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I know how to win Mecha Chameleon. And by using a little bit of science, you can turn this Friends vs. Hide and Seek game into psychological warfare. Hello, Internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that has hidden the subscribe button somewhere in this room. Click the subscribe button if you can see it. Wow, you're good at this. Probably because, like me, you've been playing a whole lot of Mecha Chameleon. Yes, it is pronounced Mecha. It's a Japanese word that means very, extremely, or super. So, super chameleon, which makes sense. It's a classic prop hunt style game, but instead of getting random objects to hide as, you have to color yourself right into the background. Or not, if you're me and have whimsy.
Damn, yeah. I can't find Tom anywhere. Have you guys seen anybody? I found my friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, but I didn't find Tom anywhere. Wait, you found Oh, Spider-Man. Shoutout to Mr. Tom Live, by the way. But, I have been having a lot of fun with this game, and it's been all I've been seeing other streamers play for the past few weeks. I'm unreal. I'm [screaming] I got overconfident. in there. Find your place in Oh my gosh. Oh, yeah. She got it. Wow, she got it. And I get it. It's a classic hide and seek recipe with a fun twist, which is a recipe for endless fun. Heck, they even
sold 10 million copies in just a couple of weeks. But, the cool thing about Mecha Chameleon is that it's not just about who survives. Instead, each player gets awarded points based on a few different factors. Of course, a hider will get points for simply being the last one found, but there's more to it than that. They get points for being near the hunter, or if they're in the hunter's direct line of sight but don't get caught. If a hunter is looking right at you, but you're camouflaged, you'll get more points. So, if you really want to win this game, you need to do a little more than just finding the most remote spot on the map and holding your breath. There's a bunch of psychology
that goes into a game like this, and I have all the tools you need to exploit your friends' brains all the way to victory. Grab your paintbrushes, theorists, as we help you become completely invisible in Metamorph Chameleon. One of the main mechanics of the game is that your avatar can have a selection of poses. Lots of variety to choose from, but two or three of these poses are far superior than the others. Mostly lying flat and the ball. But picking which one depends on your surroundings. If you are in a sparse environment with not a lot of clutter and plain open spaces, your best bet is the lying flat position. This is because
a lying flat pose lowers the object's vertical profile and can reduce edge contrast against the floor or other flat surfaces. Which, when there's nothing else going on, helps you to remain hidden. Studies have found that visual search is guided by what we're expecting to see. So, hunters tend to scan at likely human height position and for upright body configurations. Maybe that explains why gamers don't look up. A flattened starfish pose like this, either on the floor or the ceiling, is going to fall outside the brain's default human template, making it harder for the brain to even register you're there. The same principle can apply to the laying sideways pose, which can be
useful if you're trying to be up against a flat wall as opposed to the floor or ceiling. You're essentially working against your friend's brain's hardwired psychology. The other pose that works really well is the ball, especially in cluttered spaces where there's so much happening visually that the human brain doesn't really process each and every item with the same amount of detail. It instead relies on peripheral processes making sense of everything fast. This is a phenomenon called crowding. Crowding causes our vision to interpret busy areas more like a summary or texture than a set of separate objects. you can go, "Those are a bunch of balloons." But the brain isn't picking out each and
every balloon, their color, their shape, or their size. So, just like that, you ball up and you will blend right in. This could work with any pose in theory, but a rounded more compact pose can be read as part of the general visual noise rather than a long, obviously body-shaped thing. These poses are a great starting place to remain undetected. But after playing a couple of rounds of this, your friends might start to catch on. So, it's time to kick it up a notch and figure out ways to alter your shape further than just the poses the game gives you. You got to break up the human silhouette even further, and we can do this by using the environment to our advantage in two different ways: figure-ground segmentation and disruptive camouflage.
Figure-ground segmentation involves using an object in the room to conceal part of your body. Imagine a lying posed against a wall, but your head and shoulders are blocked by a box. Now, the only visible part doesn't really resemble a human shape, and once again, the human brain fails to detect it as such. But, if you want to get more technical with the painting feature in this game, you can also break up the shape using disruptive camouflage. Disruptive camouflage works by interfering with how the visual system of the brain finds edges and separates figures from backgrounds. But, it does it differently to what we've already looked at. Rather than making an object vanish completely, it makes the
brain more likely to misread the outline or assign part of the outline to the background instead of a body. This works by having multiple different patches or markings to make the hunter see several shapes and boundaries instead of one human-shaped one. This is actually why army camo looks the way it does. It breaks up the human shape and makes them less readable. Tiger stripes also work the same way. So, in the context of Magic Chameleon, the best way to do this is to find a textured wall with lines and patterns on things that allow you to create additional lines and shapes within your silhouette. Things like paintings or decently textured walls. But, we can actually take this technique
and turn up the stealth. By placing your body in between two environments or boundaries like between a wall and a door frame, your outline gets split up into context-dependent sections. So, the hunter sees multiple edge systems instead of one unified silhouette. And now, they have to decide whether the border belongs to the person or the room itself. This is called edge disruption. What you're doing is making the brain have to process a lot more in order for them to spot you. And because this game is on a time crunch, there's a good chance that they're rushing their room scans and will miss you entirely. And
even if they do look thoroughly, they may look right at you and not see you because you're between two boundaries and they can't make it out. Meaning you get all the points and remain hidden. Now, while these techniques are pretty solid, in order to guarantee a win, you're going to want to combine this with other things human vision picks up on, color. The basic advice is obviously just match the color of the wall you're hiding against. Duh, doy. This is even easier because you can get the exact color of the wall with the paint feature. There's not really a secret to this. That being said, there are colors that the brain will give less attention
to and that's a shadow. For the record, this isn't just black, but blending into a color of the shadow cast on the wall is going to keep you under the hunter's radar. See, the human mind processes a shadow to be an absence or a reduction in light and is interpreted as part of the object rather than as the object itself. Basically, the shadow is there to tell you where the object is in reference to the light source. And so, we don't really scan the shadow as anything. That means a shadowy shaped body can exploit the same system of the brain, making hunters less likely to detect something within the shadow. So, hiding in the shadows is a solid choice.
However, this runs into the issue of not always getting the most points. We're not here to survive the game, we're here to win. Hiding in the shadows is going to keep you from getting caught, but we want to be somewhere that is right in the open, somewhere everyone will look at us while not spotting us. And here's the thing, color is a key factor to human vision just like shape, but it's not the most important value that human vision detects. Studies have found that brightness and contrast are usually more important than color or shape for spotting objects because the visual system is strongly tuned to light-dark boundaries and contrast. The reason being that form, depth, and motion rely on brightness-based circuitry.
So, the shape is kind of covered in that. Color is then layered on later rather than being the first thing vision uses to build the scene. That means that a high-contrast shape or color can be noticed quicker. Simply put, the brain often finds borders first and then fills in the surface afterwards, which is why shadows are a good option. So, we need to make sure we don't allow a clear outline to be made. We should stick with our edge camouflage tactic, but also try to avoid extremely well-lit areas, as this will affect the ability to find a body border. You may have a good position and be colored right, but if you're directly under a light, that may not be enough. There's also contrast. If
you lie flat on a wall or floor, that is naturally going to cause a contrast in the brain. The flat surface has a raised part. Suddenly, you have created an outline of a target. Not good. But, if the background already has ridges, bumps, and is uneven, then a raised body is less unusual and less likely to stand out during the scan of the room. The terrain itself is basically doing some of the camouflage work by absorbing your body into it. Similar to the cluster background argument we had before with the ball shape. What's key to know here is that the human brain does not measure color. It looks for irregularities in the environment like surface structure. So, you don't want to rely on just color. Hide in dimly lit places, places
that use darker colors that provide less contrast, a human bump isn't an unusual shape. Okay, so you know what shape to be and what colors will work in our favor. But, how do we pick where to hide? Hiding in a corner is great, but what's the best position that is going to leave hunters not knowing where you are, even though they are looking right at you? And something I've seen a lot of people do when playing this game is hide up high. This seems to be most people's instinct when hiding. And this is because of an evolutionary survival trait called vertical attention bias. This is the idea that our minds direct our attention to the tops of objects and the bottom of scenes. So, to a human,
the hardwired response when searching is to look down at something, as that is where threats and useful objects are most likely to be, not up high. So, by hiding up, you are going against the response to look down and therefore less likely to be found. Plus, like I said before, gamers don't look up. Except, that doesn't seem to work in this game. More often than not, when watching people play Match Chameleon, hunters are fighting their game instincts and immediately looking up in the room. And so, the people that were hiding up there get caught first. This isn't because their vertical attention bias is wrong, it actually proves it as well as another searching theory called fatal
attraction. Fatal attraction is the idea that a good hiding spot is actually where someone will go looking first. So, while hiding up high may work theoretically, because other hunters know that's a good place to hide, it's the first place they look. And the reason this is the go-to method, particularly in Metric Million, is because of the time limits. Yes, the countdown at the top of the screen, whether you realize it or not, is massively affecting your searching tactics. Because there's a time limit, your brain chooses not to carefully scan every detail in the room, and instead prioritizes places they think are more likely for you to hide. It's a technique used by TSA agents when searching items in your luggage. They don't have time to
look through everything, so they scan the typical areas. So, what's happening in the game is rather than exhausting the obvious spots, hunters will go straight for the spots they think are good hiding spots. They go against the vertical attention bias. This is going to make the game increasingly difficult because the more you play with your friends, the better you all come to know the good hiding spots. And now those good hiding spots are actually bad hiding spots, which means it's time to get reverse psychology on these people. Because now that we know what the hunters' go-to strategy is, we can hide in much easier spots and remain undetected. If hiding in the corners of
the map is now too obvious, the best strategy is hiding in plain sight. You've probably heard that phrase before, and it exists because it actually works. And once again, it's all down to how our brains scan the room. See, the more experienced a hunter is, the less likely they are to look in places that they expect to be irrelevant, like say the middle of the floor. No one's going to hide in the middle of the floor, that's crazy. Crazy enough to work, because now they aren't even bothering to look there and only in the sneaky places. By using all the techniques we've discussed, a hunter is likely to overlook where you're hiding, because there's nothing triggering the
brain to look closer. And it's actually the skilled hunters who suffer the most from this hiding tactic. Researchers tested out this concept by placing an image of a gorilla into fingerprint images, and then showing them to professional fingerprint analysts as well as people who had never analyzed fingerprints before. The expert fingerprint analysts were more likely than the newbies to miss the large gorilla. And this is because the experts knew what to look for and what to focus on, totally ignoring irrelevant information to the task like the gorilla. Whereas the newbies had no idea what to look for and so paid more attention to the whole picture and spotted the gorilla. We can use a similar psychology to our advantage in Metamorph Chameleon. Didn't think we'd
be using so much psychology to win a Hide and Seek game, did you? If you're playing with expert hunters or you've done so many rounds people are just getting really good, hide in a spot that's a little more obvious. The experts are too busy looking up high, in corners, under tables. They aren't looking down at, say, the stairwell, which is somewhere everyone has to walk through to get to a good hiding spot. And that spot actually becomes the most hidden spot because no one will think to look there because it's a bad hiding spot. That can also ensure that you get people unintentionally looking at you because they're just running past to get somewhere else. You'll be racking up points in no time. But I have one final
position that is even better than the hiding in plain sight tactic. It combines everything we've looked at and takes it up a notch to ensure that you don't get caught and the people are looking right at you. It goes back to our time limit factor. Because there's a limit, your hunters are looking to scan each room as quickly as possible while still effective. This is why they go for the good hiding spots first. But there's another thing you can do to take advantage of this tactic. Hide near another hider, particularly if they're a bad one, because of something called satisficing. Satisficing is a decision-making strategy used under a perceived time pressure when your brain
feels like they have done a good enough job scanning the area that you're searching. So, by hiding near someone else, you can take advantage of this. If you hide near someone who is more likely to get caught first, the hunter is going to assume that they've completed this area because they found a hider and so will look for other hiders elsewhere. This means you could use the hiding plain sight tactic in the same room where someone else is either hiding badly or just hiding in one of the good spots which we've highlighted quickly become the bad spots. Now, you're flying under the radar because not only do the hunters search in the more sus areas and ignore the simple spots. Once they find
another hider in the area, it's unlikely to be checked again because they've already been there and found someone. It's the same strategy of them going, "No one would be dumb enough to hide there." So, they discount it. So, by picking an unsuspecting spot in a dark and shadowy place, whether that's textured or cluttered, in a position that breaks up the human silhouette near someone else who is bad at the game, you have a pretty super fire way of staying undetected, which will actually open the door for possibly the most important advantage of all, search fatigue. Search fatigue is where after an extended period of searching, the hunter will become less and less accurate.
Scientists have even tested this and added time pressure as a factor. They found that while seekers were initially more accurate and thorough in their search, their performance declined. They felt more rushed and so spent less time looking at everything. Stacking this with satisficing and hiding in the same room as another hider means as time goes on, the hunters are even less likely to find you because the time pressure is making them less accurate and their minds refuse to look in the same spot they already found someone because it's seen as a waste of time. And with that, you have everything you need to indeed become a master chameleon. I'm even going to be putting this to the test
myself with the other hosts over on GT Live Monday, July 6th. So, come by and see how I do. But in the meantime, friends, remember, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching. World premiere on Game Theory. Hey there, howdy all. Welcome to GT Live.
