Short Exercise: What do Prototypes Prototype? – Sarah Teaw

Do people find fun or do they get easily frustrated when their senses are muted?

1. This is an important question to answer because our goal of our game should be to have fun rather than make players uncomfortable or frustrated.
2. I think aside from the game, just asking user testers to take 5 minutes with a muted sense (e.g. close their eyes and try to complete a normal task) and ask them to rate their frustration on a scale of 1-10.
3. My guess is that some testers may experience more or less frustration based on what sense they were told to mute, and this may also be biased towards a tester’s personal frustration temper. Because we are not using physical restraints, I don’t think people will be too frustrated.

Are people comfortable wearing physical restraints to their senses (e.g. wearing a blindfold or earplugs)?

1. This is an important question to answer because physical or personal discomfort in our game would be a real violation of fun and also have ethical ramifications that we are hoping to address early on in the design process rather than later.
2. We could come up with several different options for users to choose from: e.g. closing their eyes, covering their eyes with their hands, wearing a blindfold, etc. Then we could assess cheating/effectiveness and discomfort through a survey after the study.
3. My guess is that most players will not be comfortable sharing wearable parts of the game unless it was designed in a sterile way, therefore they may opt to self enforce these restraints.

How likely would people be willing to give up their sense of sight around people of differing degrees of closeness?

1. This is an important question because it helps inform us who our target audience should be.
2. We could select the tester to trust three people: someone they just met but share an identity with, a friend, and a close friend, to help them get from point A to point B with their eyes closed. I think it wouldn’t be ideal to test with a stranger because it is very unlikely that players of our game would play with a complete stranger–they must have met in some context, but maybe for the first time, because they are playing our game.
3. My guess is that most players would trust all the players, maybe even their close friend less because they are too comfortable around each other such that the friend could mislead them and result in distrust.