tetris and flow

Tetris and Flow is a research project dedicated to a better understanding of what motivates a player to enjoy the games they play. Several different theories have been offered on this subject, ranging from simplistic achievement-awards systems to social motivators. Tetris in particular is an intriguing example of gameplay; any regular Tetris player could speak to the infuriating nature of the game, while simultaneously returning to it day in and day out. Tetris is in fact one of the most popular games in history, as a simple Wikipedia search shows . As a game, Tetris is confounding-- how can a game with no win-state, that one must lose in playing, be so well-loved by so many? 

Tetris and Flow  attempted to separate the different aspects of Tetris in order to determine which was motivating players to enjoy the game. As we determined, Tetris has several different moving parts that effect each player differently. While it proved difficult to properly separate these parts, we found one persistent, significant element: points. Our playtesters loved points. Even those testers who distinctly said they did not look for points or pay them much mind, found more enjoyment in conditions where the points awarded were higher than usual. This effect was not small, either-- we showed a huge difference-- nearly 2.5 points on a 5-point Likert Scale-- between the higher points condition and our other three conditions. This tells us that while playing Tetris, even when one feels that they are not being motivated by points, perhaps subconsciously, they are. This tells us that players subconsciously track points, and that awarding points is a significant enough reward to keep someone playing a game. This is the sort of knowledge that tells us exactly what we are doing right, and allows us to produce better games with that knowledge in mind. 

Mindfulness in Virtual Reality is a psychology research project intended to determine the effects of mindfulness meditation training in virtual reality on stress and stress reactions, particularly aggression. The goal of the research was to determine whether virtual reality mindfulness training would be effective as a method for future aggression reduction.

In order to test these ideas, I created a google cardboard android application in Unity to simulate both mindfulness meditation and a stressful mock-interview situation. We had participants experience a calming forest scene, in which they would either hear mindfulness meditation audio or simple ambient noise. The second stage was a mock interview; participants were told they would be participating in a peer-to-peer mock interview, though all peers were controlled through the game in Unity. The fake peers would either give negative commentary and bad scores (1-10, 10 highest), or neutral commentary and neutral scores. After this stage, the participants were told they would be judging another peer in another mock interview. In this stage, participants were allowed to cut off the fake peer when they thought they had heard enough, and then give the fake peer a score. We used the amount of time that the participant listened to the fake peer as a judge, the score they gave, and their responses to general aggression surveys.