Bio-Sensory Reactions to 3D Shooting Games
December 2nd, 2008
Gamasutra has an extremely cool feature article up today:
- Shoot to Thrill: Bio-Sensory Reactions to 3D Shooting Games (www.gamasutra.com)
The article is about results that came out of a bio-sensory study that was done on players playing the first 90 minutes of several big First-Person Shooters (Gears of War, Call of Duty, Halo, etc). They tracked all sorts of player responses (brainwaves, heart-rate, blinking) and were able to form several conclusions about what players found most compelling in the games.
One of the most interesting findings is that close combat proved to be extremely compelling to players. For example, using the chainsaw in Gears of War elicited a huge emotional response from players. The authors of the study argue that’s one of the reasons so many people think GoW is such a great game. It creates a lot of these emotionally rewarding situations for the player.
They also have information on things like cutscenes and gameplay repetition. It’s a great article and definitely worth reading if you’re interested in game design. I’d love to see more studies like this done on other genres of games.
Owen