Browser Game Pick: Pierre - Insanity Inspired (Rundown)
Pierre: Insanity Inspired tells the story of a cat with an eye for art, who has to run around circular platforms and acquire items to finish his masterpiece. Items can only be collected when they align with the right symbols on the platform, indicated by a bright glow around it. You lose health whenever you grab an item while standing over the wrong sector, or when you touch a spiky ball by accident.
Items and spiky balls can be pushed away with the press of the down arrow key or D button. There are six levels to play in total.
Comments
What is this, a game about an artist cat, or a bipolar syndrome simulator?
Posted by: KC | August 27, 2009 11:41 PM
That was odd. I'm not sure how sound the "study" is though. Some people are completionists and will finish the game no matter what. Some people may try it and just not like it, so they quit. The criticism didn't bother me really, and I don't think the positive remarks helped that much either since I rarely saw them.
Posted by: Chetyre | August 28, 2009 1:15 AM
Pretty stylish, nice gameplay :).
Posted by: Lucaz | August 28, 2009 1:16 AM
Agreed, Chetyre.
I'm not entirely sure what valuable data you could glean from that as you really can't discount people clicking off it for being rubbish.
Posted by: RobF | August 28, 2009 3:13 AM
one plausible approach: say there are two settings for the game, like two sets of insults, and players are randomly assigned to a setting, and you look at differences in playtime metrics between the two groups. problems are: it might be hard to get a large enough sample, and the sample you get might not be representative of anything in particular. like if for some reason this game became wildly popular among deaf people, and the gathered data were dominated by their behavior.
Posted by: felix | August 28, 2009 9:36 AM
The voice acting is terrible to the point it damages the game experience.
Posted by: dieubussy | August 28, 2009 11:24 AM
meh, the experiment side of it didn't really do anything for me. I quit instantly at the second level when I saw it was the same thing as the first just more items required. I didn't like the game at all. Strangely the rest of the game was intensely polished - even voice acting (bad as it may be) - but the actually game pieces were terrible. No animation on the cat, bad aliasing, etc...
As well, the whole "you suck" when failing thing is more or less irrelevant when dying has no punishment.
Posted by: twincannon | August 28, 2009 5:30 PM
Felix, aye an A:B approach is more likely to steer towards the results you might possibly want but I do think this falls down at a more fundamental level with the design itself.
With designing the entire game around being antagonistic (even though it comes across to me as more stupid than anything) sort of drifts it more into the realms of parody than you'd want to garner any sort of serious results.
Now, if you did an A:B test with [insert random game someone actually cares about here] within the expected framework of a game there might be some validity and decent stats to glean.
Or they could just ask Popcap who appear to have the positive reinforcement thing down to a tee and y'know, seems to be working out alright for them...
Posted by: RobF | August 28, 2009 9:22 PM