The Psychology of Video Games

Steam, the digital game distribution platform owned by Valve, often has these weird bundles for sale where they cram together, for example, every id Software or every Rockstar game or every game featuring squirrels into one package. One message board I frequent has a mega thread dedicated to gaming bargains, and doing a search for “Damn you, Steam” produces results like these:

“Damn… maybe I want Colonization. Have CIV IV & BTS on Disc. Should I just get Colonization @ $10.19 or just get them all and have on Steam for a wee bit more. Damn you Steam.”

“Damn you Steam! More games to buy that I’ll probably never get to play.”

“Damn you Steam. I had just successfully resisted the urge to buy games at both the holiday sale from GoGamer (Heroes of M&M 5 Complete and EU:Rome at $10 each were tempting, and Company of Heores Opposing Front for $5 is a steal) and the last round of Steam Deals (King Arthur especially was calling my name), and now you put Civ IV complete (I own none of the Civ IV stuff) out there for $14. My game backlog can’t take much more of this!!”

“This is madness. I am buying games for a theoretical PC that I will build someday (maybe) so I can play them. Damn you, Steam.”

“Got $170 sitting my cart. Staring at it trying to figure out how to cut it down some. Damn you, Steam.”

People are talking like Steam is forcing them to pounce on such deals when they happen even though they already have a huge backlog and may actually already own physical versions of half the games included.

What makes these plainly ridiculous bundles so attractive? I’m glad you asked, because I can think of at least three psychological principles at play here.

Scarcity

First, In marketing there’s a well worn principal called “the scarcity effect.” When something is scarce, it automatically becomes more desirable to us than it would be if it were available everywhere we looked. This “available in limited number” trick shows up everywhere from collectable trading cards to special “limited” editions of new game releases.¹ Ever noticed a store front that had a “going out of business!” sign in the window for months on end? That’s the owners trying to capitalize on the scarcity effect. Buy now, sucker, or it’ll be gone!

Consider a simple 1975 experiment by psychologist Stephen Worchel to provide an illustration of this concept involving baked goods.² Posing as a consumer products survey, the experimenters offered subjects a chocolate chip cookie from one of two jars. One of the jars had many cookies in it. The other had only a few. Of course, people reported the cookies from the mostly empty jars as more delicious, more desirable, and more expensive. This despite that the cookies in both jars WERE THE SAME COOKIES.

But Steam and similar download services like Direct to Drive sells digital games, right? They’re not cookies that are about to disappear, there is literally an UNLIMITED SUPPLY of the 1s and 0s that comprise these digitally distributed games. True, but the scarcity effect still applies, because it’s not so much the scarcity of the physical product that we react to, but the opportunity to buy it. Often these bundles are put up a limited time sales and people HATE losing opportunities to do things once they think they’re within reach.

Notice the WEEKEND ONLY! verbiage. Act now or you'll lose!

Obscuring True Value

The second psychological principle at play here is the fact that it’s hard for shoppers to look at a bundle like that and understand what its true value is. William Poundstone, author of Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) calls this the “value meal” strategy when describing the psychology of restaurant menu design. How much cheaper is it to get the bundle? What about if I super size it? With curly fries? Oh forget it, just give me the #3.

Likewise, we look at a massive bundle of digitally distributed games and think about how much could I get those older games for elsewhere? Could I find them for sale used, and for how much? Could I rent or borrow any of them? For the games I already own, how much is it worth to me to have them available through Steam so that I don’t have to dig out my old boxes and CD keys? It’s a psychological truism that we have limited cognitive processing power at any one time, and when our brains are tied up considering these questions, we’ve got fewer cycles to devote to thinking about other stuff, like how much we want to actually PLAY the games and to avoid other irrational pitfalls.

Not that this keeps the folks who run Steam from telling us exactly how much the bundle is worth, though, which brings me to the third psychological factor in play: anchoring.

Anchoring

In the context of the psychology of prices, anchoring refers to presenting shoppers with a number in order to get them to “anchor” their perceptions of value on either a high or low absolute. The “low ball” offer is the classic example –open a negotiation over price with a really low number and you’ll set the stage so that what you’re actually willing to pay looks higher in comparison.

As a simple but elegant example, consider an experiment done by psychological wizards Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.³ The researchers asked one group of subjects to estimate the product of these numbers:

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

And then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8.

Those of you with a grade school education may know that because of how multiplication works these products are equal.⁴ Yet the average estimate for the group that was given the problem starting with “8″ was 2,250 while those who saw a “1″ at the beginning of the problem had an average estimate of just 512. Why? Because one group anchored on a high number and the other anchored on a low number.

Similarly, behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his collegues conducted a study⁵ where he used anchoring in an auction simply by having bidders write down the last two digits of their social security number at the top of their bid sheets. Those whose numbers ended in the 80s and above actually were willing to pay up to 346% more for things like wine and chocolates than were those whose social security numbers ended in the 20s or below. CRAZY.

Not one, but two anchors here

How does this relate to those Steam bundles? Well, look closely at one of those promotions and you’ll see that the marketing gurus for the service readily list the retail value of the bundle if you paid full price for all games individually. That’s your anchor; seeing that number will cause many people to set their perceptions of the bundle’s value much higher than if they had seen the sale price alone. In addition, the difference between the “unbundled” and sale prices can trigger the contrast effect, which could be considered a fourth psychological principle at play.

So there you have it: you’re broke and have way too many games to play because you don’t want to lose opportunities to buy something, you’re befuddled by pricing, and your perceptions are anchored by arbitrary “normally sells for…” prices. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play Commander Keen, Doom, Final Doom, Doom II, Doom 3, Hexen, Hexen II, Heretic, Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and more mission packs than I care to think about.

1. Which usually aren’t all that limited in all actuality [↩]
2. Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975). Effects of supply and demand on rating of object value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 906-914. [↩]
3. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131. [↩]
4. The answer to both is 40,320 if you were wondering [↩]
5. Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). Coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preference. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 73-105. [↩]

Last Thursday I did a talk at 2010 Login Conference in super nifty downtown Seattle. The title of the talk was “The Psychology of Games: Why We Do What We Do When Playing With Friends (And Screw That Other Guy).” I was pretty proud of myself for getting a talk accepted when it included a mild vulgarity in the title and had promised to make the slides and my notes available on the site after the conference. BEHOLD:

Perform clicking motions above to download a .pdf version of the presentation, including my stupid little personal notes.

Anyone who is a regular reader of this site may be a little disappointed, though, because it may appear that most of the talk was based on articles I’ve already posted here. Not true! It’s actually the case that the articles posted here were based on the lecture. I had to submit a detailed outline with my proposal several months ago, and after it was accepted I decided to create blog posts out of the stuff I was pulling together for the talk. In academia, we call this technical process “squeezing blood out of a stone.” Or a turnip. Your choice.

Anyway, I think the talk went fairly well, and I was pleased to see a handful of regular readers/commenters there.¹ One of them (“Psychochild” I think) even did some impromptu group participation by shouting out “Line B!” in the part of the lecture illustrating the social proof concept. When I get up in front of a crowd I actually don’t see it when I look at it, but I was told later that the room was mostly full and people were taking notes. Because the computer that I was using chewed up some of my notes formatting I got a little lost and missed making a few points, but I think I got the main points and came in just about 30 seconds under the 60 minute time limit. Look, here’s even a picture of me gesturing in a semi-academic way:

"Rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, that the quality of this presentation is such that several of the slides within contain extreme vulgarities."

And so, with that I’m going to shut up about this whole Login talk thing for a while. All the talks were video taped, however, so I’ll break that silence once the conference folks post them online for you to view. Not just for mine, but also because there were several other really good talks with psychological angles on things like addiction, motivation, and mental accounting that I think anyone visiting this site² would be interested in. So I’ll highlight those once they’re available.

1. HI GUYS! THANKS FOR COMING! [↩]
2. Besides those of you who are web search engine spiders [↩]

You may have heard about a little outfit called “Irrational Games” whose members can claim varying degrees of responsibility for scary and suspenseful titles like System Shock, Bioshock, and the Thief games. They do a semi-regular podcast about their games called “Irrational Behavior” that is a bit like a cross between “This American Life” and Grand Ballroom C at a tourettes syndrome convention. It’s great.

A recent episode is of particular interest to me, as it deals with the psychology of fear and what people are afraid of. Podcast producer Shawn Elliot had actually approached me to appear on the episode to talk about the psychology of fear, but while I would have loved to I had to admit that I didn’t really know anything about the topic and should probably pass. That was probably a good call, as Shawn got some nifty information by talking to an actual expert, Indiana university Telecommunications Professor Andrew Weaver who has studied fear in different kinds of media:

Fear is arousing. Arousal in and of itself can be enjoyable or attractive if we’re bored or if we’re the type of person who likes to be more physiologically aroused. And fear certainly can do that. Experiencing mediated fear gives us the opportunity to experience fear in a controlled way. Where we have the potential, at least, to master our fears, to control threats, in a way that we can’t in real life.

And he goes on. In addition to that, there are interviews with some of the artists at Irrational Games about how they create a sense of fear, and it seems that these folks have as good a grasp on the subject as any psychologist. It’s a good listen. Click here.

Shawn also goes around the Irrational Games offices quizzing people on what they’re afraid of, and some of the answers are pretty funny. By the way, if he had asked me, I would have said “Jupiter.” As in the planet. For some reason the thought of something that big, that far away, and that alien scared me as a kid. I still tense up just a little bit if I see a picture of that particular planet.

What about you? What are you afraid of? Has it ever showed up in a game?

A while back I wrote an article about the Attraction-Selection-Attrition model that I thought could explain why gamers choose what guild, clan, or message board community that they do. You can read the article for the details, but the gist of it is that people…

• Are attracted to organizations that share their values
• Are selected by organizational membership gatekeepers based on how well their values match the organizational culture
• Leave organizations over time as their values become (or are revealed to be) out of synch with the organizational culture

Founders, early members, and leaders have a disproportionate impact on defining values, which we call the “organizational culture.”

Recently we’ve been hearing an awful lot about two high profile closed game betas: StarCraft II and Halo Reach. It occurred to me that the ASA model of organizational choice could actually be applied to explain what kinds of people are attracted to closed betas and what lasting effects they have on player bases.

You have failed the secret group handshake!

First, people who like the game series and the subculture around it are attracted to the beta. These are probably going to be your most hardcore fans –people who gush enthusiasm for the game and everything that goes with it. Casual fans or non-fans are not likely to even be interested at this point without coaxing.

Second, those fans are willing to go through some pretty crazy hurdles to get selected for membership into that beta testing group. They’ll preorder your nutso collector’s edition. They’ll subscribe to services they don’t want just to get into the beta, or they’ll buy Halo ODST as much for the Reach beta code as the game. And we all heard those stories about early StarCraft II beta keys going for hundreds of dollars or more on places like eBay.

All along the way, the beta testers are defining the culture for the group by forming explicit or unstated but understood agreements about what kind of behavior is allowed, encouraged, or unwanted. If everyone in the Halo Reach beta is foul-mouthed and hyper-competitive how much of that do you think is due to those shared expectations formed by early adopters eager to get selected into those ranks?¹

The third piece of the model is admittedly a little sketchy, as the beta group doesn’t really experience attrition of these fans in the same way that employers have employee turnover. If a beta opens up to the public or a game goes retail the hardcore beta tester groups aren’t likely to leave² but there MAY very well be tension between the old beta testers and the new “scrubs” that flood the game. And beta testers may try to create their own sub-groups and isolate themselves in their own sub-culture.

Anyone have personal experience with this kind of thing?

1. Answer: quite a bit, though it’s worth noting that it’s also a carry-over from the previous games. [↩]
2. Unless they think the game isn’t worth paying for, but that’s another issue [↩]

Note: This article originally appeared in my column for Gamasutra.

Okay folks, I’m going to nerd out a bit but bear with me. There was this show that my wife used to like watching called Star Trek: The Next Generation. In one episode Captain Picard is being held captive by the Evil Alien of the Week. Said Evil Alien twirls his space mustache, gestures to a bank of four lights, and asks Picard how many lights he sees. When Picard says “Four” Evil Alien is all like “No way, dude, there are FIVE lights,” but Picard is like “F you, buddy. There are only four lights.” Also there are painful electric shocks involved, but Picard refuses to see five lights.

Turns out that most of us is no Jean Luc Picard¹ because we’re apt to disbelieve evidence obvious to our own eyes when the conditions are right. And we don’t even need a big scary alien dude looming over us; all we need are a few strangers in the room with us saying that they totally see five lights.

In the 1950s psychologist Soloman Asch conducted a series of experiments² where he gave members of a group an index card with a line drawn on it. Asch then projected a set of three different lines onto a screen and asked subjects to identify which one matched the one on the cards. All three lines on the screen were different, so it was a task so simple that anyone with two eyes and a brain behind them could get it right every time. Heck, in a pinch one eye would do. It looked kind of like this:

Which of the lines on the right matches the one on the left?

And so subjects performed admirably for the first three rounds or so. But eventually one or two subjects in the group started to immediately give answers that were obviously wrong. Like saying Line A was the longest when it was clearly the shortest. Very quickly, more and more subjects started repeating the obvious mistake, saying things that would clearly look wrong to any starship Captain.

WTF? What was going on? Well, what was going on was that only one of the subjects in the experiments was actually a subject. The rest were actors in the employ of the experimenter³ and were purposely jumping in with obviously wrong answers just to see what the real subject would do. Turns out that in three quarters of the subjects in these experiments let their choice be influenced by the others, even when it should have been obvious that this was bananas.What’s more, in post-experiment debriefing interviews, subjects rationalized their choices by saying that their initial observations must have been wrong if everyone else was saying the opposite. They weren’t just PRETENDING to see things differently, they REALLY DID.

Turns out that when the tasks become more difficult or have less clearly defined “correct” answers, the phenomenon becomes even more accute. Asch did some follow up studies where he asked subjects questions about politics (such as what were the most critical political issues of the day) and found that he could influence people’s answers by inserting confederates into the group who asserted certain answers. Other studies have shown that bartenders or barristas can get you to tip more if they prime their tip jars with their own cash, simply because it makes you think that everyone else is tipping generously⁴ These studies ties in with a lot of other things we know about human nature when it comes to conformity, submission to authority, and peer pressure. We’re often very willing to look to our peers –or even complete strangers– to define reality for us.

So what does this have to do with video games? Glad you asked. I’m sure you’ve noticed that you can’t shop on many online stores these days without being shown the ratings given to each product by other shoppers. Go shop for a new release on Amazon.com or GameStop.com and you’ll see user ratings quite prominently. Most websites that feature game reviews also have user reviews alongside their “official” ones, and file download sites like FilePlanet.com list not only download counts, but star ratings as well. See where I’m going with this? Well, keep reading anyway.

In their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness⁵ authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe a study by sociologist Matthew Salganik and his colleagues at Princeton⁶ where the researchers had over 14,000 people visit a faux music download site and browse through music by previously unknown bands before deciding which songs to download. Half the subjects were asked to pick songs based just on song name, band name, and a sample.⁷ The other half had all that info, but could also see how many times the song had been downloaded. Psychologists are always pulling crap like this.

What do you think happened based on what I’ve written so far above? Well, turns out that subjects exposed to the download counts were WAY more likely to download songs that they thought others had downloaded lots, and were WAY LESS likely to try music that they thought nobody else was choosing. The quality of the song still mattered, but so did how often subjects thought the song had been downloaded by their peers. Songs that did so-so in the control group were turned into smash hits among those in the experimental group simply by displaying their download counts.

Now, I’m not accusing Amazon.com of inflating its ratings to sell more books⁸. And one could argue that in the absence of such malfeasance that download counts and star ratings are real, useful pieces of information that shed some light on the true quality of a product. But nonetheless this is something to be aware of, especially with new files/games/books that haven’t yet amassed ratings or download counts. It’s also worth noting that advertisers can indirectly purchase this kind of influence by buying front-page placement or using ads to drive consumers to that content and thus increasing its popularity –or at least the number of times it was bought or downloaded. And it can work in reverse. Remember a while back when the backlash against Spore’s digital rights management measures caused a bunch of people to flood Amazon with one-star ratings? It’s still barely got one star out of 5 as of the time of this writing. The point to remember is that what you see other people doing shouldn’t always unduly influence your own actions.

That point made, though, it’s interesting to think about how game designers could use this kind of bias for the player’s benefit –at least potentially. I’m certainly not advocating that they inflate star ratings or player counts, but less sacrosanct data could be used to nudge players in certain directions that they might enjoy. For example, what if in a few months’ time you were sitting down to play through some more of the single-player campaign for Halo Reach when at the main menu there appears the message “Nine people on your friends list have tried the Halo Reach multiplayer modes within the last week. Select ‘Multiplayer’ From the main menu to join them.” Or maybe “1,943 people checked out the leaderboards in the last 5 minutes; press ‘Y’ to do the same.”

I know that the administrators of technologies like Steam, Xbox Live, and GameSpy Technology are awash in data like this and to my uneducated monkey brain it seems like it should be relatively easy to do this kind of stuff on the fly with real data. So somebody go do that and get back to me. In the meantime, I’m gonna go out and start telling strangers that it looks like rain, even though there’s not a cloud in the sky. You know, just to see what they do.

1. Thank God, because that guy is SUCH a nerd. [↩]
2. Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70. [↩]
3. What we call “confederates” in the biz [↩]
4. Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice. Boston, MA: Pearson. [↩]
5. Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books. [↩]
6. Salganik, M., Dodds, P., & Watts, D. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311, 854-856. [↩]
7. This would be the “control group” that your Psychology 101 professor is always talking about. [↩]
8. Though others do in fact accuse them of exactly that [↩]