playcentric

My entry to another game design challenge from Game Career Guide:

http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/569/gamecareerguidecoms_game_design_.php

This time the idea is to design a game that makes the player believe she has psychic powers! (Cool idea, hard to come up with ideas for). You’re supposed to take advantage of the fact that people often perceive patterns in random data, and have a poor understanding of probability, but since I couldn’t really come up with anything along these lines I took a slightly different twist. Here’s my entry

Since my background is much stronger in psychology than in mathematics I decided to go in a slightly different direction than suggested. My game would present the player with a village asking him/her to act as their witchdoctor – their crops have been bad in the past couple of years, all of their pet guinea pigs have run off, and they need someone to turn their luck around. Before the player can do this however, she needs to prove that she can read people’s minds (clearly the most important factor in becoming a witch doctor!) 10 villagers would line up in front of the player, each thinking of a number between 1 and 10 with no repeats (meaning exactly one villager is thinking of the number 1, exactly one villager is thinking of the number 2, etc.) The player can then pick any villager and, after reading a short text blurb (either about the villager or something the villager is saying), guess what number the villager is thinking of. This text blurb is key, because that is where we would employ a psychological concept called priming, described by Wikipedia as “an experimental technique by which a stimulus is used to sensitize the subject to a later presentation of the same or similar stimulus.” An example of this is if someone reads the word “table” in a list of words, and is later prompted to complete a complete a word that starts with “tab..”, that person is more likely than they otherwise would have been to answer that with “table”. This type of priming, along with others, could be used in the text blurb and possibly the image presented to the user before they are asked to guess what number the villager is thinking of. For example, if that particular villager is thinking of the number six, the villagers name could be Sibyl, could use a few words starting with “si” when talking to the player, and she could be carrying a basket of eggs (since eggs usually come in multiples of 6 this could further trigger the player into thinking six.) Clearly this type of thing would need a lot of user testing to make sure that the priming is working! If it’s done effectively enough and subtle enough so that the player doesn’t notice, perhaps the player could be led to believe they do in fact have ESP and are qualified to become a witch doctor!