The Psychology of Video Games

Imagine for a moment that you’re a Swiss mercenary away from your homeland and fighting for some European king during the 17th century. Now suppose that over cups of hot coco and hair braiding you and your fellow mercs begin to pine for the good old days when video games came with thick manuals and forced you to micromanage your system memory in order to get things to run. Most likely you would all be referred for treatment of a neurological disease, not only because video games didn’t exist in the 17th century, but also because nostalgia in any form was considered a malady of the mind on par with any other physical disease. Proto-psychologists of the time thought that the condition was limited to the Swiss people, and attributed it to all kinds of weird stuff, including pressure from tiny demons squeezing the wrong parts of your brain, changes in air pressure forcing blood up into the skull, and brain damage resulting from the prolonged clamor of cowbells.¹

Current research has progressed quite a bit, and generally defines nostalgia along the lines of an emotional state characterized by sentimental longing for things in one’s past. It’s a common concept, and it’s not unusual to encounter some old fart of a gamer reminiscing about how much better and more fun things used to be back in the old days. If you ever find yourself in a room full of gamers and want to cull out these people, just say the following words in a loud, clear voice: “Man, how about that Nintendo Entertainment System?” Then just tag all the people who won’t stop talking. Double tag the people who use words like “DOSBox” or “gog.com.”

This begs the question, though, of why we feel nostalgic about games² at all. And more curiously, why do we so often look at the past through rose-colored glasses and claim that old games were so great? This despite the honest fact that today we’d rather chew our own faces off than use pencil and graph paper to find our way around a dungeon or type IP addresses into a command line to find a multiplayer match –with vanilla deathmatch as the only option, no less. Yes, some games are classics and serve as important signposts on the medium’s road to maturation, but seriously even today’s mediocre games and hardware represent improvements on every front. So why do we get all nostalgic?

The N64 is the greatest gaming console ever! Because I was delighted to get it for Christmas one year!

(Photo credit: Hendricks Photos.)

To answer that question it might be useful to look at what psychologists think are the triggers and reasons for nostalgia in general. A few years back several researchers from the University of Southhampton published an article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that revealed a few things about the content, triggers, and functions of nostalgia.³

For example, the researchers found that our nostalgic narratives most often featured a “redemption sequence” where the subject started off down in the dumps, but found a way to parlay that experience into something positive. So maybe your love of games made you a bit of a social outcast in general, but you formed one really solid friendship with a kindred soul. Or maybe you learned something about lawn care and the gray market for kidneys⁴ in the course of saving up for a Sega Genesis.

The link between negative moods and nostalgia also came up when the researchers looked at what triggers bouts of the emotion. They found that feeling down in the dumps or displeasure over current circumstances is likely to prompt people to reminisce about some uplifting experience in the past. So maybe you’re more likely to get nostalgic for the 8-bit era when some high def, high poly foes are sucking all the fun out of your current experience.

These findings all point to the idea that we engage in nostalgia because it has psychological benefits. It makes us happy and improves our state of mind, especially when we need that kind of mental pick-me-up. Specifically, nostalgic reverie about a time when we were enjoying ourselves or finding ourselves particularly competent or connected to other people raises feelings of self-regard, which is a feeling that well-adjusted people tend to like. Today’s role-playing games are all about grinding that I don’t have time for, remember when I got my entire party of characters in Final Fantasy IV to level 99? Man, I was hardcore then.

Name? Job? Lack of dialog tree?

But is what we’re remembering accurate or really representative of what we felt at the time? The fact that we seem to engage in nostalgia specifically to make us feel better suggests that we may be unconsciously biased towards remembering things that make us happy and against remembering the things that don’t. We have a remarkable propensity towards that kind of thing. It’s cute, really. We require less information to confirm beliefs when they are consistent with our current state of mind⁵ and a substantial body of research⁶ has shown that we are predisposed to remember more of the good things in life. For example, one pair of researchers⁷ asked subjects floating in a sensory deprivation tank to recall and rate experiences from their past. Sixty-six percent of the recollections were considered positive (or “of positive affective valance”, as it’s said in the biz) while the remainder were neutral or unpleasant.⁸

An additional wrinkle in memory’s landscape is that the emotional footprints of positive memories tend to fade more slowly than those of negative ones.⁹ This is something known as the “fading affect bias” though I prefer “fading affect effect” because it’s punchier. Regardless of what you call it, this might be due to the fact that downplaying negative memories is an effective coping mechanism and leads to better mental health –a far cry from having tiny, nostalgia-inducing Swiss demons swimming around in your brain.

Or it could all be a case of bad mental aim. Another group of researchers claim that vividly remembered events seem so great relative to the hum-drum of the present because simply remembering something feels good. Jason Leboe and Tamara Ansons reported on studies¹⁰ showing that people tend to have an “Ah-ha!” moment when experiencing easy recall of information, and that kind of moment is innately pleasurable. It’s just a cognitive quirk in the brain. What we tend to do, the researchers argued, is mistakenly attribute the pleasure not to the easy recall of the experience, but to the experience itself. While some stand-out experiences obviously were pleasurable, this kink in the human brain biases us towards erroneously remembering such events as more positive than they were.

So, next time you’re feeling nostalgic about how great Quakeworld or the original Donkey Kong Country was, I recommend going with it. It’ll make you feel better even if you overlook the problems at the time or the improvements that have been made since. Just don’t over commit yourself to any opinions born of memory’s fickle biases. Because graph paper, himem.sys, and two buttons on a controller were worse than you really remember.

1. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Baden, D. (2004). Nostalgia: Conceptual issues and Existential Functions in J. Greenburg (Ed.) , Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology. Guildford Publications. [↩]
2. Or anything, for that matter, but I write about games here, so let’s stick with that. [↩]
3. Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91 (5), 975-993. [↩]
4. Not necessarily yours [↩]
5. Something known as the “confirmation bias” [↩]
6. e.g., for a summary see Walker, R., Skowronski, J., & Thompson, C. (2003). Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way! Review of General Psychology, 7 (2), 203-210. [↩]
7. Suedfeld, P., & Eich, E. (1995). Autobiographical memory and affect under conditions of reduced environmental stimulation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15, 321–326. [↩]
8. An especially powerful result once one considers that how many of the negative memories were probably along the lines of “This one time, two crazy psychology professors locked me in a sensory deprivation tank for an hour.” [↩]
9. Holmes, D. S. (1970). Differential change in affective intensity and the forgetting of unpleasant personal experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 234–239. [↩]
10. Leboe, J. & Ansons, T. (2006). On Misattributing good remembering to a happy past: An investigation into the cognitive roots of nostalgia. Emotion, 6, 596-610. [↩]

Imagine that two people, Kim and Carlos, notice that their cars are filthy and both go to the same car wash to make things right. With their wash they each receive a special card that lets them earn a free car wash if they get the card stamped enough times during future visits. Kim’s card says it requires 10 purchases for a free wash, but the perky girl at the counter gave her a head start with two free stamps. The card Carlos got doesn’t have any free starter stamps, but it only requires 8 future purchases instead of 10. So both Kim and Carlos are looking at the same number of purchases to score their complimentary car cleaning.

Who do you think is more likely to come back enough times to fill up his or her card? Kim or Carlos?

It turns out that it’s Kim, who got saddled with a card that required 10 total stamps, but who received enough free stamps to get her 20% of the way towards her goal. This is thanks to a phenomenon called “the endowed progress effect.” Basically, the idea is that when you give people just a feeling of advancement towards a distant goal, they’re more likely to try harder and try longer to reach that goal, even relative to people who have an equally easy goal but who got no sense of momentum off the bat.

Researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze coined the term in a paper¹ where they did the car wash experiment described above. They found that 34% of people who got a 10-stamp card with 2 freebies ended up coming back enough to redeem the cards, compared to 19% of customers who started with an unstamped card requiring only 8 stamps. This despite the fact that both sets of customers only needed 8 stamps for a free wash. Nunes and Xavier also found that those endowed with the two free stamps tried to reach their goal faster by waiting less time between washes.

Buy 6 heartbeat sensors and win a chance to punch Bobby Kotick in the arm AS HARD AS YOU CAN.

Why? The researchers argue that the reason for the results is that by giving out free stamps, the merchant was framing the task (i.e., buying enough car washes to get a freebie) as one that has already been undertaken. There’s a substantial body of research that shows people are naturally motivated to complete tasks that they feel they’ve started and will want to remain consistent with previous intentions.² Other research has shown that the closer someone gets to completing a goal the more likely they are to increase their efforts towards closing that last little gap.³ Apparently, giving people a couple of free holes on a punch card is enough to trigger both of these effects.⁴

This has a few interesting possibilities for game design. Imagine, for example, that I’m playing through Fallout: New Vegas⁵ and I get a quest to save 10 slaves from a nearby encampment. One way to deliver that quest to me would be to meet a NPC and have her say “Hey, there’s 10 slaves. Go free all 10.” And so I’d go off, and the quest would tick up “0 out of 10 slaves rescued, 1 out of 10 slaves rescued,” et cetera. Alternatively, if the game designer wanted to invoke the endowed progress effect, I could first receive the request upon opening the cell door for a pair of slaves on the outskirts of the encampment. One of the slaves could say “There were 12 of us altogether! Free the others!” and my progress would start off as “2 out of 12 slaves rescued” as the first two sprint off over the horizon. According to everything discussed above, I’d be much more motivated to complete this quest if it were presented this way.

Other examples aren’t hard to imagine. What if some NPC wanting 12 Goretusk livers in World of Warcraft gave me two to start with and raised the request to 14? What if, upon learning a new crafting skill that requires combining 5 widgets into one superwidget, the game gets me started with 1 widget and makes the recipe call for 6? What if, when I’m waiting impatiently in a multiplayer matchmaking lobby for Halo: Reach to find me 10 opponents, the game populates the first two slots with “Player Found!” after a couple of seconds even though it’s still looking? Would I be more likely to wait for the rest even if the search takes a long time?⁶ Well, you get the idea. If you’ve got other examples, let’s hear them in the comment section.

1. Nunes, J. & Dreze, X. (2006). The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort. Journal of Consumer Research. 32, 442-52. [↩]
2. e.g., Fox, S. & Hoffman, M. (2002). Escalation Behavior as a Specific Case of Goal-Directed Activity: A Persistence Paradigm. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24 (4), 273-285. [↩]
3. Hull, C. (1932). The Goal Gradient Hypothesis and Maze Learning. Psychological Review, 39, 25-43. [↩]
4. The more astute among you may guess that it has something to do with loss aversion –maybe those with the two free stamps valued them more than shoppers in the other condition and didn’t want to lose them. That’s a pretty good thought, but it occurred to Nunes and Dreze too. Without going into too much detail here, they did a follow-up study to test that hypothesis and found that the value of the endowment didn’t really affect whether or not people persisted in earning the free prize. [↩]
5. Which I actually am at the moment! [↩]
6. Sorry, is that evil? Lying to your players may be a little evil. Your conscience may vary. [↩]

If you can get your hands on the new issue of GamePro magazine (#267, December 2010 with Diablo 3 on the cover), check out my article on the psychology of horror. The timing with Halloween was better a week or so ago when the issue first came out.

This is another one of those topics that I was unsure of when the editor at GamePro asked me to tackle it. Not only did I not t really know much about the topic, I’m not even a fan of horror movies or games in particular. I’ve never seen a Saw movie or any other “gore pr0n” in my life, nor do I want to. Still, that’s why they call it “research” so I hit the library and found some more informed experts in the fields of psychology, media studies, and communications to help fill in the blanks. I got some great material, and the article turned out to be a lot of fun to write.

This is the issue to look for if you want to read the article.

I turned Bobo the Quote Monkey loose on the article, and he returned with this:

Bobo want banana.

So I gave him a banana, reminded him about the performance standards in his contract, and sent him back. This time he came up with the following:

A second set of explanations for horror’s delight posits that we hate the horror, but like the proverbial man who bangs his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops, we love the relief that comes at the end.

Excitation transfer theory, credited earlier with enabling spooky soundtracks to do their job, has also been hypothesized to give us a kind of “thank god that’s over” high. “People become physically aroused due to the fear they experience during the media event –and then when the media event ends, that arousal transfers to the experience of relief and intensifies it,” Sparks says. “They don’t so much enjoy the experience of being afraid –rather, they enjoy the intense positive emotion that may directly follow.”

Other explanations for the appeal of horror are cited, plus I also ruminate on what the research tells us about scary video games in particular. I really don’t have any feedback on how well these GamePro pieces are being received, so if you’re reading them, post a comment and tell me what you think.

When it comes to video games, I’m not much of an achievement guy. But when I pop in a new game I usually bring up the achievement list to see what’s there and to look for anything interesting. When I recently did this with Halo: Reach I had to give a snort upon seeing the “A Monument To All Your Sins” achievement, which can only be gotten by playing through the entire single-player campaign on Legendary difficulty. ALONE. As in without a co-op buddy. I liked Reach well enough, but on higher difficulty levels the game is brutal and forces you to replay sections over and over and over again using a tiresome trial and error approach. Unless you’re a thirteen year old who’s mixing cocaine in his coffee¹ it’s anything but fun, especially without a co-op buddy or three.

Wait, you want me to what?

And it’s not hard to find other examples of punishingly difficult achievements that net you more controller-biting frustration than gaming pleasure. Beat this cheap boss without taking any damage. Complete the game using only the weakest weapon. Beat this tricky level in a stupidly short amount of time. So why would anyone do these things if they’re unnecessary and no fun?

A paper entitled “Conceptual Consumption” and published in the Annual Review of Psychology last year suggests some clues.² The authors explore a theory of “conceptual consumption,” which holds that people are as interested in consuming ideas, information, and concepts as they are physically consuming things –sometimes more so. People want to “possess” an experience simply because it’s novel and rare, and will sometimes forego other more rational choices in order to do it. For some people, there’s a drive to add that concept or experience to their list of “stuff I’ve done” just so they can have the satisfaction of a longer list. Researchers Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz liken this to ticking items off an experiential checklist or “experiential resume” so that they can die feeling like they’ve accomplished more in life. These are the same kind of people who elect to stay in hotel rooms carved out of ice instead of a Florida Marriott or to eat bacon-flavored ice cream instead of chocolate.³⁴ And get this: there may even be a correlation between this kind of nonsense and how productive people are in other aspects of their lives!

This is why I think achievement systems that show what percentage of players have seized a given achievement are more motivating. Knowing that the Monument to All Your Sins achievement is worth 150G is okay, since it gives you some reference against which to compare it to that achievement that gave you 5G for watching the intro sequence to Soul Calibur 4 ⁵. But the way that Steam does achievements is a lot more likely to capitalize on conceptual consumption drives because it lets you know just how rare your little triumph was relative to other players.

Because it’s not just about a longer list –it’s about a more varied and interesting list that tells people that you’re a varied and interesting kind of person. Getting that A Monument To All Your Sins achievement in Halo: Reach is a way of signalling to friends and strangers that you’re the kind of hardcore person who has really mastered the game and best of all, you can tell them all about it⁶ After all, that experiential resume is no good if you can’t show it to anyone. Just remember to pad out your professional resume, too.

1. Don’t do this, by the way. Being a 13 year old is a terrible idea. [↩]
2. Ariely, D., & Norton, M. (2009). Conceptual Consumption. Annual Review of Psychology (60), 475-499. [↩]
3. Keinan, A., & Kivetz, R. (2008). Remedying hyperopia: The effects of self-control regret on consumer behavior. Journal of Marketing Research (45), 676-689. [↩]
4. And don’t tell me that bacon ice cream would taste great. No number of Internet memes is going to make that anything but gross. [↩]
5. No, seriously. [↩]
6. Whether they’d really rather you shut up about it or not. [↩]