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Valet av testperson var ett taktiskt sådant då jag vet av erfarenhet att personen i fråga är kreativt tänkande och reflektivt lagd, vilket jag ansåg behövdes för att få värdefull input.

Eftersom personen i fråga inte är en "casual gamer" som är bekant med Dark Souls och dessutom en "casual" filmtittare och IMDb-användare så hoppades jag på att lärdomarna skulle vara nyttiga trots de förkunskaper och fördelar samt drag av akademiskt, reflektivt tänkande som personen besitter.

För att förtydliga vad som porträtteras i serien till vänster så kom jag med hjälp av detta experiment fram till att MovieFeels eventuellt kommer att behöva vara en mer mångsidig app än vad jag tänkt från början. Ett utmanande gränssnitt (hög tröskel) är något jag fortfarande tror på, men Jennys upplevelse av Dark Souls säger mig att användaren måste mjukas upp lite innan denne kan uppleva den tillfredsställelse som behövs. Att dra ner på gamification-aspekten ser jag som nödvändigt för att appen inte ska vara för påträngande. Metaforen med trappan vs. stegen är menad att representera hur användaren måste kunna gå i lugn takt "uppåt" i användningsprocessen av MovieFeels så att denne kan ha ögonen på målet istället för att klättra rakt upp på en stege då användaren då sannolikt bara kommer att ha ögonen på vad denne sätter sina händer och fötter.

För detta krävs ett system och ett användargränssnitt som sätter den individuella upplevelsen i fokus istället för den kollektiva. Användaren måste kunna interagera med appen på sina egna villkor, lära sig i sin egen takt och interagera med sina känslor för film och sina tankar om film obrydd av vad andra tycker vilket jag tror skulle berövas av ett alltför stort fokus på en community-aspekt.

Vidare har en "bildande" funktion kommit upp som idé som resultat av detta experiment i form av ett rekommendationssystem som tar fram användartips baserat både på användarens filmsmak och vad användaren utifrån denna kan tänkas vara intresserad av att lära sig inom filmteori och filmanalys.

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Del 3

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Del 2

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Del 1

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Experience prototyping; hög tröskel (resultat)

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Experience prototyping; hög tröskel (resultat)

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Prototyp/stand-in för MovieFeels: Dark Souls (tv-spel)
Testperson: "Casual" IMDb-användare utan erfarenhet av Dark Souls conveyance och spelmekanik.
Förberedelser: En rudimentär genomgång av Dark Souls och hur det fungerar för att engagera dig som spelare (se Dark Souls Game Design Analysis ovan). Testpersonen har uppmuntrats till att uppmärksamma systematiken i Dark Souls och förmedla känslor och tankar som uppstår kring att interagera med spelet till designern.
Mål: Jag vill undersöka huruvida ett komplicerat och utmanande system kan vara av värde för att engagera nya användare i den design jag siktar mot att skapa eftersom jag tror att en hög tröskel (avskräckande som den än må vara) kan vara värdefull för att bidra till den nivå av filmdiskurs som MovieFeels ska vara en del av hos såväl allmänheten som hos cineaster som mig själv. Dark Souls är vida känt för att ha en hög tröskel för nya spelare och fungerar därmed som en bra stand-in i en experience prototyping-situation. MovieFeels i sin nuvarande idéform har dessutom ett visst gamification-element som jag tror till viss del inspirerats av Dark Souls då jag själv spelat detta spel under tiden som jag arbetet med detta projekt.

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Fördel: Att diskutera och reflektera över filmen efteråt blev mycket enklare då man hade "stödord" och skisser att utgå från.
Nackdel: Tar uppmärksamhet från filmen.
Fördel: Viktiga och betydelsefulla moment i filmen fastnade mer och gav ett större intryck vilket delvis gottgör ovan nämnda nackdel.

Hur överföra en motsvarande funktion till en app som kan användas utan att den stör i en biosalong eller under filmvisning av alla slag?
- Diskret knapptryckning medan appen är öppen så att man kan ha telefonen i fickan (med appen öppen) och bokmärka viktiga moment utan att störa folk. Appen måste ha en funktion som gör att den kan fungera tyst och i smartphonens viloläge samt att filmers olika längd är matchade så att de bokmärkta momenten blir korrekta för att användaren ska kunna gå tillbaka till dem.

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Totalt genomfördes 6 intervjuer. De tre utvalda är utvalda då dessa gav mest utförliga svar och var mest varierade

IMDb är appen folk i regel använder

Casual användning av IMDb

Engagemang kan variera rätt stort

Att lägga ner mycket tid i appen kan vara avtändande men även uppmuntrande beroende på intresse

Överlag positiv respons på min skiss från målgruppen "filmfantaster/folk med stort filmintresse".

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T.v. - betygsättning med emojis hos TV Time

Ovan - design som "straffar" och kräver mycket av användaren

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra's community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

The Souls series is one of the most punishing games to date, we all know that we died at least 100 times to before beating the game (if you ever did beat it). As difficult as the game is, the countless times we died and raged quit, most of us kept coming back for more. Let's be honest, had this been the 90's we would not have beaten the game without the internet, unless we had guides and some kid in school already beat it and helped you out. Also, Dark Souls breaks some few game design rules (well, more like guidelines) such as the ridiculous difficulty, of course, causing us to die over and over until we break something. Why? Why did we come back and died more times at the hands of so many enemies, cliffs, bosses and sadistic game design? In this article we will explore the science and psychology of the game design behind the Dark Souls overall and understand why it kept reeling us back in each time, so you as a game developer can apply this analysis into your own video games to create a solid formula.

Difficulty

Let's talk about the most obvious part first, we know Dark Souls 3 is crazy hard, and a golden guideline of game design is to not make the game too easy so it's not boring and not too hard to not frustrate the player. Dark Souls 3 developer From Software takes this guideline and completely stumps all over it, pushes it off a cliff and cranks the difficulty up to the sky. What feature of the game balances this insane difficulty? The answer is a reward system. At the beginning of the game outside the Firelink Shrine to the left, there is a samurai with a pretty sweet katana, this is an extremely smart AI that counter your moves and kill you in one hit, it can be immensely frustrating until one is finally victorious and receives that sweet glorious katana, giving the player the feeling that they've have earned it. The game rewards players for their hard efforts (at least most of the time) as it should, when we work hard at something we urge to be rewarded or commended for it. Had the player received nothing after 20 plus deaths, it would have completely made that battling experience useless and would only discourage the player from these encounters. To summarize, if you intend to make a certain battle difficult, then you must reward your player accordingly, the higher the difficulty, the better the reward. We're going to bring up the reward system a lot throughout this article and see where we should best apply it.

Reward System

Rewards come as items, weapons, armor, spells and lore hints, which are awarded to the player during exploration and after combat with bosses or certain enemies. We will talk about this further ahead, first let's talk about why this reward system is so effective, why does it have the players so hooked? For that answer we turn to science! Dopamine is a compound in the body as a neurotransmitter associated with the reward center of the brain and the sense of pleasure that derives from rewarding experiences. There are countless studies on the relation between dopamine and video games, in short, playing video games doubles the dopamine level in the human brain. In other words, when players get rewarded for exploring or defeating boss, the sense of accomplishment and reward raise the player's dopamine levels. Notice how closely this is tied to the player experience, so when designing and for the remainder of this analysis, always keep this kind of reward system in mind since it will come up often.

Combat System

If you take a Dark Souls and create an Onion Design (most important feature in the middle and then cover that with more features to support it), combat would probably be right in the middle. Close your eyes for a second and imagine Dark Souls but with a clunky badly designed combat system, now you have to beat one of the hardest games ever made with a bad combat system, terrifying thought isn't it? But if you design a smooth, responsive, and intuitive combat system and layer it with weapons, armor, diversity of enemies, bosses, then you have something amazing. That is what Dark Souls did so right, and keeps the players wanting to master the combat. Nothing like rolling out of the swing of an invader just in time and punishing the poor sucker for his mistake; Or how about when you were about to die and then through sheer skill you parried the Boss's attack and countered? This design makes you feel like a badass (when you pull it off), of course it takes time, but that is the point, for the player to master the combat system and overcome greater challenges overtime. Never overlook the combat in your designs, test thoroughly, ask people to test it and provide feedback. Another important thing to highlight, spicing things up with different weapons, they're unique in the Souls series and that's next.

Weapon and Armor System

Dark Souls offers a vast list of weapons types, each offering unique aesthetics and effects to most of them. A rapier is best for poking and countering, great sword for powerful but slow attacks, magic for ranged battles and players who don't want to git gud. Creating such a unique roaster of weapons makes the game interesting since the player can spice things up whenever they feel like it and just change their weapon types. Same goes for armor, there are different types such as cloth, chain mail, Havel's heavy armor, and such. But each armor has its pros and cons, if it's too heavy then it will limit mobility, and vice versa. The advantage of designing such systems is giving player choices to keep the game fresh and gives the player a lot of options to face each challenge they encounter. Keep in mind that maybe a player that started out as a mage has acknowledged their sinful and shameful ways and wish to become a swordsman now, giving them that option is key to encourage them to explore the different items the game has to offer. What does this have to do with bringing me back to play? Well, let's recap, having a vast weapon and armor system will keep the game interesting since the players can explore different builds that complement their play style, they will want more items to explore until they find what works best for them, this encourages them to further explore the game and the items in it.

Exploration and Story Telling

The typical RPGs will have a lot of dialogue for the players to pitch in to and see what's going on in the story. However, we all know that Dark Souls has incredibly little dialogue, and instead it lets the environment and items do the talking and leave the lore up to the player's interpretation. Now if you're like me, you completely missed out on the item descriptions. All items have a detailed description about it either telling you its function, the lore behind it, or both. This was one of the few way to get a grasp of the story or even progress through the game. A clever and brutal example is in Dark Souls 1 when you defeated the Wolf of Artorias, and got the Wolf Ring, it did, in fact, tell you that it was used to traverse The Abyss, much later in the game you stumbled upon a dead end which was an actual Abyss, now if you happened to actually read the ring description and had actually thought about that one ring at that precise moment, then you would have figured it out, I sure didn't like the 95% of the players. Why do such a punishing design? First of all, this lead to the fight of The Four Kings, which was actually an optional fight, so even though this is a brutal design, it didn't actually affect you progress of the main story, only the exploration. A lot of players don't discover 100% of the game's secrets, so as a designer you much decide on what can be missed and what cannot such as the main story, of course. That's not all, remember that reward system? Well, Dark Souls also uses it to encourage exploration, players go out of their my way to try and find some hidden loot somewhere, and when they find it, they feel clever and are rewarded for discovering a hidden area, or maybe they found a merchant with special goods, or an optional boss. Exploration was never boring this Dark Souls, because players always feel rewarded in some way, so even after getting killed over and over, I would still explore for fear of missing out on some goodies.

Bosses

Each boss is a masterpiece with one of the best soundtracks to date. It really felt like a unique experience, however we did die over and over with certain if not all bosses, yet we kept coming back for more, why is that? Do we not love ourselves? We kept doing it because it was a challenge to overcome, we all know that feeling when we see "VICTORY" in our screens, we had a sense of accomplishment. We have a psychological need of accomplishment, to overcome some trial and be victorious at the end, it makes us feel good about it and the harder the challenge the better we feel afterwards. That's exactly why we kept at it time after time, I must've died at least 30 times when fighting The Nameless King, but when I finally beat him, I felt like I could take over the world. The players also collect the soul of each boss to craft into an item (mostly weapons), that is a testimony of the challenge the player has overcome, the reward for their tears, sweat and blood. The design, as mentioned before, the higher the difficulty the better the reward, however, in this case, you were rewarded with a unique item but you weren't necessarily going to use it, so it wasn't about a better item but rather a unique item belonging to that fight experience.

Autonomy and Decisions

This one is extremely important, so pay close attention, fellow undead! Form Software designed the game to give players complete freedom, this ranges from their build, to killing NPCs, I mean come on, you can even kill the Fire Keeper, the only person that levels you up! There are consequences to the player's actions, for example the outcome of a quest (which you probably don't even know unless you look it up) according to your actions and at which specific times they were performed. You can choose to kill and NPC whom you don't trust, or you just like his shiny sword. Players like to feel autonomous and having choices, it makes them take the whole game as their own, but at their own risk. Oops! you killed the NPC that takes you to another level with exclusive loot? Going to have to wait for "new game +" or start over, it is clever yet unforgiving. Why even have this? In life you have to own up to your choices, here is the same, if you were to attack an NPC and get absolutely no reaction, then it feels unrealistic, your RPG should be designed to give the player a sense of realism when it comes to choices, and Dark Souls exceed at this (maybe a little too much). Remember, let the player play the game how they want to play it, and throw obstacles at them to overcome with their decisions.

Progression

Ah, the character creation screen, over 40 minutes on a character whose face you won't even see after 1 hour of gameplay, but most importantly, stats. In the character creation screen you're also allowed to choose the character class, which only refers to where the skill points will be spent upon creation, after that it's up to the player where they want to spend their skills points in. Let's say at first a player wants to use heavy weapons and invest in Strength, but then find a cool lance and now they aim to invest a bit in Dexterity to use it, but wait, now they want a chainmail armor so Vitality is up next. Their progression is altered by what they experience, which is definitely awesome game design to make a player change their minds after experience something in game. Of course, weapons and armor get better in both stats and aesthetics (as they should) and enemies become somewhat easier in previous areas to give the player a sense of progression. Now you've gone from a player with some okay clothes to some pretty cool equipment and moves so you can die in style! Now you've noticed a pattern, the game is rewarding you with better and better things as you progress, to keep you hooked on what's up next.

Best thing about the PvP in Dark Souls is that it doesn't take you out of your action, it adds it as a challenge. You can be walking normally and randomly get invaded by one (or more if you're unlucky) player, but it all happens seamlessly, you don't even see the invader(s) spawn, they just appear out of nowhere wanting your head. This is the time for player to test their skills at the game, when the player gets defeated by the invader then it's a "Oh that low life!" attitude, but if the player beats the invader then again they feel superior since they tested their gear and skills and the player was victorious. This feeds the psychological need of competition, to see if you're better than someone else at something. In this case the PvP design being invasion is an unexpected event, but flawlessly implemented since it adds to the player's action and doesn't stop it. Keep in mind, when designing a feature ask yourself if it adds to the player experience or if it affects it negatively, this will aid you in your game design.

Phew! So after this analysis we have covered the fundamentals behind the secret sauce in the Souls series. I hope you've learned from this and can apply what you have learned here and implement it in your own games!

Related Jobs

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Dark Souls Game Design Analysis: Why Do We Come Back To Die?

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The Souls series is one of the most punishing games to date. It's unforgiving, punishing, and brutal. But why do we keep coming back even after dying countless times? Join me in this in-depth game design analysis to find out.

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Skissa känslor, tankar m.m. i biosalongen under filmens gång

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Skissa känslor, tankar m.m. i biosalongen under filmens gång

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Avser att i viss mån "kopiera" effekten av Modeling Audience Reactions (se Teknik ovan) men på en nivå som är mer personlig. Att inkorporera detta i en potentiell app är en idé jag gillar men tillvägagångssättet med Factorized Variational Autoencoders utgör en stor integritetsrisk.

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Intervjuerna har varit spontana och korta med anledning av att de utförst utomhus, på språng

Aspekter av directed storytelling finns med i sista frågan men överlag tilläts intervjuobjekten att fritt berätta om sitt användande av filmappar och beskriva hur de kan tänka sig att nya funktioner hos en filmapp skulle kunna se ut.

Samtliga intervjuobjekt önskade vara anonyma. Intervjuerna utfördes på engelska och endast med besökare till filmfestivalen som slumpmässigt valdes ut baserat på deras intresse av att svara på frågor.

Märk väl att svaren är nedskrivna och därmed tolkade av mig. Följdfrågor beroende på svaren som gavs är också nedtecknade.

Frågor

1. Hur interagerar du med <filmappen du använder>?

2. Diskuterar du ofta din upplevelse av en film utöver tekniska aspekter (skådespeleri, regi, etc.) med vänner, bekanta, familj och/eller främlingar?

3. Om det fanns andra sätt för dig att interagera med en filmapp, hur skulle de sätten kunna se ut?

4. Hur påverkar film och diskussion om film dig rent känslomässigt (alternativ fråga som jag inte fordrade svar på då den kan uppfattas som för intim)

5. Här är ett förslag på ett gränssnitt hos en potentiell filmapp där man ”betygsätter” film med sina känslor (visar skiss). Har du som filmintresserad några tankar om de olika funktionerna eller om konceptet som helhet?

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Besök filmfestival och använd directed storytelling?

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Interaktion med en nyanserad uppsättning av funktioner och menyer (inspirerat av Dark Souls)

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Interaktion med filmrating-app direkt efter ett biobesök

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efter Bend/Break/Blend
minimala och subtila förändringar
förslag på gränssnitt & implementation av teknik