The goal of the thesis was to conduct a pilot study researching the effect of entrainment and to see if it can be used as a way to synchronize videogame players to the games they play. I wanted to see if I could use entrainment to increase a videogame player's ability to play a videogame by synchronizing the player's actions to a piece of videogame music that I had created for this pilot study then changing the tempo of the music during gameplay. I conducted a test in this pilot study to see if entrainment could be used as a kind of 'super sense' to get the players to react faster in the game, learn the rules and mechanics of the game faster, and ultimately complete the game quicker.
I wanted furthermore to see if a player's experience of time could be distorted by changing the tempo of the videogame music during gameplay; perhaps one could influence a player's perception of time by using tempo changes in music. This could be used as a technique in game developers' games and could easily be included to get people to play their specific games for longer durations.
I examined these effects by performing an experiment with a clone of the game Space Invaders that I had made with unique features for this particular experiment. I had a total of 15 participants for this pilot study, all with different backgrounds and relationships to videogames.
The result of the pilot study showed that participants with the game music increased in tempo showed an ability to use the mechanics of Space Invaders faster once they knew the core mechanics of the game. The participants with the decreased tempo in the music showed mixed results with none of the participants showing a noteworthy peak in performance.
The time distortion experiment did not show any trends toward a collective response from all of the participants.