Observer Changes Observed

I once spied on people playing Spider-Man 2 at a demo kiosk. What they most wanted to do was to see if they could kill Spider-Man by jumping from a high enough place. Eventually they succeeded, got a good laugh out of it, and went about their business. Funny, nobody did that in our focus tests.
Likewise, something I've devoted a fair amount of energy to while playing Fable and The Sims 2 is getting my characters laid. Would I do that in a focus test? Probably not. Not even if the observer was behind a mirror.
Focus testing is a good tool for finding shelf-level events. For measuring 'fun'...not so much.

Comments

[Rich]

Bingo! I would say that you won't see much outside of events directly tangential to the dictated course of action for the session.

Talk about Schrodinger's cat. This is like Schrodinger's, uh... gigantic fuckin cat. Maybe it would be a cool project to try and measure the effects of interference in a focus test. It seems like an X-factor worth solving for.

What would be really nice would be to run focus tests over Xbox Live 2's rumored service that will allow you to watch games in progress that are being played on other peoples' machines. But then, there probably a million security reasons why that couldn't happen.

[Robert Vesco]

I once saw a group of kids playing "Lemmings," the famously successful and entertaining nonviolent videogame of the early 1990s. These tweens had devised a different goal from that the game designers had in mind -- they would direct the Lemmings into a position from which they could be trapped in the tightest, most embarassing space, and then would hit the "cancel level" button, causing them to spectacularly explode.

Phillip K. Howard, in "The Collapse of the Common Good" writes about kids unleashed in a newly designed "safe" playground, which had been designed so that there were no dangerous swings or teetertotters, or what have you. The resulting environment was so bland that the kids went home, got their bicycles, and invented a new game of crashing into the "safe" playground equipment as hard as they could.

People will find a way to have fun; it's often violent and not always the way you had in mind.

[jake]

I remember hearing something about a kid who, in The Sims, would marry someone, get the extra money and then have her go take a swim. Next he'd remove the ladder from the pool and his the wife would subsequently drown. Repeat. That always disturbed me.

[Adam V.]

Lemmings: Non-violent, except one of the tools WAS explode, and you could certainly kill lemmings by dropping them too far.

[bacon]

violence is fun.
end of story.