Mental Model [Definition]:
“A mental model is a person’s internal representation of external reality, based on their learning and experience”, and the key principle of a mental model is the way of how one thinks something will work based on his/her learning and experience.
The first thought that occurred to me when I first started playing Frog Fractions, was that the game was somehow related to mathematical fractions (1/2, 1/4, 1/8) and so on and that it would be educational. The word “Fractions” in my experience always related to math and learning. When I started playing the game however, every bug I was killing was giving me random fractions that meant nothing and the score was also shown in fractions which was not something I was used to and the numbers weren’t making any sense. I had no idea what zorkmids and indignity meant in the game and the only thing that was making sense was the fruit that I was collecting which allowed me to upgrade my skills.
In the game I started off on a lily-pad killing bugs which made sense considering that my character was a frog, and with upgrades I moved on to a turtle which was weird but acceptable and then all of a sudden I found myself riding a dragon which was a whole new level and left me perplexed. After continuing to kill bugs and collecting more fruit, I searched for more upgrades and one of these upgrades required 25,000 fruit, which was a lot for the progress I was making. It went from beginner mode, to highly advanced in terms of fruit collection in a very short time. Now for someone who plays a lot of games, progress usually builds up slowly over-time. I later found out that I could take my dragon-rider frog to another screen when moving downwards and in the bottom I found a lot of fruit and when collecting them, the status changed to “Fruit: Like a billion”, so now not only did I have enough for that 25,000 fruit upgrade skill, but could also upgrade ANY skill. This game went from extremely easy to extremely hard and back to extremely easy again in just a matter of seconds.
The game goes on like this for a while and at one point, in order to progress, one must enter user commands, similar to coding your own frog to do stuff, after which the frog character morphs into a person with a very cringy animated head (the developer’s) which simply put, left me speechless.
Conclusion: The game went against and broke down my mental model of how a normal game is played which in my humble opinion, I found distasteful and not to my liking.
References
Nichols, Jamal (2017). UX Design Basic: Mental Models [online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gM8K4ooavY [Accessed 13 May. 2018].
Melvin Magro 