Can we design games that will make us better at insight?

I realized several things when trying to write a follow-up to my last blog post:

1) I had no idea where to start explaining things.

2) It was too big of an argument to do all at once

3) Even if I knew where to start, and could write it all out, I had not organized my own thoughts well enough yet and put them out there. So basically the writing would be both incoherent and impenetrable! Not a good way to start a blog!

So instead here is a slightly kinder, more introductory post on how I think we can integrate cognitive science and video game development in some really cool ways.

A few months ago I was brainstorming ideas for TOJAM(Put a link in later), a local indie game design competition/thing and came up with a kind of RTS (real-time-strategy) that I think could be a kind of proof of concept of some neat ideas. I had recently read about Navon Letters (cite this) and their effect on people's insight problem solving abilities, and figured that using them in a game could lead to some really cool gameplay.

First of all, a quick and dirty introduction to insight problem solving. Insight problems are the kind of problems where changing how you are looking at them from an often incorrect framing is essential to solving the problem. Most people are familiar with the 9 dot problem, but likely by the name of "that stupid impossible problem on the place-mat in the diner on the side of the road". For those unfamiliar with the problem, it goes something like this:

Draw a line that goes through the 9 dots without lifting your pen from the page and with only 4 lines. It looks like this:

If you have a piece of paper handy, try drawing a few sets of these dots and trying to solve the problem. If this is your first time encountering this, PLEASE DO NOT LOOK UP THE SOLUTION RIGHT AWAY! Avoid the temptation of cognitive miserliness!

And just to put some space between the problem and the solution, here is why it is good filler for the place-mat at a crappy restaurant. Since it is notorious for needing a change of framing and for putting us in the wrong framing at first glance, it is a perfect distraction to eat up your attentional resources so you don't notice how long the food is taking to be served, or that the chef just sneezed into the salad. It is interesting to see how a problem from a psych study several decades ago has spread into places you would least expect.

Alright, so enough of that. Here is one possible solution:

Don't feel bad if you couldn't solve it and gave in, it doesn't mean you are unintelligent or a horrible human being or anything. Pretty much everyone else who is encountering it for the first time right now did exactly what you did.

You are probably thinking right now that the solution was dumb, or that it broke some kind of rule that you couldn't draw outside of the box. But then let me pose this question to you, the reader: where did I say that it was a box, or that you could not draw outside of the lines? Pretty much everybody sees this as a constraint on the problem even though it was never specified. We need to break out of the frame that we are seeing the problem in to frame it in a new way, to look at it from a new perspective, and then the solution becomes incredibly simple (An aside: this is the origin of the much over-used and misused phrase "you need to think outside the box". Ironically enough, telling someone to "think outside the box" has absolutely no bearing on their ability to solve insight problems).

For the frustrated among you after trying this problem who think that they cannot do insight problems, you are solving them every time you get one of those eureka moments (the story is overused, but look up the origin of the word eureka for another good insight problem solving example), when you suddenly see things in a different way that makes a solution so much clearer.

Since this is also a blog about game development, here are some examples us gamers would find very familiar. The time when you realized that you could use your deku sticks in Ocarina of Time to spread fire from one torch to another was a moment of insight. Or when you realized a new use for a unit in an RTS, like sending a single zergling staggered ahead of your main attack force into some seige tanks to soak up the first shot in StarCraft. Or when you noticed that if you just calmed down and realized that jumping was not the only way to attack you would stop getting hit by shoryukens in Street Fighter. Or the time you took two innocuous Magic: The Gathering cards you had tossed into a pile and realized that they had some profound and powerful strategies if you used them together.

You had hit things with deku sticks before, or built units in an RTS before, or performed a varied offense in a fighting game before, or played cards in a card game before, but this was something different. It felt like something different didn't it? That's what insight problem solving feels like.

So now the question is, how can we make ourselves better at solving these problems, at switching frames, at finding the insightful solutions? And why did I name-drop Navon letters earlier in this post?

Navon letters are these things:



They are letters made up of smaller letters, usually with the component letters being different than the overall letter. Look at that shape and what do you see? An H made of T's? Or just a bunch of T's? Notice that you can do a kind of shift in your perception, almost like the optical illusion of seeing a drawing of a cube going into a page and popping out of a page. This is a perceptual shift, and we are actually engaging different kinds of processing when we see it as a bunch of T's and when we see it as an H.

Before I get into what those processing styles are, I will jump ahead to what Hunt and Carroll (2008) found in subjects primed with these Navon letters. Subjects in their study were given the task of either identifying the components (the T's) or the gestalt/larger letter (the H). They were given a series of these letters and then asked to do some insight problems.

What they found was that the subjects who were told to look at what the larger letter was showed markedly better performance on the insight tasks than the ones who were told to look at the components. Telling them to look at what the larger letter was priming them to look at the frame they were putting around the problem, in a literal sense and in a more abstract sense. It was engaging our cognitive style that is good at looking at how we look at things. So, now we have some interesting results! Here is something that can effect our insight problem solving abilities!

So, what about the game I mentioned? The one that takes advantage of this effect? That's for part2, since this is getting way longer than I thought it would. But here is a taste: what if we had an RTS where quickly moving from looking at what units your formation is made up of to looking at what your formation is was integral to the gameplay? This would be exploiting the navon letter effect in a time constrained pressure situation that relied on strategy and thinking. What kind of effects would we see in our players?