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.