Predicting Player Perception of a Room’ s Purpose Through Context Complexity
Ian RODRIGUEZ
Level Design
Predicting Player Perception of a Room’ s Purpose Through Context Complexity
Every day, humans passively understand their surroundings by matching the world around them with mental representations. When someone walks into a room for the first time, they obtain information through stimulus such as sight, compare that information against their collection of previous exposures, and finally make a judgement on what they believe the function of that space to be. While this cognitive process has been the subject of many studies in the past, research on the amount of data needed to understand a space has yet to be explored.
The purpose of this research project was to discover and quantify the minimum amount of contextual information needed for a player to accurately understand an interior room’ s fictional purpose.
I created a level in Starfield that requires the player to rescue nine hostages aboard a space station, each of which is in their own individual room. Hostage rooms were designed with varying levels of appropriateness: the wall texture, room scale, and number of appropriate objects differed. I then recruited 13 playtesters to play the level and complete a postsurvey, which asked them to identify the purpose of each of these rooms. I then concluded what the minimum amount of information needed was.
Using this arithmetic approach to world design, as well as its findings, designers and environment artists can create more believable spaces with minimal effort.
60 LEVEL DESIGN