As leader of the in the 海角社区’s Department of Psychology, Ben Dyson designs fun, strategic games that are leading to new insights into human potential.
As a researcher in cognitive psychology, Dyson is interested in figuring out the hidden mechanisms that control how people think and make decisions, and how those thoughts are expressed in behaviour.
Traditionally, he says, researchers have tested the limits of human performance with experiments that require participants to complete unfamiliar tasks in unnatural settings.
“The potential limits of human performance and perception and learning and memory and all those things we have data on might be underestimated because when we were testing people, they were not as motivated or interested in the task as they might have been,” explains Dyson.
“Now, when we invite people into the laboratory, they don't adopt the role of a participant, they adopt the role of a game player. I think that has much more potential impact.”
Designing games
Dyson has designed several games, including SHAPE, whose components and iconography relate to the 海角社区’s strategic plan of the same name. Two to four players sit around a table and set up a grid of “impact” cards in different colours and shapes that represent tasks they need to complete to score points. Each assumes two roles: the innovator who attracts resources and the collaborator who gets the job done.
“The game could be an interesting promotional tool,” muses Dyson, “something that would tell you a little bit more about the university, like the idea that there are two different kinds of characters within the game — innovators and collaborators — and two different roles that you have to juggle.”
Dyson emphasizes that everyone within an institution has different, complementary roles, but as in the game, all have the same goal to complete tasks that create impact.
“Sometimes you're gathering resources. Sometimes you're using those resources to complete the things that you need to complete your teaching, administration, research or outreach, for example.”
Once the game has been refined, Dyson hopes to use it to research decision-making under different conditions.
“When we play a game, we abandon the natural roles that we usually have and adopt novel personas. We agree to this rule set and maybe we'll also agree to be kind of mean to one another in a fun kind of way, and it's OK to be mean because we're in this magic circle. So competition and collaboration could be very useful in the game.”
Dyson’s SHAPE game was inspired by his monster-themed creation, Double Creature Feature, which involves recruiting specific types of monsters for a Hollywood B-movie. It is entered in this year’s competition.
His Tenure Track is a simulation game that teaches concepts such as hypothesis testing, peer review and conference networking — the typical demands of academic life. It’s a finalist in the .
Building on pre-existing games
Before Dyson began designing his own games, he noticed that some existing games could test aspects of cognition. The kids’ card game Ghost Blitz, for example, is a good test of task switching, the ability to unconsciously shift attention between one task and another. The game has two task cards and you never know which will come up next. Dyson and his team digitized the game, enabling them to precisely record things such as reaction time and accuracy.
The team then expanded its research to study competitive decision-making using new . Imagine a large, flat-screen TV on a tabletop with two players, one on either side, competing to perform randomized tasks the fastest.
“We have the same degree of control and precision that we would get in a regular experiment, but we think people are just having more fun, and we're able to get different estimates of cognition in that way,” explains Dyson.
A rewarding career comes full circle
“What I’m finding really rewarding,” says Dyson, “is the synergy between the things I’ve been studying throughout my career — experimental design, decision-making, looking at the brain — all coming together by thinking about collecting data from human game players versus human study participants.”
That change in thinking from designing experiments to designing games has motivated Dyson to question everything he’s done in his career.
“At the end of the day, you might not design a good experiment, but you might design a good game which has a completely different impact in a completely different domain. A failed experiment might make a great game.
“By studying human cognition through the lens of games, I’m having much more fun. That's the thing I'm most excited about at the moment — when the work doesn't feel like work; it feels like fun.”