A pre-study of the effect of challenge system on type A/B personalities in endless runner mobile game A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of University by Shihong Zhong In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Digital Media May 2015 1 ©Copyright2016 Shihong Zhong This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike license Version3.0. The license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. 1 2 Table of Contents LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………...3 LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………….4 ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………...5 1. INTRODUCTION ...…………………………………………………………………..6 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ...………………………………………………………….. 11 3. THE RESEARCH QUESTION ……………………………………………………….19 3.1. THE HYPOTHESIS ...……………………………………………………………….19 4. METHODOLOGY……………………………………………………………………..20 4.1. GAME DESIGN ……………………………………………………………………..20 4.2. STUDY SETUP ……………………………………………………………………...26 4.3. ETHICAL ISSUE …………………………………………………………………….31 4.4. LIMITATION ………………………………………………………………………...31 5. RESULT ………………………………………………………………………….…….33 6. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………...38 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………...41 APPENDIX A: TERMS …………………………………………………………………..43 APPENDIX B: THE A/B PERSONALITY TEST ……………………………………….45 APPENDIX C: EXTROVERSION TEST ………………………………………………..48 APPENDIX D: POST-QUESTIONNAIRE……………………………………………….51 2 3 LIST OF TABLES 5.1 The results of the A/B personality types and extroversion level of participants ……..34 5.2. The enjoyment levels of participants in the A/B personality test …………………….35 5.3 The enjoyment levels of participants in the extroversion test ………………………....36 3 4 LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 The Average Retention Rate of Endless Runner Mobile Games ……………………..7 2.1 The Examples of Well-Known Endless Runner Games ……………………………...12 4.1 The Title The Dungeon Thief ………………………………………………………....20 4.2 The terrains in The Dungeon Thief ………………………………....………………..21 4.3 Screenshots of Using Ghost Replay System ………………………………………….23 4.4 The Ghost Replay System in Mario Kart 64 ………………………………………….24 4.5 Unity Plugin Ghost Tool Pro ………………………………………………………….25 4.6 The Challenge System ………………………………………………………………..27 4 5 ABSTRACT A pre-study of the effect of challenge system on type A/B personalities in endless runner mobile game Shihong Zhong The research explores type A and B personality players and their preferences for competing with high score strangers or non-high score friends in an endless runner game in order to identify a potential method for increase player interactions. The retention rates of endless runner mobile games have been saturated since 2013. Game analysts think that this is a consequence of the lack of social interaction inherent to most endless runner games. To counter this saturation and increase retention, a modified challenge system should be instituted to facilitate interaction between players. However, there is insufficient research regarding player interactions in the context of mobile gaming. Therefore, the current study was conducted, incorporating the fields of PC and console gaming and psychology, focusing on a self- developed endless runner game to investigate player personalities and their preferences for competing with high score strangers or non-high score friends. The type A/B personality theory defined by Friedman and Jordan in the1950s was used to examine ten students from the same class who attend Drexel University. The study revealed that type A students initially liked to compete with strangers but switched competing with classmates after playing the game ten times in a row. Type B students like competing with classmates consistently during the duration of the study. The research found that personality affects player preferences with regard selecting competitors in the endless runner game. This finding offers one way to improve player interactions through the use of a challenge system to encourage players to interact with the preferred kinds of competitors based on their personalities. 5 6 Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION Mobile games have beat console and PC games to become the biggest market in 2016, boasting a 37% market share of the global market and 36.9 billion USD. Mobile games have achieved this populatiry because of the diversity of game genres, portability, and sociability. [7] In considering the history of mobile gaming, endless runner games have played an important role in increasing the number of mobile game players. Since 2011, Imangi’s Temple Run, the endless runner title, was introduced, effectively taking over the global mobile game market. Eventually, this endless runner became one of the most popular genres in mobile gaming. For example, Temple Run covered 11% of the entire mobile game market in Android smartphones, which means one of every ten smartphone users has downloaded Temple Run in 2011. [3] It seems that endless runner mobile gaming has become the rising star of the gaming industry. However, the situation may not last much longer. There have been thousands of endless runner games released since 2011; the market tended toward saturation in 2013. According to a report by Google, the download ranks of endless runner games for Android phones significantly dropped in 2014. Notably, Imangi’s Temple Run 2, dropped its download rate from 11% in January to 6.4% in June.[18] A look through the average retention rate of endless runner games in 2014 reveals that the entire performance of the market was not going well. The trend shows that the retention rate gets lower and lower every season. The next-day retention rate is on average 27.7%, which means 72.3% of players never play the game again in the following days. After 7 days and 30 days, the retention rates are only 10% and 3.7%, respectively (see Figure 1.1).[18] Low retention could mean that fewer players have been playing their games continuously, resulting in profit loss. 6 7 Figure 1.1: The Average Retention Rate of Endless Runner Mobile Games What this suggests is that the games become less fun to players. Since most endless runner games share common game mechanics, many published games use similar frameworks and control methods. Zynga’s Looney Tunes Dash, Simutronics’ One Epic Knight, and Marvel’s Marvel Run Jump Smash and Kiloo’s Subway Surfer were all 3D third-person endless runner games but with different art assets. The nature of this genre limits the creativity and innovation of these games. Ultimately, the games were no longer attractive to the players, and player retention decreased. More problematically most mobile games, like Temple Run and Subway Surfer, have weak or limited opportunities regarding social interaction. They only allow players to share and compare their scores on Facebook with no other interaction between other players, which contributes to player boredom.[9] The future of endless runner games is currently not optimistic. Consequently, mobile game designers must solve the problem of how to maintain player engagement and therefore increase player retention. Without a solution, this gaming genre will continue to decline. Game analysts suggested that social interaction was the critical element needed to increase player enjoyment and therefore retention. Intuitively, enjoyment can be obtained from social interaction because people gain more inherent fun from being with other people. [10] Subsequently, endless runner games 7 8 attempted to add social features to enhance interactions among players and hoped to increase player enjoyment (and consequently retention). The added element that these games included to facilitate interaction is known as the challenge system, which is a competitiveness enhancer. It allows players to compete with other players across the Internet by challenging their scores, with the aim of boosting player enjoyment. The challenge systems have two main purposes, namely to facilitate socializing and competition. Socialized challenge systems cause players to care less about the score and more about interacting with friends and potential competitors. For example, Gameloft’s Minion Rush allowed players to search for nearby friends and encouraged them to battle with each other. It was a local-focused challenge system. In contrast, competitive challenge systems focuse more on score battling. In NetEase’s Tom and Jerry, players used the challenge system to compete against scores on the global leaderboard and to climb the ladder with ever-increasing scores. Tencent’s Wechat Dash focused on global competing. Its challenge system matched random strangers globally to form each round of competition. The challenge system has proven to provide benefits when compared to other endless runner games without the challenge system. In 2014, Wechat Dash and Minion Rush had a higher retention rate than Temple Run 2 and Subway Surfer, neither of which featured a challenge system. This data certifies that through the use of a challenge system social interaction between players is enabled which in turn strengthens player enjoyment in endless runner games, with the potential to boost retention rates. [18] Nonetheless, the increase in retention rates provided by the challenge system was not significant enough to generate above-average retention rates in the entire mobile game market. The trend line of endless runner games was still performing poorly compared to their initial success and other genres of mobile games. Although the challenge system gave the mobile game designers new hope, the existing literature studying