Challenge: Neuropsychology (Perception)

Welcome back to my attempt to define how games challenge us by looking at the areas of brain function listed on the Wikipedia entry for Neuropsychology and seeing which ones games test.

I'm skipping Memory as a subset of Learning. I'm skipping Motor Coordination as the use of fine motor skills in most games (and gross motor skills in certain rhythm games) don't require any in depth explanations. The same could be said of this article's subjet, Perception, but it had a couple concepts I found worth mentioning.

What is perception?
Perception (specifically sensory perception) it how the brain turns electrical signals from sense organs into "information". It crosses over with arousal because it's often about which sensory input is deemed important enough to pay attention to.

What types of perception are there?
For gaming, mostly sight and sound are used. Some games also use the relatively crude mechanism of rumble or force feedback to use the sense of touch to convey information.

How does perception work?
We don't really know. But we do know that a lot of factors go into determining whether a stimulus is perceived: intensity, duration, the abilities and limitations of the relevant sense organ (see also: colorblindness in color matching puzzle games), number of competing stimuli; priorities of the perceiver.

How is perception fun?
I wouldn't call perception fun. I'd call it stimulating or engaging. Take the first boss fight in God of War. On the deck of a ship during a storm, the protagonist fights a giant three headed monster. The rain is pouring, the monster is attacking, the music is blaring. It fills the senses to bursting. Then take a horror game. Often times they deprive players of sensory input, letting them guess what might be waiting for them in the silent shadows, making every movement and sound, no matter how brief, no matter how small, cause for concern.

How is perception not fun?
When the the important stimuli are too difficult to distinguish, it can be very frustrating.

Chunking
Since I haven't mentioned this before, chunking (or learning to group incoming data into meaningful groups) is an important part of perception (and learning and memory). Many games tend to have recurring patterns that, once learned, make perception much easier. Instead of seeing a stream of "notes" in a rhythm game, the player sees familiar patterns (something like learning to see arpeggios or chords in sheet music). Much as we learn to see words instead of the letters that comprise them, chunking is how we gain "fluency" in a game's language. It's gratifying to achieve, if the language is an interesting one.

I'll leave the question of what constitutes an interesting language for later.

So what's the takeaway?
While the process of perception may be fairly automatic, any game designer who doesn't understand human perception is probably going to make confusing, unpleasant, and uninteresting games.