So, I admit it, I bought a PSP. I hadn't planned to, but there were tons at Target yesterday, and I figured it was either now or later so might as well make it now.

I had and continue to have doubts about the device. Again and again Sony tries their hand at this notion of an integrated mobile device. Five years ago they made an investment in Palm and started rolling out Clié devices with the same promise of integrated music, productivity, movies, etc. They never seem to get it quite right. It's not an easy task to be sure, but the idea that one device can or needs to serve all those goals may underscore a kind of mobile fantasy... the idea that devices can and should service our every need, wherever we are.

If it weren't for the proprietary media format and the questionable lousy battery life, I'd say the PSP has great potential as a crossover movie/game device. The screen really is beautiful and even at $250 it's a bargain as an alternative to a portable dvd player (plus you get a gaming console). But I'm doubtful that Sony will find a way to make movies on PSP work. You'd have to un-copyprotect your DVD and rip it to Mpeg4 on a 1GB memorystick... illegal, time-consuming, and difficult for the average consumer. The only other option is to pay $20 a go for lousy action movies on UMD. Hopefully Sony will realize that more gamers have young kids now, and we'd happily use the PSP as a cheap portable DVD player if there were content to play on it.

Anyway, among my weekend spoils I picked up the game Lumines. It's a terrific puzzle game, rich with gameplay innovations even though it looks like "yet another block dropping game." I'll talk about those innovations some other time. Today, I want to talk about the weird relationship between Lumines and standardized global intelligence tests.

In addition to standard play, Lumines offers puzzle mode. Here's how one reviewer explains it:

When I started playing puzzle mode I was thrown back to memories of global intelligence tests. That probably sounds perverse to most readers, but my father was a clinical psychologist, and so I have a lot of experience with intelligence tests. He did a lot of occupational rehabilitation for state agencies, and his patients were often late. As a result, I spent a lot of time as a kid sitting around in his private practice, waiting to go home.

To bide my time, he'd often let me "play" the global intelligence measures he used for his patients. I was especially fond of one performance subtests of the popular Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS): block design. David Wechsler, author of this particular measure defined intelligence as "the global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment." The WAIS has two scales, verbal and performance. Block design is among the subtests on the performance scale, and I have fond and vivid memories of it. The test requires the subject to put sets of blocks together to match patterns on printed cards. Each face of the blocks are colored differently, and the subject has to assemble the blocks so that their aggregate arrangement reconstructs the desired pattern. It's a bit like tangrams but the pieces are cubes rather than planes (see the photo at right). I must have completed this measure dozens of times. I became very good at it. I'm sure it completely skewed my ability to take an intelligence test "in earnest," but there's no harm in that.

As I was playing Lumines puzzle mode today, I realized that it is almost exactly like the WAIS block diagrams. The player has to reconstruct a pattern using a finite number of fixed shapes. But the game adds another dimension, the ability -- and sometimes the necessity -- to clear certain blocks in order to create the final pattern. Unlike other puzzle games like Tetris and Zuma and Cubis, Lumines patterns are removed when the player forms squares, and they're only removed when a cursor passes over the proper part of the field -- not automatically.

Some reviewers are calling Lumines the best game on the PSP, a rather amusing fact given that it's not a fancy real-time rendered 3D adventure game -- the apparent preference of the PSP alpha user. As I was musing on WAIS block diagrams, a score of possible research questions streamed out of my Lumines-infected brain. I'm not a psychologist or a even social scientist of any kind, so rather than try to answer them, I'm just going to pose them provocatively here. Maybe someone knows about existing research that might answer these questions.

If the WAIS block diagram is supposed to measure performance intelligence, and if games like Lumines are increasing aptitude in that kind of activity, then what is the real-world correlate? If the test is measuring a specific kind of performance, what kind of activity could a game like Lumines be said to "train?"

Comments (10) | Post a Comment | TrackBack (0)  

Comment from Jean Dupree on April 6, 2005

there is a lumines clone available at

http://www.rit.edu/~jhb4598/jblog/archives/000598.php3

its decent.

Comment from Citizen on April 15, 2005

First off, The psp Beats the frick out of The DS both with sound and it's visuals. I think (opinion) that the PSP is a great groundbreaking peice of equipment and will continue to lead the way how people think of mobile gaming. the fact that you can pick it up, put in your pocket and walk away whilst listening to you music is soo awsome .

Comment from Jean Dupree on April 15, 2005

What's a frick?

Comment from Chris on April 19, 2005

Whats a frick, and what the hell does the psp vs DS debat have to do with this article?

Aside from that, the psp BREAKS NO NEW GROUND. It just does what my ps2 does, portably. the DS does try something new, and in that regard is groundbreaking, but whatever.

Comment from Mike on April 21, 2005

Jean, there is another Lumines Clone available at http://www.frogtoss.com.

Comment from Damian Yerrick on June 4, 2005

I second Mike's recommendation of Verticube. But soon you won't need a PSP to play handheld Lumines, as there'll be a GBA port tentatively called luminesweeper.

Oh, and a "frick" is a polite version of a "f***".

Comment from core19 on December 9, 2005

I cant wiat to get the psp

Comment from Annon201 on January 4, 2006

Much much much <3 for lumines, about the most creative game ive seen for PSP.

Unfortunatally, i cant say much for most of the other games out on PSP yet (as pretty as the graphics are on that screen), they all appear to be the same repedative titles that game companies have been releasing for the last 5 years.

I just need to pick myself up a DS so i can finally get hold of some of the titles that will pioneer the next generation of computer gaming with extremly innovative controlling and real-world interaction ;)

Comment from Arjun Tomar on September 17, 2006

I still ask myself why I took up Computational Media? So that I could create a game in which one could blow up as many aliens as possible or so that I could create a game that would entertain as well as educate ( not in a "preaching" sort of way) ? I think I would like to work on the latter one. We live in a world where one has full faith in " arificial intelligence " but always doubts one's own - which to me is quite shocking!!! Where are we heading? Are we heading towards an age that would see us being governed entirely by the "AI"? Maybe. What can one do? One cannot possibly go back to the stone age (and no one wants to !!!!) and one cannot stop relying on the AI too - they are now an integral part of our lives !!! No , that is not where the solution lies , the solution lies in bridging the gap between AI and human intelligence, a kind of interface that uses AI to challenge us, to make us think, to make us want to beat it- every single time!!! And that brings us to Lumines. A game that not only entertains us but also makes us think !!!! Better than stealing cars and blowing up aliens, dont you think ??? ( I dont deny the fact that you do enjoy blasting those wretched monsters but all the time ???? ) A game that increases our aptitude while entertainig us , what else could one ask for ???

http://www.watercoolergames.org/archives/000367.shtml

Comment from ben orooji on November 26, 2006

Your question of whether scores have increased since the advent of games like Tetris is an interesting thought.

It is interesting that full scale IQ scores actually keep rising and thus every 10 years or so, clinical psychologists are forced to re-do the tests and "norm" them all again, effectively resetting scores back to where they were previously. It is an interesting debate as to whether we are becoming more "intelligent" or becoming more adept at intelligence tests :) Administering only the Block Design subtest is actually a very common method that researchers use to quickly assess a general idea of the participants intelligence. Needless to say, if your thought proved true, that would make such methods a little less valid, unless we were going to control for people who played these types of video games, and how long they play them. I'm sure a researcher interested in assessment would love to run with this idea!!

Ben Orooji, BS
Graduate student
University of Maine,
Clinical Psychology program

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