CS377: MOO Study

I have little prior experience with MUDs, however I am quite familiar with how they work and so on. MUDs suck too much time from work. The WWW is bad enough. I play text adventures: Zork, ADVENT and so on.

    You see a small, white house.
    What now?

What do we learn about the subject ?

• He is familiar with text processing - he has used a computer before. He knows how to edit text and scroll back. So he is not a computer novice.

• He has played adventure games before - specifically Zork. He uses habits of adventure game players: writing down key words, useful names. Unfortunately we can't see what he is writing on and what he is writing. Note: I could be misinterpreting this: he may be writing things down because he was told to. We do not know enough context to determine for certain.

  Basically we have no idea what information the researchers have provided to the subject. He does appear to have a list of initial commands to try out. We do not see these or any other aids in the video, but this does not mean they weren't there. Are there postit notes on the screen?

• He appears to have been briefed thoroughly about the MOO: he comes across a reference to 'home' and asks "Home? do they mean the cupboard?"

• He wants to play within the game world - when the news clipping mentions server downtime, then he complains about being pulled out of game context into this meta-world above the game itself.

• He is thrown off by some of the jargon used in MOOs: Wizards, vanilla (meaning common) and home. The objects in his first room are strangely named - he does not know who are people or who are things.

• He has been given an explicit series of tasks to accomplish: reading the etiquette documents and getting out of the room. However, the study does not appear to have a clear focus - the subject flounders around the MOO, looking for a hint to what he should be doing.

  He's "supposed to look at [help manners]" without knowing why he should. He is not self-motivated - hence unlikely to achieve 'flow' or identify with the problems in the game.

• The explicitness of the tasks prevents him from doing what he would normally do: access the help and tutorial system and explore the system in his own way.

• He is clearly worried about completing the assigned tasks in the alotted time.

• The camera is intrusive - he is clearly conscious of it (10 min. mark) "Oh that's right - I'm not supposed to pay attention to the camera."

The MOO

• A very frustrating room - it describes several things in the LOOK message, but few of them respond to common actions, The common error message frustrates and irritates the user. None of the exits are made visible to the user.

  "Jesus Christ! I'm never gonna get to another room" then later (asking the game) "HOW do I get to another place?" Finally, after discovering a guitar in the corner: "Do I have to play the guitar to get out of here? Is Paul Allen gonna play the guitar?"

• There is little context provided for the exercise the user is doing: 'long forgotten tea brands' - I don't even know what that means.

  Dropping the user into this particular room instead of at his normal 'home', 'the cupboard' seems strange. It is not clear why this was done or what he was supposed to achieve in this particular room.

• The objects in the game are very specifically named - there are no synonyms - 'shoebox' and 'show box' are treated differently.

• This rigidity in the interface makes for great predictability (since a command always means the same thing) "It's gonna say the same damn thing!" - it also means it is a pain to learn as it does not forgive errors.

• There is a steep learning curve for this game - many commands must be mastered before play can begin.

The User Interface

• Overly constrained - don't move - don't change anything and everything will be fine. It's not a natural setting for the exercise.

• The terminal used for viewing was straightforward enough, but its appearance was optimized for the video, not for its user. He hated the font, the colors and the size of the window.

• It's line mode and primitive. Keyboards only - check mice at door. On the other hand, it's very flexible, since words can describe anything. Command lines are very expressive, but difficult for novice users, since few operations are 'made visible' in Normanic terms.

• The game tries to be helpful. It is overly helpful - given its line by line text only interface, there is nothing more frightening than 300 lines of help delivered in 15 line chunks. "I'm starting to glaze out" as he says after the fourth page of help on manners.

  The amount of text is too much for a simple line mode - a better presentation mechanism would be a scrollable list or similar. Some hypertext system or similar would be easier to navigate than the endless stream of HELP commands.

  "Examine - see HELP EXAMINE".

• "I've already forgotten where I am."
  After viewing help in the MOO, it is difficult to check your location. You must type LOOK to find out where you are. The old Zork games solved this by always showing the name of the current location at the top of the screen. There's that Normanic principle of 'making things visible' at work again.

• The user interpreted a delay in processing a command as success - by implication: since an erroneous command was quickly detected, this must mean I've managed to get the system to do more work by issuing a correct one. This is wrong - it is merely net-lag - and frustrating for the user.

• While the user interface is not bad in itself, but rather some of the things that this particular interface is asked to do are best implemented in other systems which are better suited.

The video

• Seeing the monitor was useful, as this gives us insight into what the user is responding to. However, I would probably use a separate video tape for video capture and run it in parallel with an overview of the user's work area - that way the user is free to move windows around and change the color schemes as he wants.

• A face close-up shot is not very helpful in understanding what work the user is doing around the computer. We can see his reactions to text, but we can't see what he is doing or where he has put his other tools, like writing pads.

• I would include the initial briefing session (or a summary of it). This should also help the subject become familiar with the camera before the study itself begins.

• Having the user talk to himself is unnatural - people tend to internalize dialog. Having the user talk to the camera, as was the case here, defeats the purpose of trying to make the camera unobtrusive.

  One way of dealing with this is to add another person to the task and have them cooperate (and thus communicate). This complicates the study (since another camera may be needed) and changes it from a solitary exercise to a social one. The user now has to deal with the other user as well as the game.

• At the very least I would include a brief description of the goals given to the subject at the top of the video. This study did not appear to have a goal beyond getting out of the room and reading lots of help text.

• If I could change one thing, it would be to allow the user the freedom to explore if he got stuck, so he could go through the tutorial if he wanted to, he could read the HELP pages if nothing else worked.