In adaptive gaming, game plays you!

I read an article in New Scientist last week about adaptive gaming - a technology that allows the game to figure out what kind player you are, and adapt the game play to be more fun for you. So if you, for instance, love killing zombies, but hate timed puzzles, the game figures this out based on your fail rates and give you more zombies and less timed puzzles.

An excerpt:

To investigate the idea, the researchers altered the game Super Mario Bros, varying parameters such as the number and type of enemies and the size of gaps between platforms in response to how the players fared. The game also records a player's moves, including how often they run and jump, and the time spent standing still.

...

Some early results appear obvious. "If you die by falling too often down gaps that is indicative of frustration," says Yannakakis. However, the approach goes beyond "common sense" associations to uncover those that are not so readily apparent, he says. In Super Mario Bros, for example, hitting bricks to release coins or stomping turtle shells and throwing them - activities not necessary to accomplish the overall goal - positively correlate with a fun experience, Togelius says.

While Super Mario Bros is an awesome game and a classic, it's not exactly Bioshock or Fallout 3. In a way, games like Fallout 3 have already been doing this for years, by letting you play the game the way you want. You like blowing shit up? Up your explosives skill and blow some shit up. You like puzzles? Up your security skill and start hacking. Even whole levels can change based on your actions, like in Fable 2, but the game never takes into consideration what you think is more fun. If it did, would the game be as good?

Or maybe the more important question is, how could this technology be used to make games (and maybe other things) better? Letting people who avoid challenges keep avoiding challenges doesn't help them, and it definitely doesn't keep them interested for long. The main benefit seems to be in keeping people who suck at games from getting frustrated and quitting. More easy stuff might equal more sales within a certain market segment, but would it make for a more enriching and memorable user experience? I don't think so.

The only way this technology benefits the user is if it finds out what she enjoys, then makes that aspect of the game progressively harder. Then she ends up being really good at something she likes doing. The applications go well beyond games.

Update: You can play the experimental Super Mario Bros game yourself here. Thanks to Fast Company for digging up the link!

WTF FTW (Why absurdity is good for you.)

Why was this ad so effective? Taken significantly farther, why do we have insanity like every freaking Skittles commercial floating around? Do we just love being fucked with or do disconnections actually make stronger connections? And how can those of us who love Skittles commercials justify our ideas that even we know make no fucking sense to the people who need to make a flowchart just to get a latte?

The New York Times weighed in yesterday with an article titled "How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect". Here's an excerpt:

In the most recent paper, published last month, Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.

After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.

The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.

But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.

“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Here's how I understood it: evolution has given us a handy mechanism for dealing with shit we don't understand, by distracting us with a sudden understanding of other things. Basically:

Life: "Hey, here's a purple squirrelephant eating popsicles on the bus."

You: "Wait a second..."

Your Brain: "Hey look! There seem to be more white cars on the road these days than any other color! It's probably because the we're all so sick of the clutter of the modern world, that we enjoy the peaceful retreat of a clean white surface. ...Cars. White. ...Yeah ok you can go back to whatever you were doing now."

The distraction keeps you from going insane, and as an extra benefit you've made a new observation about the world that you can now contribute to the global knowledge base via Twitter.

So the next time you need to explain to the client why one of these is a good idea, refer them to my General Theory of WTF: The less sense something makes, the more your brain looks for things that do make sense. The more you find things that do make sense, the smarter you feel. The smarter an ad makes you feel, the more positive associations you have with that brand, and positive associations = brand loyalty = $$$$. Convoluted? Yes. But that's evolution for you, baby.

Why advertising and video games are the perfect filler for this rad Venn diagram I made

Video games are awesome. We love video games. We'll play video games all weekend until we stink and there's crumbs everywhere. But what do video games really do for us? Or for the world? Or for abandoned kittens in Somalia? Mostly jack. Sorry video games. I'll admit my thumb-eye coordination rocks now, but I've gained 5 pounds since I bought Fallout 3 so it evens out.

Advertising, however, is universally hated. No one likes ads. Especially the ones they play during your online videos that are 40 million times louder than the show but only last 20 seconds and can't be paused so you just have to mute them and sit tight until Star Trek is back on so you can then pause and go to the bathroom. God those guys are idiots. And yeah, I watch Star Trek on YouTube. Gene Roddenberry didn't see that one coming! Ha. Anyway. Advertising sucks except for one instance: when it actually makes you do something. Laugh, think, buy Clorox, stop driving with a 40 hangin out the window, or donate five bucks to homeless penguins. In those cases, we love advertising. (And by "we" I mean you, me, penguins, the State of California and/or the suits cashing in on your new bleach purchase. Let's not limit ourselves.)

If you're starting to think these two industries sound like perfect compliments and that I must be retarded for suggesting that this is anything new because there's like 400 companies who are already making hybrid ad-game thingies, then hold your horses. Good job keeping up with the latest ad-game-lovechild news though. This blog is about one thing and one thing only. These three things:
One-way advertising is dead. If you think the "New and Improved!" lint shaver in the ad someone left on the seat next to you on the BART train seems one-way, it's not. Even at 3am in a tunnel somewhere underneath Market Street, you can look up that lint shaver and find out if it really is new and improved, if it's made using child labor, if it's available used for half the price, and what kind of warranty it comes with, just in case the 57 guys who gave it a four-star review were wrong. If you're making ads and not taking that into account, I genuinely hope you've been in a coma since about 2000, because otherwise I don't want you tarnishing my blog with your wrinkly, beady eyes. Everything is now interactive, which is good because interaction gets consumers more involved, more loyal, more connected with each other, and gives them the chance to contribute their own suggestions and ideas - which, by the way, don't always suck. Interaction is awesome. But it's hard to swing it your way, because you have to make your message worth it for people to bother spending time with.

The ultimate masters of getting people to spend time doing shit are, by the way, video game makers. Just ask my flab.

So hey ad people, hey video game people: we have a lot to learn to from each other. Especially if we wanna have jobs in five years.

And that's why you should subscribe to this blog.