The Influence of Laterality on Player Choice and Pathing
By: William Tyler Buser
Supervisor: Michael McCoy
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred May 15, 2010
Thesis / Project completed: June 7, 2010

In order to design meaningful and compelling experiences level designers must understand the interests and desires of their audiences. Providing choices within games and their environments are important in order to provide players with a sense of control, and it is just as important to try to understand and foresee those choices. This project examines the possibility of innate subconscious motivations for player choice, specifically player movement and pathing choices. It studies whether laterality, i.e., handedness, influences the preference individuals’ exhibit for the paths or routes they choose in games. Using a series of nine forks, players are presented with near symmetrical pathing choices opposite each other. The hypothesis for this project predicted that a player’s dominant hand determines the player’s innate preference when deciding between two identical choices that would reveal an inherent directional bias.

This study involved the creation of a Gears of War level featuring nine decisions points, forks compromised of equal left and right choices. In total, twenty-seven subjects participated in the study, which included a brief demographic survey and a play-through of the level followed by a more in-depth survey discussing their motivations and preferences. Overall, the study was successful at identifying a bias, preference for one direction over the other in relationship to handedness. However, the hypothesis did not predict the actual results. In fact, the assumed result did not appear at all. The four left-handed subjects had equal balance of left and right bias, where the remaining subjects, all right-handed, had a significant majority who had a large left bias, not a right bias. This does not mean that player pathing patterns are not influenced by laterality, but that there is an inverse relationship and that possible other psychological factors may be at work. The analyzed data suggests interesting trends and a correlation between decision-making and handedness that could serve as a starting point for future research.

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