GAMES = TESTS
How do you evaluate a person’s abilities? For example, his attention span? It’s simple: give him the task of finding a typo in the text. The more attentive person, the faster he will cope with the task, the higher will be his score. Task → solution → grade. This is the way most tests are designed. Interestingly, all video games are structured exactly the same way.
Any game is a series of tasks. The success of their solution depends on the specific abilities. For example, the solution of the problem [to find the way out of the maze] depends on spatial thinking, and [to notice the enemy] on visual attention. In Overwatch and League of Legends, most tasks require quick reaction and coordination, while in Hearthstone and Clash Royale good memory and counting skills are more important. The better a player has the right abilities, the more successful he is. By capturing how a player solves individual tasks, games essentially collect data about his or her abilities, and sometimes character, values, and so on.
Video games are tests in disguise. Except that they are not very eloquent. Think about it: how often do games tell you directly how smart/intelligent/memory-aware you are? Usually they only give you indirect scores: post-match stats, rankings, “achievements”, points – they all tell you how successful you are, but tell you little about yourself. What’s the problem?
The problem is that the game speaks to us in the voice of the developers. And they themselves have little understanding of what abilities/qualities their game highlights, what the player’s results tell us. Unable to understand the data, they can’t write meaningful feedback either. So it turns out that games are silent. And only scientists are able to “talk” to them.
PORTAL 2 ASSESSES YOUR INTELLIGENCE
So, in 2016, scientists from the United States wondered if Portal 2 assesses a player’s fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the flexibility and speed of thinking, the ability to adapt to new situations. It is an intelligence that does not depend on knowledge (erudition). Researchers have suggested that Portal 2 might be an excellent test of fluid intelligence. In this game, clear elements and simple rules are combined into many original challenges. The player’s success depends entirely on the ability to look at a new problem from the right angle.
As in the original game, the player is tasked with finding a way out of the test chamber. Each subsequent room introduces a new challenge that the player hasn’t encountered before (e.g., not dying from bullets), or uses a new combination of elements (e.g., cubes + transport funnel). The difficulty grows from room to room. The player has only 5 minutes to solve each one. The tasks created for the test do not require good coordination (e.g., you don’t have to rearrange the portal during the fall). This is important because gamers usually have great coordination skills due to great experience. This test condition deprives gamers of an unfair advantage over non-players.
Scientists hypothesized that the more rooms a person solves, the higher his or her fluid intelligence. To test this, they invited 100 students. Half had experience playing video games, half had not. Each participant watched a short video about Portal 2. Then he or she would go through a couple of practice rooms. In these rooms, the participant became familiar with all the game elements of the test battery (bridges, turrets, panels, etc.). He then solved 15 rooms from the Portal 2 test battery and completed the classic fluid intelligence tests.
It turned out that the Portal 2 Battery does measure intelligence: A person’s score in the game predicts his score in the classic tests. What’s more, success on Portal 2 does not depend on whether a person has experience playing video games. An avid gamer or a novice, both solve rooms with the power of pure intelligence.
SCIENTISTS CREATE GAMES
Testing with video games is a promising and dainty topic. Scientists say that games can evaluate even better than scientific tests. The fact is that conventional tests are cumbersome and monotonous. For example, you are forced to spend almost an hour looking for synonyms or recalling sayings. Rarely can a person enjoy such a thing. Most people get bored, and the bored person is scattered, easily distracted, and thinks about his own things. He ends up making mistakes that he would not have made in his normal state. Is it then possible to speak of his “true abilities”?
On the contrary, when playing video games, a person willingly solves problems. In a game, complexity is the key to enjoyment. Working to the limit, a person is able to experience the happiness (“flow”) of playing a video game. Therefore, he seeks challenges and obstacles.
When a person plays, he/she is maximally concentrated and wants to achieve a result; he/she demonstrates what he/she is really capable of.
Understanding this, advanced scientists have taken up the development of video games themselves. In 2013, scientists from Florida created a game that assesses a person’s ability to orientate in space (VSNA). In it, the player has to search for gems in a three-dimensional environment. The faster a person finds a gem, the better. The game assesses a person’s abilities well: a person’s success in the game predicts his or her score in tests of spatial thinking and knowledge of mathematics. People in STEM professions (requiring strong spatial abilities: engineers, surgeons, mathematicians, financiers, chemists, etc.) significantly outperform the other participants in the game (linguists, educators, historians, etc.).
In 2008, Australian scientists have created a game Space Matrix. Here the players need to destroy enemy spaceships. From time to time combinations of dots appear at the bottom of the screen. The player’s task is to memorize them. Periodically the player is “contacted by the control center”, and then the last combination of dots must be called – this is information about the position of the ship in space. Space Matrix is good at assessing the general intelligence of the player, even better at assessing his working memory and speed of working with information.
The authors point out that in a dozen years video games may become the benchmark for testing. They will be able to measure not only intellectual abilities: in the future they will help to assess the personality, thinking style, the state of the player.
THE VIDEO GAMES OF THE FUTURE WILL HELP YOU GET TO KNOW YOURSELF BETTER
Any game can give an in-depth assessment of the player, we just need to learn how to collect and interpret this data. Science can help developers meet this challenge. For scientists, it is an opportunity to test hypotheses on millions of gamers. Developers, on the other hand, will be able to give gamers interesting feedback. Moreover, they will get a tool to fine-tune the game for the player. Real-time assessment of the gamer’s abilities and growing skills will make the game’s difficulty dynamic (no difficulty level selection in the menu). The game will be able to subtly catch the moment when the player gets desperate or bored. Depending on the current mood of the player can shuffle quests in RPG, change the style of communication and appearance of NPCs. All of this is an opportunity to give players a truly unique experience.
Rough attempts to do something like this have already been made. Instead of evaluating the player by the game itself, developers have tried to introduce common tests into the gameplay. Think at least of horror games that test a person to scare better – Silent Hill: Shattered Memories or Until Dawn. The developers offer the player to sit in on a “therapy” session and answer personal questions. In Silent Hill the answers have a veiled effect on the available locations, the behavior of the characters and the appearance of the monsters. The results of the “testing,” coupled with the manner in which the game is played (what the player looks at, what he responds to) determine the ending. It is also important that the portrait of the personality that is drawn can then be read. Until Dawn tries to follow in these footsteps, but is lazy: the therapist directly asks you what disgusting creature will jump out in your face behind the next door (video). That’s where it stops.
Things will change once scientists get really involved in game development. Imagine you’ve finished playing DooM or a series of matches in your favorite MOBA, and the game displays a score for your intelligence or mood. How would you feel about that? How would you feel about having your anonymized data stored on a server and transmitted to a research institute?