and quicker ways to measure the experience are needed.

2. Hedonic Experiences

User experience develops and changes over time: they do not necessarily motivate prolonged use as strongly as some other aspects—especially in games. Hedonic consumption has been defined as those facets of behavior that relate to the multisensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of a consumer's experience with products. Pleasure principles can be applied to assess how one perceives the hedonics in a game and what aspects we can consider.

3. The PAD Scale

The Pleasure Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model is a model that has been developed for the convenient assessment of consumer reactions to services and products. This means that the model was meant to describe and record emotions. Based on the theory that emotion is an input-output system, this scale can be implemented in assessing game emotions in a short, timely, yet intuitive manner. (Image: Use and application of the PAD scale in the study of colour emotion 2007)

Arising Research Question:

How Might We Measure a Purely Hedonic, Short-term experience in a Festival Setting?

Use and application of the PAD scale in the study of colour emotion

Literature Review

  1. Perrig, S. A. C. (2021). Measuring User Experience-Overview and Comparison of two Commonly Used Questionnaires.

  2. Liu, Y., Song, Y., & Tamura, R. (2020). Hedonic and Utilitarian Motivations of Home Motion-Sensing Game Play Behavior in China: An Empirical Study. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(23), 8794.

  3. Poels, K., Hoogen, W. V. D., Ijsselsteijn, W., & de Kort, Y. (2012). Pleasure to play, arousal to stay: the effect of player emotions on digital game preferences and playing time. Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 15(1), 1-6.

  4. Schaap, R., & Bidarra, R. (2008, September). Towards emotional characters in computer games. In International Conference on Entertainment Computing (pp. 167-172). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

  1. Chang, T. S., Hsiao, W. H., Chen, T. C., & Ganbold, E. (2019). Hedonic, utilitarian, and social motivations for consumers purchase mobile in-app content behavior. International Journal of Innovation in Management.

  2. Hollebeek, L. D., Abbasi, A. Z., Schultz, C. D., Ting, D. H., & Sigurdsson, V. (2022). Hedonic consumption experience in videogaming: A multidimensional perspective. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 65, 102892.

  3. Alba, J. W., & Williams, E. F. (2013). Pleasure principles: A review of research on hedonic consumption. Journal of consumer psychology, 23(1), 2-18.

Redesigning Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance Scale

Simplifying the existing scale into a 6-item assessment and designing the input method as an intuitive button, I have constructed the hedonic assessment digital sheet.

Aiming to test the scale on two groups of players, the upper-body player (punching) and the lower-body player (locomotion) as per our game mechanics, I created two sheets and two graph visualizations.

Festival (Experiment Day)

  • Players

    We agreed to emanate the virtually engaging, chaotic environment located in a dark street (artwork by Play Wang)

  • Venue Design

    We had the game designed to be played by four, two playing one character

Real-time Visualization of Data Through App Development

  1. Archived the data retrieved using LiveGraph from Figma

  2. Used Apple’s XCode to organize data, send the input, and visualize into two separate graphs

  3. Players can also see and take into their account how they felt about this short-term experience

  4. I later documented these data and saw if there were any significant results to the PAD level of the two groups—upper-body and lower-body based on the game mechanic they use

Hedonic Questionnaire

Application Visualization