Monday, February 25, 2008

The Real Story on Characters and Emotion: Taking it 'to the Streets'!

Our presentation at GDC 08 went well! I know a lot of people were interested in seeing the slides and poster again or even peeking at the data themselves, so I've put everything live.
We got some interesting feedback as well! I'll just summarize some of the top responses:

- Culture plays a big role in feedback. What makes the King of All Cosmos (Katamari Damacy) an amusing character here isn't the same in Japan, where he's funny for other reasons. The culture in our survey was mostly American/Canadian/European, which means of course that we are overlooking a big part of the market.

- Almost all named responses were humans or humanoid characters. There were very few animals or pets, except in the favorite allies question where characters like pokemon and pikmin came up a few times. Expected, but an interesting analysis nonetheless.

- Someone during the session asked about heroes vs. antiheroes, and which players felt more of a relation to. Looking back through the data, it actually seems the ratio was about even. My speculation here is some liked heroes for their positive, idealistic qualities, while others found the antiheroes more complex and real. I didn't check to see if this correlated with any demographics (age, genre, etc)... but the good news is, the data will be live as soon as I make this post =)

Our next big topic of research is player-created avatars and player-generated stories. Check back with us soon for an overview and a survey link! =)

This is Corey, signing off.