Once a team had played Game A and Game B they still had a final task in "The Test": fill out a question- naire. The purpose of the questionnaire is to get an insight in the psychological impact of the DDA in the players, as well as asking an honest opinion about DDA on several people with different gaming backgrounds. We will now outline all questions asked (text in italics) and comment the motives of asking such questions.
• Co-op Craft is supposed to be a collaborative and cooperative game. Would you agree that it is? Why
(not)?
• Did you feel part of a team with your partner? Were you able to work well together? Why (not)? These first two questions are to reassure the good design of Co-op Craft as a distinct-role co-op game. We expect players to answer positively to both questions and give good reasons for their answer. If most or many of the players answer negatively with reasonable arguments, the game is probably not well designed as a distinct-role co-op game, thus we would not be able to take the results concerning DDA in this game as representative for DDA in co-op games.
• As you know there were two game types: A and B. Could you notice a difference between the two game
types? If so, what do you think was the difference?
This is an interesting question. In this work we have not delved deeply into the psychological impact of DDA in the implemented game, yet here we make an important exception. As the reader might recall, all of the implemented DDAAs in Co-op Craft are classified as implicit DDAAs (see Section 4.4). As explained in Section 3.3, implicit DDAAs try to make changes in the game without making them too obvious to the player and disrupting his sense of disbelief. This is normally desirable, as pointed out by Adams [1] (see also Section 2.2.2). Hence when questioned about the difference between Game A and Game B, we expect the players to NOT notice that there was DDA going on in Game A. Then the assertion that DDA is implicit in Co-op Craft would be correct. Note that the players may still notice an apparent difference in the difficulty of the games (for some Game A might be easier, for some it might be more difficult), but even a sharp observer should not notice that the game is adapting according to player’s performance. The real difference between Games A and B is explained in the next question (players were asked to fill the previous questions before reading and answering the final ones).
This is the actual difference between the two types of games: Type A included a Dynamic Difficulty Algorithm (DDA), whereas Type B didn’t. In other words, in Type A the game analyzed both your performance and your partner’s performance and adapted the game difficulty accordingly. For example, if you were behind in collected resources, the volcano eruptions would happen more often and the volcano resources would last longer, in order for you to catch up. On the other hand if you were ahead, volcano eruptions would happen less often and the resources would last less. This is one example among others that Game Type A implemented. Game Type B had the standard difficulty and did not adapt at all according to player performance.
• What are your impressions on this? Do you think it was a good idea to adapt the difficulty of the game
according to you and your partner’s performance? Was it done well in this game in your opinion? Would you like to see this kind of adjustments in other video games? Why (not)?
These are the most important questions. Positive answers and opinions here, along with good reasons from the player’s perspective, would help us conclude that DDA has great potential in co-op games and that there are good motives to believe that it would be appreciated and well-received if implemented commercially.
• Do you have any other comments or suggestions? For example: how could Co-op Craft be improved,
what did you miss in this game, what did you like about the game, why would you (not) play it again, was it too easy/frustrating, why will you not consider me your friend after this... And anything else miscellaneous you would like to comment about. ;)
This is obviously the least important question of the questionnaire for the purposes of this work (the focus of this work is not on Co-op Craft as a game). But here I can get some nice feedback in case I want to improve the game in the future.
7 Results
Here we will present the results of "The Test", both the raw data and the analysis to this data. We will also evaluate the performance of all players and teams with support from the numerical data and my personal appreciation from viewing the replays. Following this we will analyze the answers to the questionnaire. Finally we will expose the encountered problems and suggest possible solutions to them.