Final Project - Reading with different narration
For the final Game Design experience, I focused on Automatic &Effortful thinking + Bandwidth.
I was inspired by my experiences with ebook reading with audio.
There are a lot of different approaches /researches regarding to reading comprehension. Though I cannot find the exact references, below are commonly known researches.
- We don’t read each letter of words, or even each words, we just read general shape.
- Harder the typeface of article is, you learn more information, remember about the contents better.
- Listening to unpredictable background music helps reading comprehension.(Similar approach to the second one)
Based on that, I wanted to explore if ‘narration-like music helps reading comprehension’.
For that, I needed to figure out.
- How to cut corpus by meanings.
- How to generate sound of text
- How to play the sound accordingly to the text you are reading.
My goal is narrowing down bandwidth and trigger effortful thinking.
- Bandwidth: Ebooks shows a whole page of text, which sometimes hinders you to focus when you are listening to audio also. By showing exact line where you are reading, hopefully narrow bandwidth and focus on the text.
- Effortful Thinking: listening to unexpected sound according to text you are reading can be annoying but also wake you up to focus on the text (I guess). I think this approach is pretty similar to reading in illegible font or unpleasant music as background. Even underlining on the text you like or memo on the side can be one way of triggering effortful thinking while reading.
Sadly, the background sound was too different than I expected, but I tired to present how the reading experience could be different with different sounds.
For the further step, to gamify reading experience, I can add some interaction with click or touch gesture.
LINK FOR EXECUTABLE FILE
December 16, 2018
Game Presentation: OLDTV
This game is a simple and strong example of automatic/effortful thinking and bandwidth
.
As the conflict text example is Thinking, Fast and Slow, this game provides conflicting information at the same time.
The meaning, color of font, direction and background color are contradict to each other, it is really hard to what to follow.
What you need to do is LEFT CLICK if the color of the word is the same with the word, or RIGHT CLICK if not.
To me, reading was more effortful thinking than just getting visual information. That might be because I was playing in English.
In fact, I only lost to cyan color. Compare to other colors (red, blue, yellow, purple and green), cyan is only one color that Koreans do not use (write or speck in English) in daily lives.
So, I played in Korean to see if I can play better.
Fun thing is that I played much worse in Korean. Even though reaction time was shortened, lost more quickly and frequently. I guess that is because my automatic thinking in Korean is much faster, which makes more mistakes with the conflictual informations. I mistook that I thought I only lost to cyan, but actually I lost to green and blue equally 4 times the most. This is interesting part that Koreans used to say ‘blue’ when something is even ‘green’. We do have words to dictate green colors, but somehow to express the freshness of the green, we call some green stuff as blue such as mountain, trees, grass and so on. When I heard of these at school I thought it is so textual example which is far from reality. May be it wasn’t. I was also just one of Korean who are confused with describing green and blue…
Not only the explicit part of the game, I love to commend the game art contributed a lot to the game mechanism also. The concept of old TV, it shows glitched TV screen, which is not only so beautiful but also makes the game difficult at higher level since the words show different colors when they pop up. I ended to actually ‘read’ the word in my mind not to be confused.
Lastly, the relaxing music is one of the great conflicts this game has. While you are listening relaxing, chilling music playing game which doesn’t require much physical reaction, on the right corner of the top you see the timer and counter is ticking, which makes you rush and make more and more mistakes.
October 5, 2018