We just finished up one of our meetings for the Spencer EGGPLANT games research group, and it occurs to me it might be a good idea to start posting some notes online. Having feedback from various and sundry, including faculty who are away at conferences, might be useful, and we're developing categories and going through processes of revision which I think might be useful to other academics studying video games. Heaven knows it's freaking ridiculous how little of a common language we seem to have. So here's the first batch of notes; hopefully this will become a regular feature.

Thursday we had our first participant come in for the Grand Theft Auto study. The original idea was to have experienced players do talk-alouds about their goals and strategies as they worked their way from a designated save-state, but the trial run suggested this might be problematic, for the following reasons:

• The participant had a hard time talking aloud. Whether this was because of his age, the fact that he was an expert player whose knowledge of the game had become routinized and was no longer explicit, or simply that he's not that kind of player, was not clear.
• The save state proved to offer fewer options for different things to do within the game than we'd hoped. I think we need a save state with more money and cars in garages so players have more of a choice of what to do.
• Despite the fact that we keep saying we want to study the relation of motivations, goals, and strategies, we didn't bother to ask the participant explicitly what his goals were, and hence we didn't really find that out.
• Chuck has suggested strategy may change based on experience, not just motivation, which is quite likely and so obvious I can't believe I didn't think about it before. It looked as if this participant's strategy was shaped by his GTA experience -- playing at friends' houses, where I'm guessing he didn't have much time to poke around and see what was possible in the game. He was very mission-focused. We're going to have to take the experience factor into account -- I believe our next step will be to take data on someone who's never played the game before and compare it to experienced players.

The participant tended to not be able to say much about what he was doing when he was just driving around (though he had enough attention available at those points to talk about his strategies in general) leading Jess and I and Zhou to a little consideration today of what it is in a game there is to think and talk aloudabout. Jess began to categorize these as "challenges." At the time I was fixated on developing some more specific categories and brushed off this generalization, but in retrospect I think it's a good way of explaining what, overall, might be occupying a player's attention and figuring into their strategies. Here's some basic categories of challenges:

• Physical environment. Some parts of this require more attention than others -- a particularly hard leap in a platformer; a particularly difficult corner to steer around in GTA.
• Enemies. Spawning singularly or in groups.
• Plot points at which you are given more information about the story of the game and where you're supposed to go next.
• Items: deciding which to collect, in what quantity, how, and where.

One of the things we're figuring about GTA is it's not particularly challenge-dense if you're just playing through the missions. You go to a plot point, and then there's a lot of driving until you hit the next one -- that is, unless you are super concerned about the condition and make of your car, running down every/no pedestrian, avoiding the cops at all costs and keeping a low wanted level, and so forth. None of those things are really vital to finishing the main plotline of the game. I think we may eventually end up deciding we want to use a more challenge-dense game in order to get more data.

Anyway, what do you think, sirs?