Psychology and Games. Blender and MIDI. Fitts' Law

Daniel Mietchen from the university of Jena skypes in to tell us some ideas about how games could help in his research on the human brain.
- Intercultural studies, studies across species, studies with pre-language children. The important thing here is to be able to investigate cross-cultural matters independent of language.
- Rating of stimuli: Research into properties that are interesting from the viewpoint of psychology. These properties should be rated in a natural setting, e.g. while choosing properties of their favourite characters in a game
- Think big? Can one cooperate with Microsoft, for instance?
- Think small? Ten users might be useful for more traditional psychological settings if the experiments are tailor-made.
MW demonstrates some results about controlling Blender through MIDI.
I'll tell a little bit about Fitts' law (one of the HCI fundamentals) and some ideas of how to apply it to test "speedy" gaming computer mice.