Contextual Studies - Reflective Journal/Research
I decided to write about Games and the Human as I am interested in how the Psychological side of games affect humans and other mediums. My main point in my essay will be on a principle that is used in other medium design disciplines than games, Anticipation.
To research Anticipation in games and other mediums, I researched what was the main reason why humans felt satisfaction when they anticipate something that will occur. This lead me to researching about how Dopamine is administered to the animal to keep it motivated and act on the goal that they wish to achieve. I also found that when the goal is less achievable or the animal that is trying to achieve the goal becomes uncertain that they will get the reward, then the Dopamine levels will rise as the uncertainty of the reward is addictive to animals.
I then needed to look at how this was done in other mediums such as Music, Animation and Games. What I had found was that Anticipation is used in almost the exact same way throughout most of these mediums. This may be because it is not only a principle of design within all these mediums but something that fundamentally ensures humans will use your product more. Therefore, I feel that more companies that make these products should use Anticipation to heighten their sales and for games, replay-ability.
Anticipation almost universally is used by announcing change. Whenever an event is going to happen, then something should announce that event is going to occur soon. This sends a predictive stimuli to the owner of the product when they are subconsciously aware of the predictive stimuli. In a real life sense, a dog that sees the lab coat of a scientist that feeds the dog, the dog will begin to salivate before even retrieving or seeing the food. This is reflected in media as music uses this in a specific note known as a Anticipation Note. This note occurs at the end of a harmony earlier than a note should be there, to announce the change of the new harmony, giving the listener their dose of Dopamine from the predictive stimuli.
In Games this is done via a multitude of ways as Games are made up of multiple mediums put together to make one huge medium. Games use the same Anticipation note in their music to excite players in a action game, or use that same note to cause dread in a horror game that may have had a nice cinematic transition from a heartfelt scene to a horrific scene. Games also use sound design to create what is known as “player feedback”. The sound design is where a sound that is pleasant or fits the action that is being acted out, is placed just before, be it seconds or milliseconds, where a specific action that will change an event of the game. This creates the same anticipation that is created in other mediums and gives the player their Dopamine before they even do something cool.
