SUBLIMINAL MESSAGING IN VIDEO GAMES

An important aspect of developing a game that introduces people to concepts without them realizing it is subliminal messaging. I do not mean subliminal messaging in a frightening Sci-Fi "everyone is programmed and everything is a program" kind of way. My intention is to create puzzles of some kind that people will want to solve. To solve these puzzles the player will have to follow instructions and hints. The instructions and hints they will follow will be methods used to solve computer science concepts.

The question is how to make puzzles people want to solve, and how to give instructions that aren't blatantly related to computer science topics. To do this I will soon be reading through some chapters of several books and doing other external research to discover what has been done in the past, what has been somewhat successful and what hasn't. I will update this blog with my findings and references soon.

The first source I've looked at is called "Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design", a book by Scott Rogers to aid game developers from start to finish while making a game. I focused my attention on one chapter in particular called "Puzzle Me That", a chapter all about building good puzzles, microgames and minigames. The information this text provided about the best design of a puzzle was fairly straight forward. The text recommended that puzzles be simplistic, have scaling difficulty, disguise any learning, and make the reward immediate.

The insights this chapter had about minigames was likely the most important take away. Rogers recommended adding novel elements to each new minigame. He recognized that minigames can get repetitive so his solution is to change up the look, sound, and feel of a minigame every time it appears. He also recommends that before a minigame begins the player is given an opportunity to "brain shift" from the general gameplay to the minigame gameplay.

This was a fascinating chapter of an incredibly useful book for anyone thinking of designing their own video game. It provided me with some valuable insights into the design of puzzles to keep the player engaged and interested in the puzzle despite its potential content. This chapter did reenforce the idea that learning in video games needs to be disguised, but it did not give me much information about how to disguise learning in video games.