Final Update

Over Christmas I have been getting a variety of family and friends to play through my environment and I've been watching all of their responses to each of the decisions and tallying up doors people went for. The way I went about these play tests was i took each participant and placed them into a quiet room with just me and them and I told them that it was left click to interact with objects such as doors. When they came to the decision doorways (choosing light or dark) they can only choose to go through one doorway for the purposes of the test. I also added a small mini game to the start of the environment where players have to find a key card to open the doors which lead onto the decision doorways. This was to help immerse the player into the environment and try and get them to feel like they are playing a fully fleshed out game.

I managed to gather 20 people to play through my game from a wide range of ages groups the oldest being my parents (50's) and the youngest being my sister (7), everyone has some gaming experience whether it be table top games or video games but everyone understood what they had to do as all that was involved was clicking.

Light or Dark

For this decision players seemed to go more for the dark doorway with 17 of the 20 players going through the dark doorway. This decision I kind of expected because a lot of people when playing games will always be curious and go for the darker doorway because they think something may be hidden in the dark or that they feel like they are missing out on something. When I asked players at the end why they chose the dark door a lot of the responses were similar, most players wanted to see what was in the dark, they felt like the dark side was more intriguing than the light door which was the same as everything else they had seen so far in the play through.

Green or Red

Next was the green or red door choice, now this one was a bit of a split decision with 12 of the players choosing red and 8 choosing green. These results for me were different to what I was thinking because I assumed most people would go for green as green is often associated safety and being able to go at green (street lights). I asked the players who chose red why they decided on red rather than green and a lot of people said that they felt like there was some form of danger behind the red door which they wanted to explore and find out if there was. The interesting point with this test was that the majority of people who chose red were younger and the majority of people who chose green were older. I think this could be because the younger testers were used to red being associated with danger in games which is why they decided on red because they wanted a challenge or an enemy to show up.

Dynamic (flickering light) or Regular Light

The next choice was a doorway where the light is flickering above it or a doorway with a regular light above it, the majority of players chose the flickering light with 16 people going for the flickering light doorway. I assumed players would choose the dynamic light doorway for the decision because curiosity is in everyone and especially in games where there is no actual danger people tend to explore their curiosity's. When i asked people why they chose the dynamic light nearly everyone told me that they just wanted to see what was behind the door again because they were curious and they thought there was something interesting behind the door. An interesting point to note is that the few people who chose the regular lit doorway said they chose this because they felt the flickering doorway was scarier and that they felt like there could be danger behind.

Light coming under doorway or completely dark doorway

Finally the players had to choose a doorway with light coming from underneath one door and then the other door being completely dark, all 20 players went for the light under the door with this choice. This was an interesting set of results because I was assuming at least someone would choose the completely dark doorway, this being because so many people chose the dark doorway at the start rather than the light. After they made their decisions i asked them why they chose the light under the doorway, with most players responses being it was too much of draw the light under the doorway and they just had to know what was behind it and that the dark door seemed uninteresting this time after they had picked the dark doorway the first time and found nothing. But some players also noted that the dark doorway seemed scarier than the lit doorway which is why they chose the light. Again I think they choice was heavily influenced by curiosity of what was causing the light on the other side of the door.

After receiving feedback from everyone and watching people play through I feel like curiosity has a lot to do with affecting player decisions, players will often make a decision because they are curious and want to see what could be on the more dangerous side. Danger and fear is also a factor and I think players especially younger ones actively seek danger in games because they know they are disconnected and no actual harm can come to them. So overall I feel like the testing went well and I feel like I've learned a lot about how lighting affects players decisions and also how age and player experience does come into play when using lighting to lead players in a certain direction or when trying to affect their choices. I'm also happy with how much I've furthered my modelling, texturing and most importantly lighting skills throughout this project.