Bye Builder

I constructed a 3D world building environment, Byte Builder. I used this environment to make visual and aural stimulus that may allow participants to form schemes and categorize them. While they do this mental effort, I interview them. I conduct pre-post semi structured interviews which seek participants notions of motivation, and how and when they make schemes to see the world. During their use of the Byte Builder models I ask participants to speak aloud, wherein they discussed what they see and how it makes them feel. I screen-capture their interaction. The speak-aloud and screen capture enabled me to observe what they were assimilating and accommodating, and to index what actions they gravitated toward in the open-ended world, i.e., their motivations.

At the beginning of one activity, the user reads a narrative. A young woman, Agein Han, has built a virtual world using a system that allows her to fully immerse into the environment. A bug in the system traps Agein in the environment. The player then uses the mouse and keyboard to explore the world and try to save Agein. I tell them that to get out they have to collect bright green bytes that emit a mechanical sound. They then play a two-minute tutorial to learn how to move and the actions available to them. They can pick up items, such as a torch for a light or a bow to hunt. They can hunt animals to feed themselves. They can hear the bytes. Once they collect two bytes they move to a second stage. They start on top of a hill, and see bytes fall from the sky. The user then moves around the alpine setting to collect four more bytes. The third stage shifts the visual space by distorting the view and adding more colors. In this intervention stage, the player needs to accommodate for these drastic settings. Finally, in the remaining two stages the player moves through downtown Chicago, and downtown San Francisco. Here they explore the streets of these more familiar settings to collect bytes. The intervention had five participants, one man and four women ages 22 to 28, each having different prior experience with video games (From never having played to playing daily). In this paper, I will discuss the qualitative results from three participants: Sally, Ally, and the pre-post motivational data from demonstrated with Kirst.

I am currently developing this design framework, to release on steam early access. I belive it will be a valuable testing environment for 3D environment construction to be used in research. I have one paper under review on it, and will continue to develop more.