A study from Macquarie University last year shed light on the ability of morality meters in games to influence player decisions. Now, the high-tech testing space is being upgraded and will also be used as a quality assurance pod for local indie studios.
The study, spearheaded by Malcolm Ryan and his colleagues, revealed that player behaviour can be “nudged” in various directions depending on the presence and presentation of a morality bar.
How the morality bar is presented is the difference between it having no effect and swinging player decisions as much as 20% in dilemmas such as the trolley problem, as Ryan explains on the first episode of the grokludo podcast:
Groups of participants were observed while playing the game and interviewed afterwards to get some qualitative insights. One of the more notable insights was that even when players reported ignoring the meter, thinking it had no effect on them, changing aspects of the meter would still influence player behaviour.
If the right conditions are met, the morality bar suggesting one side was better than the other could swing a trolley problem from being statistically 50/50 choice to something more like 70/30.
Since the study has been published, the game has been kept live on Itch. You can play it right now here.
Future versions of the study will include the ability to record mouse movements and eye-tracking equipment to see where players’ gazes linger. According to Ryan, early results from the eye-tracking gear are “very insightful.”
“It shows a lot of what’s going on in your head, as people look from the choice on the meter, then look to the other choice on the meter, then look back… You can see the cogs turning in peoples’ heads.”
The space is also being made available for game or app developers for hire. Larger publishers like Ubisoft have used eye-tracking stations in their quality assurance processes for a while now, but a space like this can make that kind of QA testing available to smaller Aussie indie projects.
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