Analyzing player behavior in Hotel Dusk
We seriously need more game reviews like this one. Krystian Majewski looked at the design of Hotel Dusk in terms of the behavior it caused in a player. By videotaping his girlfriend playing through the first chapter, he was able to calculate the percentage of the game involving interacting with people, interacting with items and the environment, or changing locations. He then mapped her spoken responses to the game to the kind of gameplay in which it occurred, to see where the player was most engaged.
It turns out that it isn't the characters that generate the biggest emotional response, but rather the interactions with the environment-- the puzzles. Majewski speculates that "When interacting with objects, the player is acting on his own so the feeling of responsibility is much greater." For this game, at least, it would seem that the story doesn't drive immersion as much as the gameplay, which is a pretty interesting hypothesis. We'd like to see the same kind of experiment done for a Final Fantasy game.
