What kind of questions do you expect to have answered? AP: One of the really amazing things about how society – especially non players – see games, they invest in games all of these hopes and fears. Like, is some massive societal trend – like people living with their parents longer before moving out – caused by video games? We look for these grand things that have nothing to do with play. They have nothing to do with the loops in the games [or] the mechanics of what’s happening. So the kinds of things we’re going to look at are, does playing a game make you feel better? And if it makes you feel better, less stressed, less anxious, what’s going on in the game when that happens? So imagine you do an Uber rating of how you feel. Five stars a session, and then you do another Uber rating. And then it’s happening tens of thousands of times, across hundreds of thousands of sessions. You begin to build some idea of what are the kinds of things that happen in a session that relates to people feeling better? That’s actually a pretty big deal in the world of games research, I promise.


“We’ve all seen the headlines that video games ruin lives or teach people to steal cars or whatever it is. And if there’s something we can do to give something back to the culture of video games, which is wholly positive, then that’s a good thing” James Marsden, FuturLab


relationship that we believe are important to include in the game, which might throw other planned features out, or push them further down the road map. I don’t know, it’s a hard question to answer really.


But it begs the question, why hasn’t this kind of collaboration been done before? AP: Honestly, we have had access and the thing that we struggled the most with is having – especially with the large companies – the flexibility to move from an idea of a study to conducting it and then letting the results speak for themselves without any form of actual or perceived interference. Then there are other developers who actually don’t have games or offerings that are relevant to many of the questions that exist in science. But there’s a sweet spot here, where the data actually can be created that people would care about, and the decision making process isn’t overly regimented. It’s really a combination of relevance and


flexibility, and an ability to work with data, that those three things have to come together. And they haven’t because historically data hasn’t been sharable on the timescale that games are produced,


JM: It would be valuable for us to know where friction points are and where there’s satisfaction. There’s a fine line between achieving something and being driven mad with frustration. And there’s this really nice, natural difficulty curve to every level in PowerWash, where the first action you make is extremely easy because you can just clean anything and it goes from dirty to clean. But as you progress through the level, it gets harder and harder to find the last bits of dirt and we want to know what the perfect balance there is. You don’t want it to be an easy ride right? The flow state needs to be triggered so that you’re feeling totally engaged all the way through and being challenged just the right amount. Some levels, we know, players have reported that the final last bit of dirt is really hard to find and it drives them mad. But there’s a sense of achievement once they do find that last bit of dirt. If they didn’t have to search around for five minutes, maybe that sense of satisfaction wouldn’t be there. So if we can polish that to a shine with the help of Oxford’s insight, then that’d be useful to make the game a bit better. But in terms of having like the ultimate relaxation mode or modes tailored to specific neurodiversities, it’s too early to say. We’re just excited to see what can be discovered.


Aside from hiring the programmer to work with the Oxford team, what’s the cost to you in terms of this project? JM: I suppose there’s production overhead, integrating this person into the team, treating this person as a member of staff. Those are sort of mechanical things. But I think it just adds another dimension of unknowns to a game that’s currently in development and early access. So potentially knock on effects of features that come out of this


34 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022


Thanks to things like early access? JM: I would say so, yeah. If this wasn’t in early access, we wouldn’t have had the time or inclination to think this was a good idea. The game would have been out and it would have been too late, probably. But I also think there’s a certain confidence on our side, given the feedback we’ve had from the gaming community.


Is this something you would do again, or recommend developers and publishers to get involved in? JM: I say watch this space and see how it goes. Our whole team and everyone involved on Square Enix’s side are very excited about the fact that we’re doing this, because we all love video games. We’ve all seen the headlines that video games ruin lives or teach people to steal cars or whatever it is. And if there’s something we can do to give something back to the culture of video games, which is wholly positive, then that’s a good thing that we were happy to be a part of.


AP: Human play is fundamental to who we are. We’re lucky to survive past procreation age and we get to play into adulthood now and it’s how we learn about the world. And I think that we can use play to learn about ourselves. And I think that James partnering with us on this just offers us another way for gamers to learn about themselves. I want them to see the results. I want them to be able to see their own de-identified data. And I want them to be able to say “I play these other games and I want to be able to donate that data too,” because that is how we learn about the world.


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