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Understanding the Player-Game Relationship through Challenges and Cognitive & Motor Abilities. Jacques Carette Sasha Soraine McMaster University McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Hamilton, Ontario, Canada [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT to better tailor the gameplay to the abilities of the player. Our We explore the relationship between a player’s cognitive and short-term goals for exploring this relationships are to: motor abilities, and the abilities necessary for completing spe- 1. explore novel motor experiences in games, and cific challenges. Existing engineering-focused work does not treat the player on the same footing as the game. We view 2. have a method to formally discuss and categorize game- (the mechanical part of) games as a system of systems com- play. posed of the game mechanics (including challenges), and the player via their cognitive and motor abilities. In particular, we would like to create new challenges based on under-exploited abilities. In particular, we incorporate a player model in the definition of what makes challenges the same. This allows us to define Our aim is to systematically describe the (mechanical) player- a typology of challenges and of abilities specific to games. game relationship; however, such a discussion of design Our motivation is to better understand the relation of abili- choices requires a lot of space — similar work required over ties to the mechanical parts of players’ game experiences, and 300 pages to communicate their ideas [59]. Thus we present thence to better craft them. For space reasons, we focus on a a representative part of our work. At a high level, we will subset of challenges and abilities. present: the game, through the lens of gameplay challenges; the player, through their cognitive and motor abilities; and the CCS Concepts relationships between them, as necessary to complete chal- •Applied computing ! Computer games; •Human- lenges (ability configurations). centered computing ! User models; Interaction design the- We view our work as engineering-focused. Our contribu- ory, concepts and paradigms; Interaction devices; tions are: 1) a clear definition of what makes challenges “the same”, 2) a framework to understand challenges via play- Author Keywords ers’ motor and cognitive abilities, 3) worked examples of Gameplay challenges; player model; cognitive abilites; analysing challenges and game-specific player abilities, and motor abilites; player-game relationship; competency 4) the idea of a limiting ability for completion of a challenge. profiles; ability configurations This work is ongoing, but the focus on particular challenges means that our presentation is self-contained. Furthermore, INTRODUCTION our extended work has not (yet) needed ideas beyond those Game design is both an artistic and engineering endeavour. contributed here. From an engineering perspective, we are looking to create more mechanically meaningful games – where the mechani- RELATED WORK cal gameplay experience is interesting for the target audience. Player-Game Relationship Our thesis is that to better engineer a mechanically meaning- Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we believe the ful game, we need a model that describes both the game and player-game relationship can be viewed at a set of tiers that the player, and their relationship. That specific tasks can be build upon each other, with sociological approaches (either characterized by the set of abilities needed to complete it, is psychographic (i.e. personality) or behavioural [21]) at the called a competency profile [1]. To the best of our knowledge top, and lower-level mechanistic approaches at the bottom. this has never been applied to games. Our long-term goal is Over the long-term, finding theories at different levels that are coherent with each other would be beneficial. We are inter- Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different ested in the lowest level, considering the ability configuration copyright statements: of challenges as mechanistically descriptive. • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical ap- proach. Adaptive gaming studies the player-game relationship to • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication create immersive game experiences through maximizing license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The addi- flow [12, 8] or GameFlow [63]. The popular perspective here tional fee must be paid to ACM. is behavioural modeling (top-level in our hierarchy). While This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. quite useful in understanding how players “play” and how Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. the high-level experience is crafted, we believe that a “low Karhulahti [67] defines challenges as a goal with an uncertain level” model is better to explore the ability configuration of outcome (which he borrows from Malone [36]). He proposes challenges. two main types: kinesthetic — where the “required nontriv- ial effort is at least partly psycho-motor”; and non-kinesthetic Model Human Proces- Drawing inspiration from Card et al’s — where the “required nontrivial effort is entirely cognitive”. sor [7], we look for a model which considers players as a set Gameplay challenges (e.g. completing a test room in Portal) of interconnected subsystems, each defined by a set of abili- are composed of a non-kinesthetic challenge (mentally solv- ties, that are taxed in completing tasks. We examine this rela- ing it) and a kinesthetic challenge (executing that solution). tionship at its lowest level (between individual player abilities Though we agree that gameplay challenges may involve both and an atomic unit of gameplay). This allows us to understand types of components, this division is not fine enough. the cognitive and motor sources of difficulty and experience. Björk and Holopainen outline a framework to describe and Zhu et al. [69] explore the player-game relation through the analyse games, as well as a set of tools called patterns which lens of difficulty by examining performance probability dis- are “semiformal interdependent descriptions of commonly re- tributions of different “game events” — essentially a type of curring parts of the design of a game that concerns game- competency profile. Abstracting difficulty this way allows play” [5]. These patterns are meant to be functional build- them to compare “game events” between games. Though per- ing blocks in game design, and so include elements that can formance distributions assists with comparing and describing define challenges (e.g. goals, actions, obstacles). Though challenge difficulty, it doesn’t identify its source. They fur- one can combine patterns to create a list of “challenges”, ther note that having a more robust player model would help these do not distinguish between instances that use the same — though it would complicate event comparison, as different motor/cognitive components but with different importance. sources of difficulty may still produce the same distribution. Though a fitting description of the mechanics of gameplay, We have the same goals, but wish to address those issues. it fails to capture the player’s experience. Factors such as We take a similar approach, based on challenges and player 2D vs 3D, camera perspective, pacing, etc, influence how the abilities, and their relation mediated by the physicaly inter- player will approach scenarios (e.g. guarding a character you actions looking at this relationship through the physical inter- can/cannot control), and thus the cognitive abilities used. actions between the player and the game. We seek to deter- Djaouti et al created a tool for classifying and analysing source of difficulty mine the principal . By working with in- gameplay mechanics called “bricks” [13]. They identified teractions at the level of abilities rather than actions, we can three types of bricks: play, game, and meta. Play bricks limit- identify when the motor or cognitive component is the (manage, random, shoot, write, move, and select) are the (in- ing factor in challenge completion. Furthermore we can see game) actions that a player can take. Game bricks (destroy, whether one particular ability determines success, or whether match, avoid, and create) are the goals of the game. Play other abilities can be used to improve challenge completion. bricks and game bricks combine to form meta-bricks, which describe families of challenges; e.g. the “DRIVER” meta- Challenges brick, which combines the “MOVE” and “AVOID” bricks. We found six frameworks for analysing gameplay and cate- This tool is limited by the scope of games used to create it; gorizing challenges [2, 5, 13, 15, 67, 37]. Unfortunately, we they analysed 588 single player “arcade” or “casual” com- found no agreed upon definition for a challenge. By synthe- puter games. The types of challenges encountered in those sizing elements of several definitions, we offer: kinds of games don’t cover the scope of possible challenges Definition 2.1. A challenge is an in-game activity with a suc- that we want. cess condition which engages the player in a way that re- quires some level of proficiency in at least one dimension Feil and Scattergood explain challenges as defined by “ob- (cognitive or physical). jectives, and the barriers that prevent players from achieving [them]” [15], identifying six standard challenges: time, dex- The success condition can be defined by the game or the terity, endurance, memory/knowledge, cleverness/logic, and player. resource control. Though these challenges incorporate an ele- ment of the player’s experience into their definitions, they are We believe that a good challenge description must include: too broad to be meaningful; they defined dexterity challenges • the in-game mechanics associated to the challenge, as “some sort of feat that requires dexterity”. Furthermore they use the term challenge rather liberally — explaining that • the mechanism of interaction between the player and the certain genres put more emphasis on combat, movement, or game (i.e.

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