The Psychology of Video Games

Have you ever wanted to hear me go on about the psychology of video games without that annoying Internet between us? You HAVE? Are you going to be in Seattle, Washington, USA on May 14th at 2pm? You ARE? Well, you’re in luck, because I’m teaming up with some of the folks at GameSpy Technology to lecture at the 2010 Login Conference in beautiful¹ Seattle Washington.

The lecture is entitled The Psychology of Video Games: Why We Do What We Do With Friends (And Screw That Other Guy).²

Nifty title, you say, but you need more info? Fine. Here’s an official sounding summary:

What can decades of research by psychologists tell us about how gamers behave differently when playing video games with strangers versus with friends or alone? Under what conditions will grown men and women in multiplayer games do things like cheat, abuse glitches, hurl vulgarities, form allegiances, return favors, play fair, welcome newcomers, and form communities that persist outside of your game?

Hey, this stuff is human nature, and psychologists and behavioral economists have been looking at these kinds of things in other contexts for a long time. They just use their own jargon –stuff like prospect theory, deindividuation, reciprocity, game theory, social identity building, decision-making heuristics, person-organization-fit, distributive justice, and other fancy terms. Sometimes they even draw diagrams.

In this session, a Ph.D. in psychology who also happens to be an avid gamer will bridge the gap between these two worlds by looking at what the science of psychology has to tell us about why gamers do what they do when they’re in groups and how game designers might leverage these kinks in the human mind to design better experiences for everyone involved. Each topic will be accompanied by a review of relevant scientific research from the fields of psychology and behavioral economics, as well as real-world data from actual gamers to back up the claims and test the hypotheses.

That’s STILL not enough information for you? Okay, okay. Here’s an outline of the actual lecture:

• Introduction
  • Who we are
  • The psychology of video games
  • GameSpy Tech
  • How the two are working together
    • I provide expertise on psychology and research methodology
    • They provide expertise on community building and hard data
  • What we hope to accomplish in this lecture
    • Some education
    • Some entertainment
    • Some solid ideas for things you can experiment with yourself

• The Glitcher’s Dilemma – To cheat, abuse glitches, or play fair?
  • Game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma
    • Concept overview
    • Examples from video games
  • Review of theory and experimental data
    • Classical experiments
    • Effects of knowing the other person
    • Effects of anonymity
    • Effects of replaying games with same person
  • Things you can do
    • Reducing anonymity
    • Facilitating “tit for tat” strategies
    • Increasing the public nature of play

• How to Build an Antisocial Jerk for Fun and Profit
  • Deindividuation – How to make people lie, steal, and cheat (or not)
    • Concept overview
    • Examples from video games
  • Review of theory and experimental data
    • Classical experiments
    • Effects of anonymity on antisocial behavior
    • Effects of being in a group
    • Effects of transferred responsibility
    • Effects of leaders and role models on group behavior
  • Things you can do
    • Reducing (or enhancing) anonymity
    • Facilitate communication and information sharing among groups
    • Provide queues for desired behavior
    • Designate group leaders and reward proper behavior

• Fanboys and Witch Hunts
  • Social Identity Theory – “Us” vs. “Them”
    • Concept overview
    • Examples from video games
  • Review of theory and experimental data
    • Classical experiments
    • How groups form
    • How groups unform
  • Things you can do
    • Providing queues to help groups form
    • Helping groups NOT form
    • Facilitating the sharing of group identities

• Back Scratches All Around – The Power of Reciprocity
  • Reciprocity – Returning favors and building social debt
    • Concept overview
    • Examples from video games
  • Review of theory and experimental data
    • Classical experiments
    • The evolutionary psychology angle
  • Things you can do
    • Build “favors” into your game
    • Allow people to track each other down outside of game
    • Facilitate and frame information about favors
    • Make it about the individual, not the team

• The People (and Orcs) make the place – How Guilds Form
  • The Attraction-Selection-Attrition model of organization development
    • Concept overview
    • Examples from video games
    • Applicability to guilds, clans, fan sites, messageboards, etc.
  • Review of theory and experimental data
    • Classical experiments and theory
    • The importance of leaders
    • The importance culture
  • Things you can do
    • Build tools organizations can use to communicate culture
    • Build tools for leaders to use
    • Build tools for organizations to evaluate new members

• Q&A to Fill Remaining Time

Act now and I’ll throw in this Speaker Biography:

Jamie Madigan has a Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in Industrial-Organizational psychology and works for the federal government as a personnel psychologist. He is a life-long gamer and spent several years in the gaming business at GameSpy Industries where he assisted in the development of many web properties, including FilePlanet.com, arguably the Internet’s largest distributor of game-related files. He currently runs www.psychologyofgames.com, a weblog dedicated to using psychology to understand why game players and developers do what they do.

So, if you’re going to Login by any chance, please come and see me! And bring a friend. Or an enemy. I honestly don’t care which.

1. well, I assume; I’ve only heard nice things [↩]
2. It sounds catchier in my head than in yours [↩]

Time for the monthly post where I lump a bunch of stuff together.

ONE: Hey! Have you heard about this Facebook thing? Yeah, me too. In fact, for some reason I created a Facebook page for Psychology of Games which you can access by performing clicking motions here. So far I’m really just using it to announce new posts, but it gives me a little more freedom to comment on them than Twitter does. If you use Facebook, you should “Like” the page so that you become a fan. Because I like it when numbers get bigger. I’m sorry, but I really can’t give you a better reason than that.¹

TWO: Big thanks to Kyle, Alex, and Emerson for sending donations my way via that Paypal button. I’ve used it to buy a few books, including A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It, and Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between Who We Are and What We Buy. I’m catching up on my reading lately thanks to some travel. I’m particularly looking forward to getting to the latter two, as I’ve been wondering about a few things along the lines of pricing, sales, and the like. In particular I want to figure out why digital distribution systems like Steam can throw up collections like “Every id game ever made, ever” and we’ll all go bananas buying it even though we’ll never play most of them and we already own the rest.

THREE: As a reminder, I’m going to be giving a lecture² at the Login Conference next month. I’m putting the finishing touches on the presentation this week, and by “finishing touches” I mean “starting to write it.” The theme of the talk revolves around what psychology has to say about how gamers behave differently when they’re in groups versus alone, and how the composition of those groups matters. I’m going to be posting a more detailed outline of the lecture this week. If you’re going to be at Login, please come and see me! My talk is entitled “The Psychology of Games: Why We Do What We Do With Friends (and Screw That Other Guy)” and it’s going to be on Thrusday May 13 at 2:00 pm. In the “Harbor” room, apparently, which sounds tres classy. Come shout disruptive things from the back row of seats so that people will mention the session later.

1. Don’t let that stop you, though. [↩]
2. ooh, look at ME, I’m a lecturer! La tee dah! [↩]

I’ve looked at a few kids, like at the store, and one thing I’ve noticed is that they sleep a LOT. Why is that? And while we’re at it, why is it that I spent an entire controller-crushing hour trying to figure out that one level in the puzzle game Braid before giving up and then nailing it on the first try after a good night’s sleep?

Actually, both these questions have a related answer. Sleep, it turns out, is integral to learning. Some psychologists and neurologists believe that sleepy time –especially deep REM sleep– is the time when your brain releases key chemicals to throw up the “under construction” signs and rearrange your neural connections based on what you’ve been exposed to.¹ This is one possible reason why babies sleep so much: they literally have to shut down to assimilate what they’ve taken in.

I used this picture of a sleeping kitty because it was in the public domain. Also, he's so cute!

And in addition to generally refreshing you and resharpening your reflexes, sleep seems to have a similar effect on learning tasks that involve precise, manual finger movements. In one study of this phenomenon² researchers had subjects complete an exercise where they tapped buttons based on what they saw on a computer screen, and if that’s not a dead on description of a video game I’m not sure what is. There was an underlying pattern to the stimulus, and subjects were either told to try and uncover the pattern or they were left to their own insights. When the subjects were invited back to repeat the task, the researchers found that those who had gotten a full night of rest saw dramatic improvements in their performance while those who had just taken a 15 minute break saw no such increase. Other research³ found that a full night of sleep yields a 20% improvement in similar tasks.

But that’s not where the benefits of sleep on task performance end. Other research has shown that sleep also increases creativity and problem solving. So the next time you’re enraged your inability to time a series of jumps or figure out how to make a mustache out of a piece of tape and a cat⁴, try sleeping on it. Let your brain take what it’s gotten and make some sense out of it without your standing there over its shoulder and making demands.

1. Maquet, P. (2001). The role of sleep in learning and memory. a one-year delay. Science 294, 1048–1052. [↩]
2. Robertson, E.M., Pascual-Leone, A. and Press, D.Z. (2004). Awareness modifies the skill-learning benefits of sleep. Current Biology 14, 208-212. [↩]
3. Walker, M.P., Brakefield, T., Morgan, A., Hobson, J.A., and Stickgold, R. (2002). Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleepdependent motor skill learning. Neuron 35, 205–211. [↩]
4. Name that reference in the comments section for bonus points [↩]

Note: This article appeared as my column on GamaSutra and GameSetWatch.

Many of us have been surprised in spite of ourselves when one day we looked up and realized that we’ve been paying for a MMO like World of Warcraft when we haven’t logged on for months. Or maybe we’re reading our e-mail and we get a cheerful note from Microsoft saying that our Xbox Live Gold account has automatically renewed and the charge applied to our credit card. And still we don’t do anything about it. Why not?

Before I explain, consider this graph, showing the participation rates of two groups of employees at an actual Fortune 500 company in a 401(k) savings plan. (For those who don’t know, a 401(k) savings plan lets employees automatically sock away part of each paycheck for retirement. They offer lots of benefits and participating in them is generally a smart thing to do if you don’t want to die of old age on the job.)

Today's kids love hearing about 401(k) savings plans, right?

Can you guess as to why only 49% of people in Group A decided to save for retirement while a comparatively larger 86% of Group B members decided to save? Maybe Group B is full of MBAs, economists, or self-aware computers who are more rational than the drunken chimps in Group A? Nope. Maybe Group A is full of young whippersnappers unconcerned with retirement while Group B is comprised of old geezers? A better guess, but still incorrect.

These groups were actual subjects in a 2001 study by Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea, two economists interested in what happened when a tiny but important change was made to the paperwork related to the 401(k) plan.¹ The only difference between the groups was that the paperwork for Group A required new hires to actively sign up for the savings plan, while the paperwork for Group B automatically enrolled new hires into the savings plan unless they overrode that decision. In other words, people tended to go with the default choice –”Don’t Participate” for Group A and “Participate” for Group B– and the suckers in Group A saved less because they couldn’t be bothered to check one box on one form.²

Psychologists have a term for this reluctance to change from our previous or default decisions: “the status quo effect.”³ Most television programmers use it to glide you from one show to the next, using an established hit with a strong viewership to build an audience for whatever comes after it. It’s even gotten to the point where you move seamlessly from the end of one show to a quick intro to the next without even pausing for a commercial break. Because once they start, most people will continue to watch even though switching to something else is trivially easy.

This is, of course, the same reason why gaming companies prefer that you sign up for an automatically renewing service instead of using prepaid subscription or point cards. It’s also the reason that rental services like Netflix or GameFly offer “Free Trials” that will roll into paid subscriptions if you don’t actively cancel. They even spin it as a benefit: “If you are enjoying Netflix, do nothing and your membership will automatically continue…”

But it’s also important to be aware of the fact that the default choices you’re presented with when signing up for a new service⁴ have much the same effect as the status quo bias. Let’s stick with GameFly and consider this screenshot from the sign-up process:

Oh, which to click?

Notice which option is checked by default: the most expensive one. That’s not by accident. HTML technology is sufficiently advanced so that they could easily have had NO plan chosen by default and could instead require you to make your choice in order to proceed. Instead, they’re taking advantage of the status quo effect and probably getting more people for the $12.95 plan.

Hey, look, Netflix does the same thing!

Hey, cut that out!

Similarly, “Opt out” options are popular among marketers because many people don’t bother with the almost effortless task of unchecking some boxes so that they don’t receive spam or avoid installing some obnoxious toolbar in their web browser.

But you guys, wait! The status quo effect only gets more potent when the task you’re faced with is more difficult or cognitively demanding. In a recent article for Psychology Today, psychologist Kelly McGonicgal discusses some research⁵ that addresses the neuroscience of how this all works. Subjects in this study were asked to make difficult calls about whether a tennis ball was in or out of bounds, but for each trial one of the two possible calls was randomly made the de facto default choice. You can probably head me off at the pass and figure out that people tended to stick with the randomly assigned default choice, even more so when the call was difficult. And according to McGonigal, even considering going against a default choice seemed to increase the activity in the prefrontal cortex (an area associated with decision-making) and increased exchanges between that area and the subthalamic nucleus, a chunk of gray matter associated with motivated behavior. In other words, evaluating something besides a default options literally requires more mental energy.

The status quo effect can work to our benefit, though, as we saw in the 401(k) savings example above. Many games feature built-in tutorials, tooltips, or other pointers for novice players. Often these assists can be turned off, but they are almost always “on” by default because even if you ,make players aware of them, most would probably not bother turning them on if they were off by default and frustration would ensue. For example, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games don’t present tutorials to new players by default. This always seemed weird to me, and I swear I made it through most of the first Guitar Hero without ever knowing about hammer-ons and pull-offs because I had skipped the tutorial.

So beneficial situations aside, how do you guard against the status quo effect when you don’t want it unduly influencing your behavior? For starters you can use prepaid subscription cards instead of automatically renewing subscriptions. I renew my Xbox Live Gold membership each year by using such a card, which has the added benefit of letting me buy the cards when they’re on sale and hold on to them until needed. Heck, even Zynga of Farmville fame is selling prepaid game cards now.

Beyond prepaid cards and canceling free trials before they morph into a paid subscription like a Zerg larvae, just make sure you take the time to look carefully at default options the next time you’re filling something out or agreeing to a terms of service. Especially when it’s a cognitively demanding or confusing task, as that’s when you’re most likely to succumb to the status quo effect. Consider: are those default choices what’s best for you? SPOILER ALERT: no, probably not.

1. Madrian, B. & Shea, D. (2001). The Power of Suggestion: Inertia in 401(k) Participation and Savings Behavior. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 4, 1149-1187. [↩]
2. Actually, it’s not quite that simple, as the study found that new hires also stuck with the default 3% savings rate, while those who actively had to choose their savings rate tended to set aside a higher percentage of their pay. But it’s true in the general case, and if the default had been 6% instead of 3% then they would have saved that much more. [↩]
3. Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books. [↩]
4. or even a 401(k) savings plan [↩]
5. Fleming, S.M., Thomas, C.L., & Dolan, R.J. Overcoming status quo bias in the human brain. PNAS. Published online before print March 15, 2010. doi:10.1073/pnas.0910380107 [↩]

Neuroscientist and avid blogger Jonah Lehrer recently published a great article in the Wall Street Journal about what he and others call “the superstar effect.” The piece is well timed, seeing as it deals largely with the effect that someone like Tiger Woods has on his competition and Mr. Woods has in fact just returned to harass his competitors for the title of “Most Badass Dude Ever at Golf.” Lehrer describes the work of economist Jennifer Brown, who meticulously studied not just Tiger’s performance in high stakes golf games, but the performance of his peers:

Ms. Brown discovered the superstar effect by analyzing data from every player in every PGA Tour event from 1999 to 2006. She chose golf for several reasons, from the lack of “confounding team dynamics” to the immaculate statistics kept by the PGA. Most important, however, was the presence of Mr. Woods, who has dominated his sport in a way few others have.

…

Such domination appears to be deeply intimidating. Whenever Mr. Woods entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even observable in the first round, with the presence of Mr. Woods leading to an additional 0.3 strokes among all golfers over the initial 18 holes. While this might sound like an insignificant difference, the average margin between first and second place in PGA Tour events is frequently just a single stroke. Interestingly, the superstar effect also varied depending on the player’s position on the leaderboard, with players closer to the lead showing a greater drop-off in performance. Based on this data, Ms. Brown calculated that the “superstar effect” boosted Mr. Woods’s PGA earnings by nearly $5 million.

The reason, Lehrer goes on to explain, is that when faced with such an overwhelming favorite in the odds, people tend to short sell themselves and not give their best performance, as if the outcome is predetermined. And what’s worse is that this need not even take place in our conscious thought to have an effect. And what’s worse than that is the fact that the phenomenon seems to be most potent with more experienced players. Veteran golfers play a good chunk of their game on autopilot, not wasting mental energy over analyzing every tiny movement, angle, or twitch. But when Tiger Woods is on the fairway, they may begin to overthink their strokes, their choices, and their plan –to engage in too much of what psychologists call “action identification.” The result is that they change the way they play and play worse as a result because they’re wasting their finite concentration on things that didn’t need it yesterday. Writer Malcom Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame also has a nifty article about this phenomenon, which you can read here.

When we talk about someone “psyching out” the competition, this is what we mean, and it appears to jive with actual scientific research. The WSJ article goes on to discuss how this same phenomenon happens in other competitive environments outside of golf, such as law firms or the executive boardrooms of General Electric, and how it’s especially potent in “winner take all” situations.

…Like, say a game of StarCraft! In the realm of video games, what this all made me think of is the importance of proper matchmaking based on skills and how some games seem to do it a lot better than others. Whenever I jump in to competitive game of Modern Warfare 2, for example, I can’t seem to take four steps without getting owned because everyone else in that game seems to be SO MUCH BETTER than I am. I think many of us have been in a poorly mached game where we round a corner to face the person dominating the top spot on a scoreboard and we just sort of sigh and wait to get headshot rather than try and fight back, especially if we’re squatting at the bottom of the rankings. Halo 3, on the other hand, always seems to group me with people closer to my skill level, and I have a lot more fun and win a lot more matches as a result.

A list of the people who would crush me in any given game of StarCraft II.

The superstar phenomenon is something that Blizzard seems to be actively trying to avoid in its ranking system for StarCraft II with its bronze, silver, and whatever levels of play and the ability to see the ranking of your opponent. Though not perfect and obviously still being tweaked, the system seems to go to great lengths to match players with opponents of similar skill. So I can be relatively sure that I’m not going to waste time second guessing my build order or metagame because I was matched against Tiger Woods, who in the context of this game would be some Korean dude who has been playing StarCraft for 12 hours a day for the last 10 years.