#psych 148

[psychologale]

re/cognition (3).

this time, i'm going to be playing 4 pics 1 word, a puzzle game based on pop culture, words, and double meanings that was extremely popular back when i was in high school (2013? 2014? i can't remember the exact year!). to be completely honest, i'm not about to play this game blind—i was practically addicted to this game in its peak, along with a ton of my classmates, but i am hoping that the years i've spent away from this game will allow me to have a fresh perspective on how it works!

mechanics.

the game is pretty straightforward: you're given four photos and you're supposed to look for the word that 'links' all of them together. the connections can be pretty easy, as we can see above (ink), but they can also be confusing if your brain simply refuses to supply you with the perfect word that matches all of the (seemingly unrelated) pictures.

what makes it fun?

apart from the fact that games naturally make you feel good whenever you get things right or win them, puzzle games (personally) make me feel a sense of smugness whenever i figure out the answers. it makes me feel great, as if i’m part of an inner circle that ‘gets’ it, even if the some of the questions are rather easy. i feel accomplishment whenever i figure out some of the more confusing questions (like the one right above this section, it took me a few seconds to realize that the answer was ‘light’).

knowledge.

the biggest realization that i had while playing the game was how efficient our brains really are in sorting concepts into categories. i never really thought of how my mind organized ideas in my head; of course, i was vaguely aware of the fact that things really are sorted (otherwise, how would i be able to form coherent thoughts?), but not to this extent.

as i was finding the answers to these puzzles, the semantic network approach came to mind. the semantic network approach basically posits that knowledge can be seen as linked concepts, connected through their similarities and can even be arranged in an hierarchical manner. this approach is also heavily related to language, as it relies on meanings to create concepts and cluster them into linked groups. 

to better see this, i’ll pull up an example by terashima (2002):

if, for example, a photo of an automobile were put as one of the four images in the puzzle, i would immediately come up with different concepts that are related to it: the body, its handle, its tires, its brake, even its windshield or the fact that it is used to drive. from these concepts alone, i have a general idea of what the word that the puzzle wants from me is.

to further narrow down my choices, i would have to look at the other photos in the bunch. if, for example, a photo of a screwdriver were presented, i would naturally try and input drive or driver, based on the amount of boxes and the available letters. if a photo of a phone was there, however, i would try to write down mobile, as in [mobile phone] or [automobile]. my answer simply depended on which concepts these photos had in common, and if those concepts described with words could be slotted in the puzzle.

language.

obviously, language would be tied in rather heavily with this puzzle game, as it relies on words—it’s literally in the game’s name. semantics seems to be the most important part of the game to me, as well as one’s ability to speak the language used in the game, which is english. one must know the english language as well as know the meanings of the words to be able to answer the puzzles. otherwise, it is not possible to figure anything out.

lexical ambiguity as well as discourse are also pervasive, as it has been shown in the puzzle again and again that words (that are associated to the photos) can have more than one meaning. to illustrate, here is an example: 

the word is ‘kick’, but it has different meanings in the different photos. the ones on the left side both show kick as something that is done with the leg to exert force (karate kick, kicking a soccer ball), but the images on the left side use kick in a different way (sidekick, a kickstand for the bicycle). lexical ambiguity explains this phenomenon by stating that words can have more than one meaning.

discourse, on the other hand, is also important because it adds context to the photos. this is where the added layer of culture (in this case, pop culture) would have its effect. for example: 

the answer for the image above is ‘happy’. discourse is important because without the knowledge that pies are used for happy celebrations and that pharell williams (bottom left) had a hit song called ‘happy’, one may have more trouble with figuring this particular puzzle out.

do i recommend it?

if you have free time and you like flexing your puzzle-solving skills along with your pop culture knowledge + your wide vocabulary, go ahead! there’s a reason why this game was so big back in 2013-14, and it has a free app, anyway. there’s no reason not to try it out if you’re interested. there were definitely times when i was a little surprised by the answers, or times when i couldn’t figure out the words, but don’t worry! there will be free hints there to help you. :) 

[psychologale]

re/cognition (1).

welcome to my blog, and to the first post of many! right now, i’m about to play hidden kitchen, a hidden object game reminiscent of i spy books, except completely online.

i’ll be using this blog post to write a ‘live’ reaction as i play the game, with commentary on each section of the game until i reach whatever stage i can reach on the first try. after that, i’ll be sharing some insights that relate to the topics discussed in class. 

wish me luck! :D

level 1/10. 

first off, i didn’t realize that pausing was impossible for this game. after taking this screenshot, i realized that the timer wasn’t pausing. it kept ticking down even when i wasn’t playing, which was a bummer because that meant that i wouldn’t be able to type down all my reactions without compromising my score. so, disclaimer: i definitely lost a lot of precious time because of my photo-taking. :(

level 1 was pretty easy; all the items were simple enough to spot, but your brain can definitely make the process a little confusing. because my brain kept filling in ‘details’, like the sizes of the items or where i would normally find them in a kitchen, my eyes tended to skip over some areas where one of the items would be, just because i subconsciously thought that the item was probably somewhere else, or that the item was too small to be the one i was looking for.

these assumptions are called scene schemas, and they got in the way of my item finding. because i was expecting certain items to be in certain spots (i.e. sauce bottles on countertops or shelves, knife racks on countertops), i had more trouble in trying to find them because they would sometimes be in unexpected areas, and my brain wouldn’t register them as the item i was looking for because they’re not in my (subconsciously) assumed area.

level 2/10.

pretty similar thoughts from level 1, though level 2 seemed to be a little harder because of the colors used in the scene. the white background made it much more difficult for me to spot the white items that needed to be found, and i ended up wasting a few precious seconds for an item (i think it was a basic white cup) that was right there, simply because my mind didn’t recognize its outline due to how fast my eyes scanned over the surface.

level 3/10.

not gonna lie, i was kinda sweating in this one. i was worried about the timer going off, and i was preoccupied with trying to find all the white items that were blending in with the counter and the cabinets. because i was so focused on the countertops, i failed to notice that my last item was in the overhead rack for a few seconds, which wasted a ton of time. i was worried because of the low time bonus at this point.

level 4/10.

this stage wasn’t harder than the previous sets, save for the small items blending in with the other items on the back table, as well as the camouflaged stainless steel item right on the stainless steel sink. moments of fixation allowed me to determine which items were which and if they were one of the items that i needed to find. after confirming, i would go back to scanning different areas to look for different features for the rest of the items. i think i was just pressured by the idea that i had to finish everything before the timer ended, but i ended up completing it, yay! i also got nervous because of the time bonus, which was now at a worrying 395.

level 5/10.

oops. my last level for this run. unfortunately, i wasn’t able to complete the entirety of the game (up to level 10), but at least i made it to the halfway point. it wasn’t extremely hard, but the time limit got to me and the game ended right after i completed the level. :/

final score: 2655.

okay, so it’s not the best score. a part of me wants to defend myself by saying that, hey, i was taking the time to think about my insights + take good screenshots, but that’d just be me making a bunch of excuses, which isn’t exactly a fun thing to read about. i enjoyed the game, actually—i’ve always been fond of i spy-ish games, but i usually like playing them without the added pressure of a time limit. 

insights.

spatial attention and visual scanning were both incredibly important in playing searching games such as hidden kitchen. i believe that i was slow in looking for the objects because oftentimes, i was focused on finding one item at a time, rather than somewhat committing all of the items to memory and clicking them as soon as i saw one of the items, which sounds like i was making use of feature search. however, upon reading more about feature integration theory, i realized that it was a better explanation of how i looked for things.

for example, several kitchen items that i, the player, was tasked to find were of a silver (stainless steel) color. whenever i saw a glint of that very color, overt spatial attention would take over, making me pour all my effort in searching for one of the items in the area where i saw some kind of silver. shapes, too, could also be misleading—there were times when the game would ask you to look for two to three similar items, usually sauce bottles which had small differences (like their lid colors and some minute shape differences). 

i think that the game could do better with making the items blend in more with the rest of the scene to make it more difficult. most of the items that the player was made to find had a thicker black outline, which served as a hint that maybe this item was one of the needed things to complete a specific level, making a thick black outline one of the features that my brain tried to look for while scanning the pictures.