27. Attention and Memory
I have a memory like an elephant.
I remember every elephant I’ve ever met.
—HERB CAEN
When we drive, we are assaulted by hundreds of stimuli: other cars on the road, signs on the side of the road, the radio, other passengers in the car, and so on. Some of these stimuli require little processing—the tree on the side of the road requires little. Some require more—a car merging at a high speed requires a good deal of processing. The act of focusing on one element is known as attention. Attention allows us to process an item by putting it in conscious awareness.
We are not limited to processing only items to which we consciously pay attention. For instance, we are often unaware of tasks we perform automatically. Perhaps you drive home while daydreaming, and all of a sudden you are in your driveway. This is because the highly processing-heavy act of driving has been made automatic by repetition, which leaves your attention to be (dangerously) diverted elsewhere.
Attention
Many elements affect what items humans pay attention to.1 Differences in color, orientation, size, and motion affect our ability to guide our attention.
1 Wolfe, J. M., & Horowitz, T. S. (2004). “What Attributes Guide the Deployment of Visual Attention and How Do They Do It?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(6), 495–501.
In Figure 27.1, SPR, the ad makers for the firm GSR, exploit our tendency to let our attention be drawn toward salient elements rather than dangerous elements. Because the Sikh plumber looks different from the mustachioed plumbers, our attention is drawn to him first, despite the fact that one of the mustachioed plumbers on the bottom row has a bomb instead of a wrench.
GSR ENTRANCE HALL SYSTEM.
Figure 27.1 Advertisement.
One of the most invasive myths about attention is that humans have the ability to multitask. As modern men and women, we are used to checking our phones, Twitter, and Facebook while walking, cooking, catching up on Netflix, and reading something for work or school. This leads many of us to the conclusion that we have mastered multitasking by necessity. The problem is that this is not true. The brain can focus on only one thing at a time. What humans are doing when they are “multitasking” is switching their attention between all these tasks. This task-switching has a cost—namely, we are worse at tasks that involve task-switching.2 We take longer to complete such tasks and make more mistakes than we do when we perform the same work in sequence. Some studies have posited that the task-switching involved when a driver makes a cellphone call behind the wheel makes him more dangerous than an undistracted but legally intoxicated driver.3
2 Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). “Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763.
3 Strayer, D. L., Drews, F. A., & Crouch, D. J. (2006). “A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver.” The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 48(2), 381–391.
What is most important to games, however, is that this task-switching decreases a player’s ability to learn effectively. People who task-switch frequently are more susceptible to interference from other stimuli, making them less able to focus on any particular task4 and making them take longer to complete similar tasks.5 In terms of flow, these players drop out more frequently.
4 Ophir, E., Nass, C., & Wagner, A. D. (2009). “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(37), 15583–15587.
5 Fox, A. B., Rosen, J., & Crawford, M. (2009). “Distractions, Distractions: Does Instant Messaging Affect College Students’ Performance on a Concurrent Reading Comprehension Task?” CyberPsychology & Behavior, 12(1), 51–53.
Attention Misdirection
Horror games are the most fertile grounds in which to abuse human attention. One tactic these games use is the jump scare. The jump scare directs the player’s attention elsewhere and then quickly introduces a threatening element. The juxtaposition of safety and danger causes the player to be frightened.
Take a look at an example from BioShock at www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAHA36OmdBE.
In the BioShock YouTube video, the player’s attention is focused on a reward: the tonic. The designers know that the player must be facing the desk because that is what triggers the sequence. When the player is in position, fog is introduced surrounding the player. Since the player assumes that the fog is going to be used to introduce enemies, she spins around to face the danger because she knows it is not going to come from the direction of the wall. Her attention is then focused on distant threats because the entrance to the room is far away. Instead, the fog clears to reveal a mad dentist in dangerously close proximity. This startles many players because they expected a far danger yet received a near danger.
Haunted houses abuse this tendency as well. When a participant enters a room, the designers of the house generally know where his attention will be drawn.
Figure 27.2 shows the schematic of a haunted house room at Universal Studios Florida from 2011. The participants enter the room and see a woman in skimpy clothing sawing a man in half on a table. As the participants keep walking forward, their gaze is directed toward the girl and the saw. This is a “look here!” element because this is the only lit area in the scene and because the sound effects blast in the room directing the participants’ attention toward this area. The designers correctly assume that the vast majority of participants will have their attention drawn to the lit area.
Figure 27.2 Attention misdirection.
As the participants round the corner and are looking toward the distracting scene, from the opposite direction, a performer in a menacing giant tree costume jumps out at them. This works because the participants’ attention is drawn away from where the tree emerges. If the girl were not there, participants would have a chance to see the tree coming. If a designer knows where a participant is looking, then she also knows where the participant is not looking.
Games often use this concept to draw attention away from some elements and toward others. Using lighting is a common way to direct attention. Areas that are lit draw players toward them. Players don’t often choose to walk into dark areas when lit areas are available.
Attention Direction
The original Halo was constrained by its development schedule, which forced the developers to craft levels from similar repeating elements. Instead of repeating the same room over and over again, the level designers created variations on the same room to increase variety. However, they were concerned that this “sameness” would cause players to assume that the entrances and exits were always identical, even though the level designers changed them up for variety’s sake. To solve this, the level designers used a simple trick: They drew arrows on the floor that lit the direction in which the players should go (Figure 27.3).
HALO (C) 2001–2015 MICROSOFT CORPORATION.
Figure 27.3 The floor directs attention.
Paths, lighting, color, arrows, sound effects, and orientation decisions can all help designers subtly affect where a player will choose to focus his attention. In the book The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell relates a story in which a designer drew a simple line on the ground; this line caused players to follow it instead of exploring the open environment.6 The Stanley Parable is a dark comedy game that is largely about game design, and it makes a number of jokes at the expense of these techniques (Figures 27.4 and 27.5).
Figure 27.4 The Stanley Parable lampoons choice in games...
IMAGES FROM THE STANLEY PARABLE (C) 2013 EVERYTHING UNLIMITED LTD. USED WITH PERMISSION.
Figure 27.5 ...by highlighting the ways in which game designers direct attention.
6 Schell, J. (2008). The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann.
Memory
Another human deficiency relevant to games is our extremely limited memory. The common rule of thumb that is cited for human short-term (or working) memory is seven plus or minus two elements.7 This rule is widely used but not scientifically accurate. Its origin is actually from a psychologist’s notes from a professional meeting, not from actual research. Since the original estimate of “seven plus or minus two,” copious research has been done on the limitations of working memory, and this research has found that the number of items most subjects can keep in short-term memory is actually four8 but that it is highly dependent on the type of information.
7 Miller, G. A. (1956). “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review, 63(2), 81.
8 Cowan, N. (2001). “Metatheory of Storage Capacity Limits.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(01), 154–176.
These four items do not have to be discrete; often, they are grouped together in items called chunks. So a person can hold four chunks of information in short-term memory. For instance, if I told you to remember the letters GAMEDESIGNLIFE, you would likely easily remember them as GAME, DESIGN, and LIFE, which should make it easy for you to recall the entire string later. However, if I gave you the letters HKNLZAMDKJPQBXL to remember, you would likely have difficulty, despite this string and the original being the same length.
Note
Assuming that a player has only four new concepts to learn can be problematic if that player has not reached automaticity with all the other concepts in the game. As an example, learning the four abilities for a new character will be tough if the player also has to learn the game’s basic rules and mechanics simultaneously.
This fact is extremely important to remember when you are teaching players complex games. Fighting games tend to have dozens of moves players need to memorize. These are difficult to remember as a massive list, so many novice players just punch buttons and hope for the best. League of Legends, for instance, has an incredibly difficult number of concepts to master. Luckily for newer players, the makers of League of Legends decided that most game characters would have only four unique abilities that may be activated, keeping them easily in line with the number of elements able to be held by working memory at one time.
Other elements (shown on the in-game display in Figure 27.6), such as the summoner spells, recall, and the health and mana bars, are more universal across the game’s characters. When a player needs to learn a new character, she often has to juggle only four new concepts in memory.
IMAGE FROM LEAGUE OF LEGENDS. (C) 2009–2015 RIOT, INC.
Figure 27.6 There are a lot of elements to take in here.
Helping with Memory Limitations
Designers can employ a few techniques to help players avoid the natural limitations of memory:
• ORGANIZATION. By better organizing elements that need to be remembered, designers can make it so players have an easier time remembering a list as a whole. Humans understand the relationships of elements in a list and can use those relationships to aid memory. In one study, subjects remembered words presented in a hierarchical order three-and-a-half times better than random words.9
9 Bower, G. H., Clark, M. C., Lesgold, A. M., & Winzenz, D. (1969). “Hierarchical Retrieval Schemes in Recall of Categorized Word Lists.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(3), 323–343.
• MEANING. Items that are well-understood are easier to remember, even when they are assembled into new concepts. Using established nomenclature and symbols saves precious processing ability. A recent study found that participants learned new Chinese phrases much more effectively when they were taught using symbols that the participant already knew and could, thus, easily turn into chunks.10
10 Reder, L. M., Liu, X. L., Keinath, A., & Popov, V. (2015). “Building Knowledge Requires Bricks, Not Sand: The Critical Role of Familiar Constituents in Learning.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2015 Jul 3. 1–7. doi: 10.3758/s13423-015-0889-1.
• ORDER. In some situations there is a primacy effect. The primacy effect is when an early element in a sequential list is remembered more strongly than other elements in the list. In other situations, there is a recency effect, where elements presented later have more impact. Which is correct? Is early or late information more important? Research seems to suggest that if a person is asked to make a decision about the information in a short amount of time, primacy effects are stronger.11 That is, if you are given a list of items and are then asked to choose one, the first items listed will have the strongest weight. However, in situations in which a person has time between when he is exposed to the list and when he needs to make a decision based on the information, then recency effects seem to have weight. Since most game tutorials emphasize playing immediately after learning how to play, it seems to make sense to put the most important information first to make use of the primacy effect.
11 Hogarth, R. M., & Einhorn, H. J. (1992). “Order Effects in Belief Updating: The Belief-Adjustment Model.” Cognitive psychology, 24(1), 1–55.
• ENVIRONMENT. In what must be a Guinness World Record example of getting a grant foundation to support a ridiculous-sounding study, Godden & Baddeley tested people’s recall of words based on whether they learned those words while in a wetsuit underwater or while in a wetsuit on dry land.12 They found that people who learned the list of words while underwater were better able to recall the list while underwater and that the people who learned the list on dry land were better able to recall the list on dry land. This implies that where a person learns has some effect on how she learns. In games, this suggests that lessons should be taught in an environment similar to the one in which they will be used.
12 Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). “Context-Dependent Memory in Two Natural Environments: On Land and Underwater.” British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331.
• REPETITION AND USE. One of the goals of learning is to move information from the constantly rewritten short-term memory to the relatively more stable long-term memory. By repeating and using information, the odds of long-term retention of that information increases.13 By having players perform the actions that you want them to remember, you increase the odds that they will remember those actions.
13 Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.
• EMOTION. We tend to remember events that pull at our emotions better than neutral events. Commercials are keen to manipulate using this tactic. In the 2015 Super Bowl, insurance company Nationwide ran an emotionally charged ad in which a child narrated the things he would not be able to do because an accident had killed him. This ad was the number one most-talked-about ad the following day despite the hundreds of millions other advertisers spent on the event. The USA Today headline summed it up: “Nationwide ad provokes; little else in Super Bowl does.”14
14 Horovitz, B. (2015, February 3). “Nationwide Ad Provokes; Little Else in Super Bowl Does.” Retrieved July 7, 2019, from www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/02/02/nationwide-super-bowl-advertisingmarketing/22749245/.
Perception
Game designers can help in the cognitive load of learning and playing their games by understanding more of the mechanisms of human perception.
Colorblindness
An often forgotten limitation is the inability of a large percentage of the population to distinguish between colors. One in 200 women are colorblind. One in 12 men are colorblind.15 Red-green colorblindness is the most common form. Blue-yellow colorblindness and complete colorblindness are possible but rare.
15 Colblindor (n.d.). Retrieved July 7, 2019, from www.colorblindness.com/2006/04/28/colorblind-population/.
Games can use color to distinguish elements, but their designers must be careful to also use additional channels to distinguish differences. The board game Ticket to Ride uses both colors and symbols to differentiate between the train cards, so even when the player’s ability to differentiate color is removed, the cards look unique. The routes on the game’s board each have a color and a symbol. These symbols correspond to the symbols on the corners of the cards, which allows colorblind players a way to distinguish between the routes (Figure 27.7).
TICKET TO RIDE GAME. PUBLISHER: DAYS OF WONDER.
Figure 27.7 Routes use both colors and symbols to help visually impaired players.
Ticket to Ride has sold over 3,000,000 copies.16 If you assume, modestly, that each copy of the game was played by only two people, then the game has a reach of 6,000,000 players. Assuming colorblind people play the game in proportion to the general public, then 480,000 colorblind players have played the game. This illustrates how including considerations for the colorblind can be worth considering.
16 Duffy, O. (2014, October 27). “All Aboard–How Ticket To Ride Helped Save Table-Top Gaming.” Retrieved July 7, 2019, from www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2014/oct/27/all-aboard-how-ticket-to-ride-helped-save-table-top-gaming.
Colorblindness is, of course, not the only disability of which game designers need to be aware. A good source of information on designing for accessibility is IGDA Accessibility, an international special interest group that focuses on awareness of accessibility issues for disabled players.
Text Might as Well Be Invisible
The easiest way to solve the problem of playtesters being confused with a mechanic or puzzle in a digital game is to provide hint text on the screen. It generally takes only a few lines of code to make this happen and designers assume that directly telling players what to do is an efficient way to teach players. The trouble is that players generally don’t read what is onscreen. The more text that is onscreen, the less it will be read. Where is the player’s attention? If their attention is in the game world, players cannot simultaneously focus on the action and the text and are loath to switch attention. The solution to this is difficult, but effective. Tutorials that introduce elements by having the player learn as he plays instead of being dictated to will increase the player’s agency in learning and will avoid having him shift his attention to poorly retained text.
Humans generally retain concepts related through pictures better than concepts expressed through words alone.17 Although psychologists have had trouble defining why this is true, they have replicated the effects in numerous studies. In one study, the subjects remembered pictorial information decades later.18 In the book Brain Rules, John Medina references a study in which after 72 hours, subjects remembered only 10 percent of oral information, but when the material was presented both orally and with pictures, the retention rate jumped to 65 percent.19
17 Nelson, D. L., Reed, V. S., & Walling, J. R. (1976). “Pictorial Superiority Effect.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2(5), 523.
18 Read, J. D., & Barnsley, R. H. (1977). “Remember Dick and Jane? Memory for Elementary School Readers.” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue Canadienne des Sciences Du Comportement, 9(4), 361.
19 Ibid.
Figure 27.8 Use images and words for the best retention.
Additionally, we just don’t spend that much time searching for answers to our questions. According to internal Google research that used eye-tracking, in 47 percent of searches, users didn’t even look at items lower than the first two results.20 This can be explained as users trusting that the first two Google results are relevant, but a likely alternative explanation is that users just do not want to read much, even if doing so will give them a helpful answer.
20 Ronson, J. (2015). So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
Gestalt Grouping
We tend to perceive things with expectations based on their representation. Things that look alike should act alike. There should be contrast between interactive and noninteractive elements. L.A. Noire presents players with a vast cityscape. Every home and storefront has a door. Naturally, it was out of scope to make every door open to a fully realized interior; yet some doors had to open to an interior. The player needs to know which doors open and which do not. In L.A. Noire, the designers achieved this by coloring the doorknobs that open doors a vibrant gold.
Figure 27.9 shows a scene from the Resident Evil series, which has always featured complex environments in which players can interact with only a small fraction of the items. The designers alert the player to objects she can take by adding a visible sparkle to them. The difference between these objects and other objects in the scene lets the player know that the interactive objects are different in some way.
IMAGE FROM RESIDENT EVIL © 2002 CAPCOM.
Figure 27.9 The sparkle directs attention in an otherwise visually busy scene.
First Impressions
An ironic concept to end this chapter with is the importance of beginnings. Humans make impressions of people after less than a tenth of a second.21 Once we have made these split-second impressions, we tend to stick with them.22
21 Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). “First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-ms Exposure to a Face.” Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598.
22 Tetlock, P. E. (1983). “Accountability and the Perseverance of First Impressions.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 46, 285–292.
Researchers formed groups of students and had them solve math problems collaboratively while on camera.23 The researchers wanted to know how the groups determined their leaders. What they found was that in 94 percent of the math problems, the group’s first answer was their final answer. The key was not to be the smartest at math problems or the most persuasive voice in the group; it was simply to speak first. That is how powerful the first impression can be.
23 Anderson, C., & Kilduff, G. J. (2009). “Why Do Dominant Personalities Attain Influence in Face-to-Face Groups? The Competence-Signaling Effects of Trait Dominance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(2), 491.
Summary
• Despite how you may feel, you cannot multitask. You can quickly task-switch, but this is at a detriment to the performance of any individual task. This penalty is reduced when the tasks have become automatic and do not need your attention.
• In general, a person can hold a small number of “chunks” of information in working memory at a time. The more closely related and the stronger the chunks, the more of them can be held.
• You can direct a player’s actions by using light, color, motion, or other attention-grabbing effects.
• Use already understood pieces to teach new concepts.
• Text alone is one of the worst mediums for retention. That makes it ironic reading it here, no?