4.2. Study Two – Appreciation

• Familiarization of one’s ludic habitus with a subfield of digital games does not only aid recognition and categorization of games that share the design elements characteristic of that subfield, but may also hinder performance in cases when games register as too similar and identical patterns of play are employed.

4.2.Study Two – Appreciation

The second study investigated how, when and why players settle into particular styles of play when playing digital games. Ten participants were recruited for the second study, with the cohort featuring players of varied levels and types of gaming experience. Five of the participants –Willow, Alice, Thomas, Evan, and Miles – were game design students or practitioners, generally reporting familiarity with a diverse range of game titles and genres, and regular and consistent digital gaming habits. Four participants – Arthur, Joe, Peter, and Susan – were dedicated players of a handful of game genres, such as grand strategy games, action-adventure, and FPSs; they played frequently, but stuck almost exclusively to these kinds of games. Lastly, Jill was the single non-player of the lot, mentioning familiarity with some older titles like SMB and Diablo (Blizzard North, 1997), but stating that she no longer played digital games.

The ten participants in the second study, playing the adventure game/hypertext fiction hybrid Inglenook, approached the prototype in one of three different styles of play, which has lead to them being grouped into three separate player clusters:

1) Cluster One (C1; The Puzzle-Solvers) included Arthur, Joe, and Jill, three players who shared a focus for finding and solving the game’s puzzles in a speedy, goal-oriented manner of play. 2) Cluster Two (C2; The Detectives) included Willow and Alice, two players –both game designers – who seemed eager to investigate every room in the house and interact with all possible points of interest in an attempt to figure out the mystery behind the game’s events. 3) Cluster Three (C3; The Explorers) included Peter, Susan, Thomas, Evan, and

Miles five players – the latte three game designers – who explored Inglenook in a slow, methodical manner. They approached Inglenook as a multilayered designed artefact, incorporating game elements, narrative text, and audio and visual design components, and shifted their attention between these during play, engaging with all layers in a relatively balanced manner.

The differences between the study participants emerged early on during their time with Inglenook. While all ten participants initially played the game in a slow and steady manner, the three players in the first cluster – Arthur, Joe, and Jill – drastically altered their style of play after solving the first puzzle in the game: flipping the switch in the electrical closet to restore power to the upper floors of the house (Fig. 22)

Figure 22. Inglenook’s first puzzle, simply asking the player to interact with the fuse box several times in a row in order to flip the switch and restore power.

From this point forward, the study participants in this cluster did not seem to care much for the lines of poetic text at the bottom of the screen in their navigation of the house. They moved quickly from room to room in an attempt to find points of interaction – more specifically, places where they could affect the game in some fashion, like by solving the initial puzzle. In the post-play-session interview, participants in the Puzzle-Solvers cluster admitted not caring much for the game’s narrative text, apart from appreciating it as a mood-setting element of the game’s overall design. The Puzzle-Solvers were also more likely to express personal dislike for the game compared to other clusters – evidenced, among others, by the fact that only one person from this cluster completed the follow-up questionnaire, in which they admitted that they had not engaged with Inglenook again following the initial playtest. For the Puzzle-Solvers, Inglenook was primarily a puzzle game, with challenges, in the form of object interaction and item retrieval, to discover and then complete in order to finish the game.

Participants in the second cluster, Willow and Alice, altered their style of play not long after solving the first puzzle –when realizing they could explore more of the house after restoring power to the upper floors (Fig. 23).

Figure 23. A screenshot from Inglenook; the player is navigating to the upper floors after solving the initial puzzle in the electrical closet.

Unlike the Puzzle-Solvers, Willow and Alice were equally intrigued by all kinds of points of interaction – whether puzzles or object descriptions – and explored the rooms in the house in a methodical fashion with the goal of discovering the game’s events, earning them their moniker as Detectives. Willow and Alice moved quickly between spaces, at times, but they also cared enough for the game’s narrative dimension to take the time and read most of the lines of poetry they encountered. In the post-play-session interview, these participants expressed different degrees of preference for Inglenook as a whole (Willow enjoying its experimental design and independent production, Alice considering it a demo or a visually unfinished project), though both admitted enjoying the lines of poetic text and considering them important additions to the game, more so than the Puzzle-Solvers. For the Detectives, Inglenook was primarily an adventure game, with mysterious events waiting to be uncovered through investigation and interaction with objects.

Lastly, participants in the third cluster seemingly did not alter their style of play at any point, engaging with it in a balanced manner that required relatively slow and steady exploration of the virtual environment, earning them the label of Explorers. Peter, Susan, Thomas, Evan, and Miles differed in their appreciation of the game as a whole – for example, Peter and Evan were

at times confused and frustrated by the lines of poetry, while Susan, Thomas, and Miles found them very important for the overall experience of the game. Miles and Thomas, in particular, recognized and labeled Inglenook as an independent or “indie” game, in a similar fashion to Willow in the previous cluster, with this labelling being enough for them to warrant a more engaged, slower-paced form of play in comparison to more commercially developed games. For the Explorers, no single element of the game dominated their attention; rather than playing it as a puzzle game or an adventure game, these participants engaged with Inglenook in an exploratory fashion, attempting to uncover all that it had to offer during their time with it.

In light of these results, the study’s findings regarding ludic habitus and its operation in digital gaming practice can be summarized as follows:

• Player-specific styles of engagement with a digital game – in other words, playstyles – are the result of the interplay between the player’s ludic habitus and the specific configurations of game elements. Elements of a game’s design – its audio-visual presentation, gameplay mechanics, spatial layout, narrative content, etc. – act as affordances and cues for specific behaviors and interpretations. The player’s ludic habitus interprets game design elements continuously (during realtime interaction with the game artefact) and contextually. • As part of this contextual interpretation, players generate understandings of individual design elements on multiple levels. They interpret design elements: o in isolation, o in relation to other elements in the same game, o in relation to similar elements in games that register as belonging to the same generic subfield of digital games, and o in relation to digital games as designed artefacts in general. • Playstyles often become fixed at certain moments of discovery – e.g. when a player solves a puzzle or unlocks an additional area to explore. At these moments, for some players, the understanding of the game as a kind or type of game becomes stabilized, leading to distinct styles of play. • More versatile and deeper familiarity with generic subfields and their design conventions can result in greater appreciation, deeper & richer analysis, and more comprehensive engagement. This can be seen when comparing the Puzzle-

Solvers and the Explorers. Prior experience, however, seems to be less important than player preferences when it comes to playstyles. A player’s gaming preferences play an important role in the attribution of salience to design elements, with the players in the study focusing on those aspects of the game which fit their broader understandings and attitudes towards digital games and gameplay.