My Thoughts on the Media Equation

The Media Equation

For this blog posting, I’m using Chapter 1 from the resource “The Media Equation” by Reeves and Nass given to us by our course professor.

I enjoyed reading this chapter and was able to identify with many points in this paper. Does Media = Real Life? According to many of the studies completed, this appears to be true.

An example of this would be using the statement, “Everyone expects media to obey a wide range of social and natural rules”. (pg. 5) If you’ve ever programmed a game, you’ll find that the programmer took into consideration the common rules of the game that most people would expect to find. If a game deviates off course too much, the general public tends to become hostile to the game – “It cheats!” or “It doesn’t play properly!” and will promptly discard the game. That’s certainly not the ultimate goal of a game developer.

In addition, on page 5, the statement, “People are polite to those who ask questions about themselves” as well as “People are polite to computers, too”, certainly rings true as well. If a game asks for information about the player before hand, generally speaking, these people will fill out whatever information is necessary. That’s not to say that the all questions are received warmly, but that by and large, most folks will give an email address or answer other relevant questions.

While on this same thread, I think that’s why the Windows environment became so popular. It “thinks” as we humans think. The old DOS screens and commands were so convoluted that most people just couldn’t memorize or complete simple tasks. The Windows environment is more visual and gives people a normal view of what is happening in the system.

Did you ever wonder why some games are such a big hit and others simply vanish without a trace? I believe the media equation helps define why there is such a big discrepancy between games. On page 8, the statement, “Because people have a strong positive bias toward social relationships and predictable environments, the more a media technology is consistent with social and physical rules, the more enjoyable the technology will be to use.”

The closer a game comes to a player’s reality – and I don’t mean in our everyday lives, but that the social rules and norms are something the player can identify with – the better results the game will have overall. Those that are too vague or too complex are too much for the player to process and they will simply move on another game that is more like the way the player thinks.

I have to admit that page 10 really hit home with me, specifically the Big Issues category. This page tells us, “research shows that media are perceived as real people and places. “ Who of us has never “talked back” to the television or expressed our impatience when the computer responds a tad too slowly?

Another common assumption about technology is that when people treat media as human, they are guilty of anthropomorphism, a mistaken belief that inanimate objects are human.”

How about when our games don’t respond exactly as we would have them behave? Lastly, if a game ran too slowly or the rules weren’t clearly defined, would you want to play it? Not according to this article on page 11, “There is also a strong tendency in discussions about media to consider the real similarities between media machines that think and the thinking done by humans.”

In addition to all of this, I could relate best to page 11, “Anything that seemed to be a real person or place was real.” The article gave an example of a scary movie. I don’t like scary movies because I tend to perceive them as real and I have to spend a great deal of time processing the details of the movie, “it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie” is my mantra! The paper goes on to state, “The fact that the movie scared us in the first place is good evidence that media are real first, and false only after we think about it.” That’s a very true statement in my world!

Although this last example is a bit off my topic of games in education, I have to share one item of interest that correlates well with this paper. As an undergraduate student, I chose to take a psychology course as an elective. It was very interesting and one of the precepts of the course was that each student had to complete a few experiments in which the student was the “lab rat”. So, I sign up for my first experiment, not really sure what I was going in for, but knew I had to.

There were several of us, including my roommate. We were all led to separate rooms and was told to fill out this questionnaire. Not too bad! Many of the questions were judgment questions, such as, if you were a mediator between two people and one person had reason A and the other had reason B. What would you do? There were several options and you had to choose one.

The person who was administering this experiment (and I assume it was a PhD candidate writing his/her dissertation looking for data) would take our answers and return shortly with a “grading” of our judgment. In my case, I was told that I had excellent judgment and asked me another judgment type situation. At the end of this, I received a notice that I had excellent judgment and would I change my major to some sort of a judicial-type career? Boy, I was feeling great!

Afterward, my roommate and I shared our “judgments”. She answered the judgments exactly as I did, but was told repeatedly that she had poor judgment and that she should not consider a judicial-type career. She was devastated until I told her my results – we had been played so well! How funny that we would respond the way we did based on a simple psychology experiment! As stated on page 14, "People like to be praised by other people, even if the praise is undeserved."

Did I mention we were freshman? Perhaps that tells the whole story there.

References:

Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. 1996. "Ch 1, The Media Equation," pp. 3-18 in The Media Equation. Cambridge University Press.