Paper Information
| Title | Optimizing the Psychological Benefits of Choice: Information Transparency & Heuristic Use in Game Environments |
| Presenter(s) | James Cummings and Travis Ross |
| Session | Optimizing Emotion, Believability, & Choice |
| Time | Friday, October 22, 1:00p-2:00p |
| Location | Green Room |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | This paper suggests that the paradox of choice can be resolved in game environments by promoting heuristics-based decision-making, thereby maintaining player freedom while also avoiding the potential negative consequences of excessive deliberation. To do this, the informational cues relevant to such decisions must be made transparent, allowing players to employ fast and frugal tools from the brain's adaptive toolbox to make the same optimal choices that they might otherwise make after extended deliberation. Developers can design for such transparency not only by creating choice experiences in which options can be assessed and compared through clear metrics and attributes, but also by designing social systems in which the choices and successes of others can be easily identified and used for informing one's own future decisions. |
| Top Paper Award | This paper was selected by the program committee as a Meaningful Play 2010 Top Paper. It will be submitted to the Meaningful Play 2010 Special Issue of the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS). Due to the copyright requirements of the journal, only the abstract is available in the conference proceedings. |