The Psychology of Video Games

Does motion control help us feel like we’re “in” a game’s world?

A few weeks ago I published an article on presence and video games, discussing a model of what puts us in the curious psychological state of feeling like we’re in a game world. When we experience presence we ignore the technology between us and that world, and we’re more likely to enjoy the game and more quickly able to learn its rules. I hypothesized at the time that motion controls that more closely mimic real movements are more likely to create presence, but that the research still had some ground to cover. I continued to read about the topic and given the recent release of Playstation Move and the imminent release of Kinect for the Xbox 360 I thought it would be a good time to revisit the relationship between motion control and presence. Topical!

Move! Move! Move! Move!

Besides the fact that absent or extremely simplified controls give us a lot less technology to forget about on our way to presence in the first place, the other reason to think that motion controlled games can create more presence has to do with mental models. In the context of video games, mental models are the representations we build of a game world –how the space is arranged, what its characteristics are, what the hell that thing is, what’s the deal with all the screaming when I press this lever, and so forth. One could hypothesize that more natural game controls help players more easily build and access those mental models by allowing us to take information from the real world (“I’m swinging a bat!”) and immediately understand what that action means for things in the game (“My little dude is swinging a bat in the same way!”). This creates consistency between things¹ in game and what we know about their real life counterparts –and that’s just the kind of thing that has been shown to create presence.

Paul Skalski at Cleveland State University and several collaborators decided to put idea this to a test and published their results earlier this year in the journal New Media & Society.² They were interested in how “naturally” a controller was used to play a game and what effect that had on presence and enjoyment. To kick things off, they proposed an interesting typology of natural control mapping.³

Directional natural mappings are the least natural, represenging simple up/down/left/right mappings and maybe some buttons. Think Street Fighter 4: up to jump, left/right to move, down to crouch, and buttons to punch or kick.

Kinesic natural mappings are those that involve gross body movements⁴ to control the game without holding a controller. This is pretty much every Kinect game, plus some of Sony’s EyeToy games.

Incomplete tangible natural mapping gives players something that feels like an in-game object. Wii Sports, for example, uses this kind of mapping when it asks you to use the wiimote like a tennis racket or golf club. A lot of Playstation Move controls are going to fit in here, too, like the ping pong game or the archery game in Sports Champions.

Realistic tangible natural mapping, though, is the most realistic kind of controller. This gives you a thing that is a thing and behaves like the thing in the game …thing.⁵ Steering wheels for racing games fall into this category, as do drum sets for Rock Band or Guitar Hero –not to mention that nutso stringed guitar controller that Mad Catz wants you to buy for Rock Band 3.

(As a side note, I actually think this typology is deficient because it lacks a place for motion-tracked controllers that are used in ways that are not asking you to mimic holding something specific. Wiggling the wiimote to make Mario spin in Super Mario Galaxy or aiming it at the TV to make Samus fire rockets in Metroid: Other M doesn’t fit in anywhere here, but those kind of controls certainly exist.)

Flailing around like a nincompoop really makes me feel like I'm flailing around like a nincompoop IN THE GAME!

Skalski et al. were interested in whether more natural mapping of controls would lead to greater self-reports of presence while playing games, so they ran two experiments. In the first, they had one group play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 on the Nintendo Wii using the wiimote like, appropriately enough, a golf club. Another group played the Playstation 2 version of that same game using the dual shock controller. The results were that the wiimote did indeed feel more natural, as measured by questions like “The actions used to interact with the game environment were similar to the actions that would be used to do the same thing in the real world.” No surprise there, but they also found that use of such controls did correlate with spatial presence (“To what extent did you experience a sense of ‘being there’ inside the environment?”) and people who played the game on the Wii were more likely to report experiencing presence than those who played with the PS2 controller.

The researchers then decided to kick it up a notch and compare several different types of controllers on the same game. They had participants play the racing game Need for Speed Underground 2 using a keyboard, a joystick, a gamepad, or a steering wheel. Same results: the steering wheel, which represented a “realistic tangible natural mapping” according tot he taxonomy above, was perceived as the most natural and players in that group were the most likely to report feeling like they were “in the game.”

This all suggests that if the goal of your game is to make players feel like they’re part of a game world, motion controllers are better than traditional game pads or keyboards.⁶ Of course, not all games have presence as a design goal, not all games can be controlled with motion, (imagine trying to play Starcraft II with just motion control) and there are probably other characteristics of motion control (like exhausting or uncomfortable movements) that could detract from the overall enjoyment of a game. Again, this is an area rife with possibilities for research …things.

Anyway, has anyone played around with the Playstation Move yet? Does it make you more likely to forget that the game you’re playing is mediated by technology?

1. “Things” is a technical term you can never over use. Go on, just try to over use it. You can’t! [↩]
2. Skalski, P., Tamborini, R., Shelton, A., Buncher, M. & Lindmark, P. (2010). Mapping the road to fun: natural video game controllers, presence, and game enjoyment. New Media & Society. [↩]
3. Big thanks, by the way, to Paul Skalski for talking to me about his research and forwarding me this paper. [↩]
4. Pun intended? Yes, pun intended. [↩]
5. I’m telling you, can’t be over used! [↩]
6. Though I should note that Skalski et al. never tested a “kinesic natural mapping” a la Microsoft’s Kinect or a pure EyeToy game. Someone should do that. [↩]

I’m looking forward to next year’s Portal 2 by Valve, in no small part because of the co-op mode where you team up with another little robot buddy and make your way through test chambers. Mistakes are sure to be made, though, and you may end up flinging or dropping your comrade to his/her death. Or maybe crushing. Or burning. Burning is always a possibility. Burning is really unavoidable when you get right down to it.

Fortunately, Valve has included a variety of emotes for your little robots to share with each other, including one that says “I’m so sorry; let’s hug it out.”

Cold, mechanical apologies. They work.

This got me thinking about some research I’ve read on the power of the apology and how it really is missing in a lot of games. In his book, The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely describes a simple and interesting field experiment he and a colleague conducted to see what effect an apology would have on remedying a minor annoyance. They hired an actor to sit in a coffee shop and ask patrons to complete a short exercise in exchange for $5. I don’t even know what the exercise was –something about circling letters– but that’s not the point; the exercise was just there to take up 5 minutes of time. At the end of that time, the actor would come over and then pretend to overpay participants by “accidentally” mixing in a $5 bill with the singles he was supposed to give them. This was, of course, done so that the researchers could see how people reacted to being overpaid.

There were three experimental conditions. In the first, things happened just as I described above. In the second condition, the actor pretended to receive a cell phone call in the middle of explaining the task instructions, and yakked away like an annoying nitwit while the subject had to wait for him to finish the instructions. Not quite as bad as flinging the person into a thermal deterrence beam, but a little annoying. In the third condition, the actor also annoyed the participants by taking a phone call, but afterwords he immediately apologized.¹

The results were that 45% of the people in the first, non-annoyed condition returned the extra money, thereby turning down a chance to hurt the experimenter.² When the actor pretended to take a phone call in the middle of a conversation, only 14% of the people returned the extra money. Surprisingly, though, if he apologized after taking the call, the number of people who returned the extra cash was the same as those who had not been annoyed at all. As Ariely puts it, “1 Annoyance + 1 Apology = 0 Annoyance.”

Why? In a 1997 study³ Michael McCullough, Everett Worthington, and Kenneth Rachal found that a good apology forged forgiveness through the act of empathy –that is, understanding of emotions between the offended and the offender. Ironically, this is one reason why I think the little robot hugs in Portal 2 work so well: those little guys look like they’ll have a lot of personality and exhibit more emotion than avatars in most other games.

Of course, apologizing is possible wherever there’s voice or text chat, but it’s probably not used as often as it should be, and in a fast-paced multiplayer game with lots of things going on, it’s kind of hard sometimes to apologize or even be heard if you do. But with a slowly paced game like Portal 2 or Little Big Planet, there’s not only every chance to apologize for a goof up, but there’s a lot more riding on it in terms of how well the other person cooperates, communicates potential puzzle solutions, or even if he/she drops out of the game altogether. Fortunately, even simple –or even insincere– apologies are particularly potent.

And this is why I believe that hugging robots should be in every children’s Social Studies textbook. Make it happen, Congresspeople.

1. But didn’t, unfortunately, offer up any hugs. [↩]
2. Though that obviously means 55% of people kept it, even when they were instructed to count it and sign a receipt saying they had only received $5 and not $9. [↩]
3. McCullough, M., Worthington, E., & Rachal, K. (1997). Interpersonal Forgiving in Close Relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(2) 321-336. [↩]

How can developers of multiplayer games get their players to behave, cooperate, play their role, and not be such incredible jerks? I have an idea. Psychology is involved. You probably guessed this.

One of my favorite little experiments in psychology was done by John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows¹ who were interested in how stereotypes were triggered. In one experiment, they had participants unscramble sentences that made heavy use of words like Florida, old, bingo, wrinkle, ancient and the like. A control group did the same thing, but with words not reminiscent of the elderly. That wasn’t the real experiment, though.

The important part of the experiment actually happened after the participants left the lab. Another experimenter sat in the hallway outside and discretely used a stopwatch to time how long it took participants to walk from one end of the hall to the other. Those who had been working with words related to old people actually walked significantly slower² than those who had worked with other words.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows also did another experiment where some people unscrambled sentences with words related to rudeness (bold, bother, brazen) and some worked with words indicating politeness (patiently, courteous, unobtrusively). All subjects then walked in on a staged scene where they had to interrupt a conversation to get some needed information. Those in the “polite” condition waited 9.3 minutes on average. Those in the “rude” condition jumped in after just 5.5 minutes on average.³

These are examples of what psychologists called “priming,” which is basically getting people in a particular state of mind or getting them to think about what you want them to. It’s a staple of advertising and surprisingly easy to do. I’ve been thinking for a while that game developers should take better advantage of it.

What if, for example, certain words of phrases were thrown around on loading screens between levels or in the matchmaking lobby for a multiplayer shooter? Would simply showing words like “sportsmanship” or “communication” or “fairness” prime people to behave themselves during games? If you didn’t want to be that transparent, you could include little stories, vignettes, or even comics or movies that included those words or illustrations of them. Or maybe you could use real data, like the number of heals provided by players in the previous game or awards for best defense. Or maybe you could include a graphic of naked, pre-pubescent angels like this:

I know you read this blog, Cliff Bleszinski. This needs to be in Gears 3. You can make it happen, man. There's still time.

In his book, Predictably Irrational,⁴ behavioral economist Dan Ariely suggests some even better ways of making this kind of thing work. He describes some experiments that he, Nina Mazar, and On Amir did where they asked students at MIT to solve as many math problems as they could in a fixed time. Everyone was entered into a lottery where the winner would receive $10 for each correctly solved problem, so there was incentive to answer lots of problems. Some subjects were given a chance to cheat at the task by self-reporting the number of problems solved, and some couldn’t cheat because a research assistant graded their answers.

But let’s back up a bit. Some subjects in the “cheating is possible” condition were also asked to write down the Ten Commandments before starting the math problems. The others weren’t asked to write down anything.⁵ Relative to those who didn’t have the opportunity to cheat, those who did but were not asked write down the Ten Commandments claimed to have answered 33% more questions –a clear indication of cheating since that’s way more than could be expected by chance alone.

But what about those who had the chance to cheat but were asked to write things like “Thou shalt not lie” and “Thou shalt not steal?” Dude, they didn’t cheat at all. They answered exactly as many questions on average as the people who didn’t even have a chance to cheat. In a follow-up study, the same researchers replicated these results by omitting the Ten Commandments and having students acknowledge understanding that their actions were “subject to the MIT honor code.” Which, ironically, was a lie; there was no such official code.

It seems that the Ten Commandments or a reference to an honor code was enough to prime people for behaving themselves, but I think the study also tapped what’s called “the consistency bias.” This is where we tend to behave in ways that are consistent with our stated intentions, especially if stated publicly.

Look, if this dude tells you to hang back and build some base defenses, you'd better listen to him.

So what does this mean for gamers? Again, I’m thinking of loading screens and between rounds of multiplayer and matchmaking lobbies. What if you presented subjects players with simple yes/no questions like these?

• Will you change classes if your team has too many of the class you wanted to play?
• Will you stick around to the end of the match even if it looks like you’re going to lose?
• Are you going to curse and be rude in this next match?
• Will you hang back and play defense if your team needs it?
• Will you fortify your team’s defenses if needed?
• Will you give other people a chance to drive the damn tank once in a while? Please? Pretty please? You always just drive it off a cliff, anyway. C’mon, what do you say?

If, while waiting for the match to start, each player could answer those questions, what do you think would happen? Would they be primed in good ways? Would they want to behave consistently? Would having their answers shown to other players have an effect?

Personally, I think this could work. It’s at least worth experimenting with. C’mon, someone out there try it and let us know how it goes.

1. Bargh, J., Chen, M. & Barrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2). [↩]
2. You know, like an old dude [↩]
3. …Jerks. [↩]
4. Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins. [↩]
5. Actually, there was also a condition where subjects wrote down the last 10 books they read, just to rule out the unlikely possibility that it was the act of remembering and writing something down that affected rates of cheating or math performance. [↩]

The new issue of GamePro magazine (October 2010, #265) is out and features my article on the psychology of shooters.¹ If you buy the magazine on the store shelf, the cover is the one on the left below. If, however, you’re a subscriber and got yours through the mail, you got the variant cover on the right that features some of the artwork by Andrew Yang that accompanies my article inside:

Oooh, alternate covers!

So, for at least one of the variants, I guess I have the cover story. Which is kind of cool.

The whole issue is themed around the idea of shooters, with previews of a gaggle of upcoming games from that genre plus some articles like mine addressing the theme. Here’s a quote:

Researchers Andrew Przybylski and Scott Rigby, who work with game designers, believe people are motivated to play a particular video game based on how well it satisfies three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence deals with a sense of control, mastery, and feeling like you’re making things happen the way you want. A well designed difficulty curve makes us feel an ever-increasing sense of competence, as does appropriate matchmaking in multiplayer games. Games high in autonomy give you the opportunity to make many meaningful decisions about what goals to pursue and how to pursue them. Finally, relatedness is concerned with a feeling that you matter to other players and social interactions with them.

These needs certainly aren’t unique to shooters, but one could argue that many of the qualities inherent to virtual gunplay create well worn paths to satisfying these needs.

This article is actually one of my favorite things that I’ve written on the psychology of games since I started this project, but I didn’t expect it to end up that way at first. In fact, when the folks at GamePro asked me to write something that “explores gamers’ fascination with the genre and why the primary interaction point in the majority of games seems to be through a gun and bullets,” I just blanked out and stared at my computer monitor for a few minutes. I had no idea off the top of my head about how to address that question, and my initial impulse was to turn down the assignment for fear of not being able to deliver on it.

Fortunately I decided instead to push back from the keyboard and ruminate on it a bit first. That gave me time to realize that even if I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head, I did know how to do research and find someone who does –they don’t let you out of graduate school without stuffing that particular skill in your back pocket. So I hit my local university library one evening to browse PsychINFO and was delighted to almost immediately find out about the research program described in the quote above. Those guys are doing some really cool stuff around what motivates us to play video games, and they were even kind enough to talk to me via e-mail for the article.

All that was left to do was to pull together half a dozen or so articles and a couple of books into one narrative for the GamePro piece. Fortunately they also taught us how to do that in school as well. So I guess the lesson is: stay in school, kids. Like, uniil your early thirties. At least.

So if you’re not already a GamePro reader, thumb through a copy the next time you can find one on the store shelf to see if you think it’s worth buying or subscribing to.² I’ve got another article due out in next month’s issue dealing with the psychology of horror games, and I’m currently adapting my article on the psychology of immersion for another feature the month after that.

Speaking of which, if you’re a game developer who has something to say about immersion and what makes games immersive, I’d love to hear from you and maybe quote you in the GamePro article. Drop me a line.

1. Shooters, as in the genre of video games. Not, like, people. [↩]
2. Protip: subscribing is way cheaper. [↩]