This thought came to me as I was watching a video of Jordan Peterson interviewing a Neuroscientist in regards to IQ. While a lot of the contents of the video goes off in a few different directions I couldn't help but think about applying psychometrics to game design. I was watching the video while I was building and planning the next area of my game Revulsion.
How is this relevant to Revulsion?
Revulsion is a game that is played from the first person perspective which means it requires the most special sense of any other genre of video game. So, as a game developer, it places the greatest challenge on me to make sure that people who play my game will be able to navigate the spaces that I build for them.
The evolution of the first person shooter.
There have been many comparisons to classic first person shooters like Doom and Quake to modern shooters like Call Of Duty or Halo. An interesting aspect of this topic has been that as first person shooters evolved they became more simple in some ways while more complex in others. If you examine the things that have become more simple you will see that dependency on the players spacial navigation has been nearly removed in almost all cases. In other words this can represent an entire aspect of the genre that has almost been entirely removed.
Not all complexity has been removed.
On that same coin, I have seen these same kinds of games have far more complex systems implemented. This can range from upgrades or perks or even skill trees and character selection. Each aspect of these complex systems are by themselves enough to dwarf the technical complexity of a level designed with multiple paths to reach a singular destination.
As a game developer of first person shooters with just under 20 years of experience, I have observed that most people appear to have comparatively poor spacial sense. We can figure out most other things with relative ease but when it comes to level design one of the biggest hurdles is making sure your levels are not too confusing.
So the first person shooter has become far more complex in every aspect except in terms of its level design.
What do level designers usually do?
A common practice is to almost literally avoid giving the player any choices at all. Most modern level designs involve traveling in a very specific path. In most modern first person shooters you are rarely forced to memorize the layout of an area as you are navigating.
Memorization appears to require a lot of mental energy.
I have noticed that people are a lot more willing to memorize a level layout for multiplayer games. This is very likely because they know they will spend a lot of time within those levels. But this is usually not the case with single player content as its very likely that you will never be revisiting previous places. Thus, if you make a lot of level content for the player to explore you can very quickly burn players out if they are forced to memorize those layouts.
How does this tie into the marketing of Revulsion as a game?
Revulsion is a game where I am purposely going against the grain as I am going to be marketing the game for being very challenging. Even considering that alone I am very afraid of depending on the players spacial sense. I will sooner swarm the player with monsters who want to fucking murder you rather than consider the idea of having two paths that loop around on each other.
With that said I am going to explore the notion of upping the anti within the next area I am working on. I will go into more detail on this in another post tomorrow.
If you are wondering, here is a link to the interview I mentioned above. What do you think about the idea of IQ being tested when you play games?
Revulsion is an independent game project that I am solo designing right now! My plan is to get the game on steam early access soon.
You can support this project by simply following me and upvoting me on Steemit! Or you can play the free demo! Link Below.
https://steemit.com/gaming/@thecastle/download-and-play-the-first-demo-build-of-my-game-project-stray
All Revulsion related posts are located here:
https://steemit.com/created/revulsion