Today I’ll explain how I learned about a new principle and applied it.
Attention
The idea of attention shouldn’t be new to most people, and the design principle connected to that won’t be particularly revealing either. Attention is a mechanism of the human brain that manages the focus of its inner and outer senses: Where to look? What to listen to? Do I concentrate on thinking? This is relevant to video game designers, because more attention generally allows for more immersion too, if the right thing is focused.
That’s what makes the principle of preferring content attractiveness very interesting: It states that people, in general, tend to focus their attention on the content that is most attractive and loose interest, if something falls below a certain (felt) standard of attractiveness.
This idea is taken from the same video I linked last week:
Therein, Senior Cinematic Designer Paweł Ochocki and Narrative Director Igor Sarzyński remark that the degradation of attractiveness is particularly relevant for content that takes more time. So in those cases, usually extra measures have to be taken to keep the player engaged.
Ocularis: Improving Player Engagement
The longer dialogue scenes of Ocularis have had exactly this problem: They were long (usually around 8, but up to 11 lines) with max. one choice near the end and no other happenings or interaction possibilities in between.
I took a few counter-measures in a test-case to see what works:
- adding timed player choices with no impact
- providing loot to pick up while talking
- filling the scene with more framing objects
- lighting the scene in different colors, differentiating certain spots and paths
This video showcases what I added (just imagine all those things missing!):
In the future, I’d like the fairies to be more interactive (letting them move when the player runs near/through them) or at least more dynamic (different behaviours in different phases of the dialogue), redirecting attention more to this actor.
Feedback Suggestions
- What design guideline or tool can you think of to improve guiding player attention?
- Do you think the fairies in the background of the scene I showed are too distractive?
Conclusion
The idea that content attractiveness and thus player attention by default deteriorates over time, made me think about other media as well. How, for example, Twitter and Instagram encourage quick, punchy posts. Or how I myself like these short blog posts very much in favor of a longer essay.
Anyway, hope you’re having a wonderful time!
Gregor Sönnichsen 