Jerome Bruner and Games
Chef: Jerome Bruner. Ingredients: Developmental theory and scaffolding
Media moves fast and is ever evolving. Word meanings change, ideas form and are forgotten as time pushes forward.
We adapt … we learn.
Five years ago the word “meme” meant a specific style of joke on the internet. Back in 1976 it was a tool to study how social trends shift .Today we may think of a funny image or gif.
Today’s child enters the same world that is inhabited by their parents and grand parents. But they adapt and learn in their own way. This is not a problem until we as adults try to market our concepts of media to the younger age. There can be a disconnect. That’s why it is important for media designers to understand how humans process new information and form new ideas.
ENTER CHEF BRUNER
Born in New York, 1915, blind to the world due to cataracts he had two years to spend alone with his thoughts thinking about…thoughts.
This lead him to eventually graduate Duke University in 1937, and achieve a Doctorate in 1941 from Harvard University … to become a leading American psychologist known for his ideas on cognitive learning and development.
Cognitive Psychology
Began with his early work in Sensation and Perception being an active conscious process rather than passive one. Publishing Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception a study in which he had poor and rich children study american coins and guess their amount based on their perception. This showed that the need of said Item had the children overestimate the value of this product.
Now in relation to games is interesting because it involves a little game development secret. People are terrible at statistics. In this GDC discussion about game balance Ian Schreiber discusses his game statistics course and points out all the ways we suck at recognizing patterns. And it is because…we are great at recognizing patterns. So for example during coin flips we see one side be lucky or the other side as a guaranteed win. This is because we are expecting a narrative, a drama, in what is a sterile numeric experience. So when we have Game statistics like health we fudge numbers here and there. Maybe we have one hit cause 25% of health if full but if there is only 25% left we drop that number down to 20%. Giving us a magic pixel.
For example in Pokemon the health bar is green if it is over 75%
yellow if it is under and red if health is less than 25%(ish). This means there can be a devastating attack that will send a player into yellow, but that doesn’t guarantee a kill if the same move is used. Adding drama and suspense to matches.
Developmental psychology
We have all had these moments. You look at a task and it seems IMPOSSIBLE. Then a week later you are knocking out problems ten times as hard. During these moments we experience a learning process coined by Bruner. Scaffolding. Taking the knowledge we have accrued and building on it. Setting a good foundation with mastered tasks to better help learn new skills. Now I could go on about Scaffolding. So I will.
It can be as basic as the 3 stage level design principle. Have a challenge one, then challenge two, then add both challenges together to make challenge three. Designers of 2D games do this all the time such as Yoshio Sakamoto, Tokura Fujiwara, and of course Shigeru Miyamoto. These examples usually include something like in Mega Man Guts Man’s stage there are these drop away platforms which you have to navigate through. You jump on the first one, learning that these are safe to stand on, and ride it until you see below you another one headed your way, but also to a dotted line in the path. Before you even have a jump arc to get to it you see it fall and come back.
Now what you know from the game and life you can guess that mean if this happens while you are on it you will fall. Once you clear that you face against picket men who throw an arc attack and block shots with a shield. Now that you face these two enemies you have full understanding and are prepared for when you fight them together. Except you don’t. Would have been really good game design if they did that.
Which is why they did do it in Mega man 5 Gyroman’s stage they introduce platforms that disappear when you run on them and then spikey drop down bots. Then to challenge the player even further they combine the two. Because of the nature of both these challenges they can easily be mixed without being overwhelming. This mixed with the fact that they have already been overcome individually lets the player enter a challenged but not stressed mindset.
But there is an even greater form to scaffolding that spans over our gaming identity and that is our Gaming literacy. Now for this I am going to focus on UI/UX design, but overall gaming literacy is the language our community has developed both in a traditional sense and in a metaphoric sense like the meme I reference in the beginning of this piece. Gaming literacy is a phrase popularized by Eric Zimmerman in Gaming Literacy Game Design as a Model for Literacy in the Twenty-First Century. In short it is the reason why having your parents play video games is so hard. It is the ability to understand different aspects in games and play patterns. It’s how we understand Platformers and shooters have different controls on the same controller.
The reason this is important for UI/UX is readability. Now If i were to say green bar a large majority of you would say oh health bar, but then a few Elder Scrolls fans would say Zelda, and even more would say Legend of Zelda’s Magic bar. But if I were to show you a screen shot you could almost always sort out what means what. If you have a red bar that probably means health unless its not prioritized in the HUD then it could be a rage meter or some other aspect and so on for every little bit of data that is in the corner of your eyes.
We can take a look at Kingdom Hearts’ Heads up display (HUD for short). One of if not the most important aspect of the HUD is the player’s viewpoints. Essentially where the player looks or needs to look during any point of the game. The beginning of the eye flow a player engages in starts at the command deck, which makes sense the player needs to know what action they are performing after all. Then the eyes scan over the battle to check out their health. This is a natural flow of eye movement which is essential because retrieving essential information is not the challenge here, it’s the action.
The peripheral viewpoint allows the player to take in any emergency information while in a drastic occurrence such as battle. Say you are in a boss fight as shown above. Your main focus is going to be the boss not your health. As you’re fighting you notice a flash of red from the bottom right side. Well look at that you just used your peripheral vision to identify your character taking damage without having to take your eyes off of the boss. Here is another example say you’re near the end of the battle. The fight is getting harder and you just need to know what your health is like versus what the boss’s health is like. So taking a quick glance to your health you can trace the pattern up to find his health all while keeping tabs on what is happening in the battle.
Now the over all time to read this HUD is anywhere between .5–1 seconds depending on reading speed. Not a lot of time, which is crucial in a game with this speed and pace. The designers are able to do this by implementing motifs of design we as players are already literate on so picking this up and mastering it is a simple task. Gaming literacy in this way is an example of scaffolding on a communal scale.
CONCLUSION
I hope with this piece I was able to show how Jerome Bruner can play a part in interactive media. We are coming to a point where game systems and gamification are being implemented into schools and other high influence areas. I want to show that we don’t necessarily have to start over with this knowledge that we can, like Bruner teaches, grow and use our mastered scaffolding to great positive influences.
