What Your Archmage Build Says About You

[Danceofmasks]

Duh Bioware, because .. PC players tend to be older than twelve.

Also, smart games aren't a new thing.

The most obvious are stuff like some really old Super Robot Taisen games adjusting difficulty levels between missions depending on how well you were doing.

Less obvious are the really obtuse formulae in games such as Romancing SaGa series, where the learning of new tech moves proc'ed less frequently if you're relatively high level compared to your enemies.
Meaning, if you're the type of player that likes to do quests while the fights are balls to the wall hard, you'll end up having more complicated moves and combos at your disposal, whilst people who grinds so that their characters are overpowered can win with their basic attacks anyway.

 

[Therumancer]

I think this is kind of meaningless. The study determined very little because from the way it sounds the people involved knew they were paticipating in a personality test and gaming experiment. When people know this kind of thing they tend to act based on the kind of person they want other people to see them as, rather than how they actually are. Knowing that the questions and games were connected your going to see people trying to remain consistant even if they don't consciously realize it.

Most meaningful psychological tests of this sort need to be conducted blind, with people not knowing they are being tested, the nature of the experiment, or the connections between what they are doing. This can raise all kinds of legal questions, but typically when this kind of thing is done they collect volunteers without any indication of the experiment or nature of the data, or have them told that the experiment is about something else entirely, perhaps with other things that are irrelevent to the test thrown in. Say for example having the people do push ups, sit ups, block puzzles, play asteroids, and then somewhere in this work in the game that actually matters. Likewise the personality test might be disguised as something else like an academic or aptitude test.

That said I'll also say that I'm less than enthusiastic about the nature of this experiment overall. Why you might ask? Well I think that by creating games that adapt to the player in this sense, rather than forcing the player to adapt to the gme, the medium is being cheapened and the games are not increasing the abillities of the player. A game that say becomes easier for an unskilled player is not causing that player to continously improve and develop skills. Gaming might be an entertainment medium, but it has the potential for so much more, and by thinking the way the industry is in using this research I think it's actually a bad thing for the medium as a whole, even if it's good for their bottom line, at least in the short term.

I'll also admit that I have mixed opinions about games that form personality profiles on the people playing them for other reasons as well. I think right now private industry has gotten way too intrusive. Once games start doing this, your going to start seeing the gaming industry collecting that data to use it to advertise and sell better games, and we already have enough problems with the ad industry as it is. Simply put I'm already irked with the gaming industry getting into your system and the goverment(s) not acting to regulate intrusive DRM, the last thing we need is for the gaming industry to start getting into our heads that way too... very little good can come from that. I don't mind the idea of VR/Neutral Interface technology, but not with private industry making products that psychologically profile their users, that kind of thing has already gone too far.

 

[walrusaurus]

Maybe it's because you can be blocked off from Miranda's mission, but not Grunt's, and PC gamers can quicksave and restore on the fly, making it easier to avoid being closed off?

Well Miranda was kind of a *****. I did all the side missions because the game kept hinting that there would be consequences if i didn't. But if enjoyed Miranda's and Jacobs the least, and would not have done them otherwise. Tali's was my favorite, i actually decided to make her my love interest after doing it (sorry liara).

I'm definitely going over the time i spent playing NWN in my mind after reading this.

 

[uzo]

snipp snippy

Yeah, pretty much there. As far as research goes, you don't tell the mouse he's in a maze, because it will have a effect on the outcome of the research. It could be the authors of this article decided not to bore us with the distractions and control groups etc that were used, however.

 

[The Random One]

I dunno. I talk to everyone for the same reason I look up every nook and crane (I'm insane). Then again his research probably includes that as well.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

I did Miranda's loyalty mission because that's how you're supposed to play the damn game. If there was an option to kick that unlikable skank out the airlock, I would have taken it. But there wasn't. That seems to be a flaw of this study, gamers know its a game, and it won't necessarily be accurate.

 

[rapidoud]

There's people that didn't do all the loyalty missions?

Jeez...

First I did was... Jack I think, I just knocked them all off as soon as I got them so I could do Legion's straight away.

Oh and the average age of PC gamers and console gamers is a huge myth, for anyone not participating in the sarcastic elitism of the "mature" gamers.

 

[vxicepickxv]

Maybe it's because you can be blocked off from Miranda's mission, but not Grunt's, and PC gamers can quicksave and restore on the fly, making it easier to avoid being closed off?

Well Miranda was kind of a *****. I did all the side missions because the game kept hinting that there would be consequences if i didn't. But if enjoyed Miranda's and Jacobs the least, and would not have done them otherwise. Tali's was my favorite, i actually decided to make her my love interest after doing it (sorry liara).

I thought Grunt's was actually the worst, followed by Thane. Jacobs was in the lower half, Miranda's was actually in the top half, but not above Tali and Kasumi's was my favorite.

 

[Scars Unseen]

This, combined with someone mastering procedurally generated content and graphics, could make for a pretty amazing game that changes according to how it is played. Would I want all games to be made like that? Probably not, but it would still be an iteresting diversion from the typical AAA game format.

 

[walrusaurus]

Maybe it's because you can be blocked off from Miranda's mission, but not Grunt's, and PC gamers can quicksave and restore on the fly, making it easier to avoid being closed off?

Well Miranda was kind of a *****. I did all the side missions because the game kept hinting that there would be consequences if i didn't. But if enjoyed Miranda's and Jacobs the least, and would not have done them otherwise. Tali's was my favorite, i actually decided to make her my love interest after doing it (sorry liara).

I thought Grunt's was actually the worst, followed by Thane. Jacobs was in the lower half, Miranda's was actually in the top half, but not above Tali and Kasumi's was my favorite.

Ya grunts was pretty lame, but it gets a pass for giving us some first hand experience of Krogan culture. And, whats his face, the solarian scientist's mission was on tuchanka too, and his was awesome. I don't remember a character named Kasumi at all... who is that.

 

[Littaly]

That's actually pretty damn interesting.

It reminds me of back when Mass Effect 2 was released. We were a couple of guys in my class who were pretty big Bioware fans, and every once in a while when we were hanging out the conversation would steer in on either Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Nobody really said anything out loud about it, but I always noticed there was a clear difference in how we perceived the morality system. Some of us thought that the paragon options were the sensible ones and that renegade was over the top evil, while others thought that the renegade options were the natural way to go, while the paragon were good guy caricatures. I had this half-joking theory that you could tell what type of a person you were speaking with depending on if they went paragon or renegade Shepard on their first play through.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

This is one of the most interesting articles I've read to date. This is, to me, the future of gaming as more than just an entertainment tool. There is a lot to learn about ourselves and the people around us through how we play games. Although some games, such as the GTA or Saints Row series, should probably be left out of metric data acquisitions because they may not accurately reflect people's personality traits. Remember escapism is just that, a way to become something we're not for a time and experience a world by different rules we set. Even if those worlds have strict rules we still form our own way of trudging through them.
I wonder though if this can lead to negative blowback from sources against gaming if the metric were applied the wrong way. If there's anything I've learned from the social sciences (or any science for that matter) is that people can skew data to support their hypothesis and that does happen on a regular (if perhaps minor) basis.

 

[llyrnion]

Picture this: You're playing the next Deus Ex game. You're taking the stealth approach a lot, and the game notices this. In fact, over the first hour or two of the game, it's built up a profile of what kind of gamer you are. Now it's got enough information to confidently redesign the game to be better for you - it invents new upgrades for you to purchase that are specifically catered to stealth players. It rewrites later missions to have more hidden entrances. Not only that, but it makes the game more interesting - increasing the frequency of alarm panels and making guards more alert. You and every other gamer on the planet play the same game at heart, but the finer details are tweaked to better suit you.

I believe this could be a Good Thing(TM). However, it'll only work if the devs/publishers have the will/resources/whatever to actually implement player choice, which is something literally absent these days.

Some of these choices could already be done today - imagine an action/adventure RPG - some action, some mistery solving, some stealth... a little bit of everything, actually.

Wanna play Realistic? Fine, no quest tracking on map, you've got to hunt down good ole Erik Questgiver when you need to talk with him, and he may be anywhere (in his action area) during the day, and you better not go waking him up at 3 am. Yes, you can actually ask other NPCs if they've seen Erik, and they might give you indications. You better have lots of spare time, because you're going to need it.

Wanna play Adventure, and not too keen on combat? No dynamic combat for you, then. Generally speaking, combat will be easy. After all, you're playing for the story. The game will warn you when you're about to embark on a combat-heavy quest with little story relevance. Some game objectives will have to be reached by problem-solving quests, rather than combat quests.

Wanna play Action? Not only will you have dynamic combat (activate powerups or QTEs), but you'll also have these helpful little arrows on the map telling you where to go, and NPCs will stay put in one place for you to talk to them, at any hour. Let's get the story out of your way, because you just want to kick some derriere.

As interesting as this research may be, it's not lack of knowledge/tech that's holding back more diverse player choice.

 

[JMeganSnow]

As interesting as this research may be, it's not lack of knowledge/tech that's holding back more diverse player choice.

Indeed. Why can't they just put the "tailored" stuff in the game in the first place and then let you choose how you want to play it? What if you want to change halfway through? Are you going to wind up railroaded because the AI decided you're a "stealth player"--even though you were primarily stealthing because your initial weapon selection for the class you chose was crap, and once you get the good weapons you want to blaze everything down in a marvelous spree of death?

And think of how BUGGY this would be. It's quite likely that an AI programmed to be "concerned" with making the game harder would ruin the game for people who like to master challenges instead of being constantly overwhelmed with ever-more-finicky gameplay.

This has all the earmarks of being a bad gimmick and not a worthwhile growth area.

 

[poleboy]

I'd prefer not to be psycho-analyzed by a machine with the intellectual capacity and empathty of a wet towel. Thank you.

 

[Tragedy's Rebellion]

This is kind of redundant, it's obvious we make our choices according to our personalities be it which book to read, which game to play, which movie to watch, interacting with other people and playing a game that simulates interaction with other people. I just don't see why this wasn't already clear and PRETTY OBVIOUS before this study. (Unless you consciously force yourself to make opposite choices which is just weird on a first playthrough)

Maybe I am missing the point of this article and the *revolutionary* idea to make games change based on our personalities is the main topic. I don't think games need extra baggage and development time or even worse - no extra development time, considering the already abysmal time needed to play to the end of an AAA title. I feel it will also bring wonky difficulty curves and artificial limiting of the experience. I say make games the way you (the developers) want and try to deliver a good, compelling game instead of trying and failing to cater to everyone. "The fastest path to failure is trying to please everybody"

 

[RanceJustice]

This is of course vulnerable to many of the same flaws as any sociology/"soft" science in that it is all interpreted through a paradigm that is likely not nearly as a unerringly rock solid as those in said field like to think. It wasn't that long ago that homosexuality was listed as a "deviance" not at all unlike other forms of psychopathy and people put a lot of time and energy into trying to understand what environmental and personality factors caused that "deviant behavior". Likewise, there were tons of sociological studies that "proved" the superiority of "Caucasoid" elements over "Mongoloid" and "Negroid", which led to a lot of the popular eugenics themes that were championed in the first half of the last century - seen at the time as inscrutable investigation. I mention this just because sociology and psychology are so variable and seen through the declarations of the predominant trends of the era that they can follow scientific method, but still end up being completely wrong.

That said I'm not immediately against adaptability in games and the work detailed in this article, but in our current climate where we are constantly profiled as it is, I worry that advancements innocently thought to make a better game will be used for the purposes of greed. The game detects that the player is highly suggestible and "weak willed", it launches more ads to buy Zynga currency and invite friends, because there's a greater likelihood that the person will capitulate and buy just to get it to go away, compared to a different users who would get frustrated and close the game instead.

The vast majority of psycho-sociological research today is being bankrolled by those with motives to simply make more money. We're constantly being scanned, evaluated and profiled in everything we do, online and even in real life, by businesses and institutions (see: Jury consultants) that want something from us - often money - that likely has little to do with our well being. I'd like my time in gaming to be a respite from that reality. The more this technology shows up in games means the more that various ad companies are going to be looking to buy the player analysis and knowing how wonderfully the industry has protected us in the past when there is a buck to be made (that is not at all), I expect that every little bit of data will be sold to the highest bidder and used by publishers for better "monetization".

The longer we can keep this out of gaming, the better. Someone wants to put an old school variable difficulty curve in game that's fine, but all this correlating and saving data, making often spurious and incorrect conclusions for profit needs to be held back as long as possible.

 

[CleverCover]

Hold on Bioware, what about the people who never skipped any missions on the 360? And I'm just as interested in the bloodbaths as I am in the tear-jerking parts.

I didn't know people would skip loyalty missions. It's just not...unless you planned to off them from the beginning...but still.

OT: The premise has an interesting idea, but I think someone said it already that it has the premise to become messed up really quickly. If I wanted to play one way in the beginning and switch later on with another method, does the game only give me certain items so I have to keep playing with that one method?

It could make a fun game and make it really boring...