The Psychology of Video Games

By far, one of the most widely linked to and discussed articles I’ve written for this site is this one on immersion in video games. A while back I wrote an expanded version of that article for GamePro magazine where I focused more on new video game technologies, and GamePro.com has recently published it for your reading pleasure. Oddly, they put it up as a 25 meg pdf file. I’m …not sure why. But you can download it and see the whole thing for yourself, including nifty sidebars and artwork like this:

If this happens to you, do not panic. Perfectly normal.

Bobo the Quote Monkey was happy to have the work, so he sat through the download and fetched this quote:

The game world also needs to behave as you’d expect it to. “Consistency is the single most important factor in creating a real sense of place,” says Josh Foreman, an experienced designer at ArenaNet who works on the Guild Wars games. “The style can be anything from photo-real to abstract to impressionism, as long as there is an internal logic to what the player perceives.” This means that in-game characters, objects, and other aspects of the world should behave like their real-world counterparts.

…Interestingly, research is incomplete in this area, as it seems we’ll readily ignore some incongruous elements. Even the most engrossing movie is full of artificial jumps in time and cuts to different points of view, but we take these in stride. One researcher looked at what effects subtitles in foreign-language films had on creating presence and found that these words floating conspicuously in space beneath the movie’s characters were such an accepted convention that they didn’t hinder a feeling of presence. Likewise, players accept heads-up displays or damage indicators in video games with little damage to presence.

This article is different than the other GamePro pieces I’d written to date. I played around with the idea of introducing the article with a non sequiter¹ by talking about Cinerama. For those of you who aren’t movie historians, Cinerama was an early technology aimed at making movies more immersive, and I saw some interesting parallels between that and our modern day wide-screen TVs, surround sound, and motion controls. I think it kind of worked, and it’s an approach that I’m going to try to use more often when I have the space to do it.

Special thanks to Paul Harvey, Dr. Paul Skalski at Cleveland State University and Josh Forman from ArenaNet for providing input on the article. If you’re interested, the current print issue of GamePro on shelves now (the one with Twisted Metal on the cover) has a fun article on the psychology of loot drops. It involves monkeys!

1. Wait, can you START something with a non sequiter? I hope so, because I guess did. [↩]

Hey. Hey! I’ve got a some questions for you:

• Do you think you’d be more likely to buy a new MMO if it came with a 28 day trial vs. a 4 week trial?
• Would you be happier if your game character got a new ability with a 1.5 minute cooldown or a 90 second cooldown?
• Would you feel more pressure from a 5 minute countdown timer or a 300 second timer?
• Would you be happier with new loot that improved your armor rating of 10,000 by 10% or loot that improved it by 1,000?

The non-idiotic among you¹ may be thinking that those choices are meaningless, since the options within each pair are mathematically equivalent. Presenting people with different units that they can easily convert between shouldn’t influence their choices. An article² in an upcoming issue of Journal of Consumer Research suggests otherwise.³

In the article, the authors propose what they call a “unit effect,” which basically says that people often don’t pay attention to the unit in which a figure is presented, and can thus be overly influenced by the magnitude of numbers when comparing options. They found, for example, that subjects tended to see a smaller difference between warranties lasting 7 and 9 years, than between warranties lasting 84 and 108 months. This despite the fact that the differences between warranty length is identical in either case — 7 years is the same as 84 months and 9 years equals 108 months.

Relax, Chuck. You still have 1,038,575 seconds before the military arrives.

In a follow-up study, the researchers manipulated the presentation of energy content in apples and candy by presenting the numbers in either kilocalories or kilojoules (1 kilocalorie = 4.184 kilojoules, so the latter unit resulted in bigger numbers). They found that presenting in kilojoules (i.e., with a bigger number) caused people to choose the apples more often if they were concerned about watching their calorie intake.

What’s more, larger numbers tend to exacerbate this effect and make us perceive differences between options as more extreme. This was illustrated by one of the experiments where home theater systems were rated on either a 10-point or 1,000 point scale. Subjects comparing a low quality but cheaper system with a high quality but expensive system were more likely to say the differences in quality was much larger (and thus worth paying for) when the products were rated on a 1,000 point system than a 10 point system. In other words, a system rated 900 on one scale would be seen as higher quality than a system rated 9 on the other scale⁴.

The point is that people often don’t do the mental arithmetic needed to compare two different units. Instead they slide down the easier path of just comparing numbers and using mental shortcuts like “Bigger numbers are better” (or worse, depending on the context). Long-time readers of this blog will recognize “Screw it, I’ll just take the path of least resistance because I’ve got too much going on” as one of our brains’ most common refrains. What’s more, comparisons between two factors are exaggerated when the numbers involved are bigger.

This has a number of interesting applications to game design and how we as players react to things. As I hinted at above, when it comes time to choose new abilities for your character, cooldown timers should be seen as more attractive if they are presented in minutes rather than seconds. Free trials should be expressed in days (if not hours) instead of weeks or a month. Or the countdown to the military’s arrival in Dead Rising 2 could seem longer if it were just shown in minutes.

Or consider this: if your game uses numbers to represent damage, having really big numbers that differentiate between weapons is going to greatly affect players’ choices. Say an in-game vendor is selling an axe that does 600 points of damage and a sword that does 1,200 points of damage. If the unit effect is true, players are going to see the sword as worth more than twice as much gold as they would if they were comparing options that did 60 and 120 points of damage. Because the magnitude of the numbers will inflate the quality difference between the two. This might not only affect selling prices from NPCs, but also auction houses as well.

Now let’s consider game reviews. Say you’re looking at review scores for different games and trying to decide which to buy. The unit effect described above would suggest that review scores on a 100-point scale would be more likely to increase perceptions of quality differences between the two games than would scores on a 10-point or 5-point scale, even if the math is the same.

Man, brains can be a real pain sometimes.

1. Which, I think, should be ALL of you. [↩]
2. Pandelaere, M., Briers, B., & Lembregts, C. (2011). How to make a 29% increase look bigger: The unit effect in option comparisons. Journal of Consumer Research, 38. [↩]
3. Thanks to reader and my personal friend Frank for bringing news reports of this research to my attention, and to Mario Pendelaere, the first author on the article who graciously sent me an advance copy of the paper so I could read the original source for myself. [↩]
4. at least relative to the more expensive model [↩]

Unlike people who apparently pay attention to what’s going on in the gaming industry, I only recently became aware of Jane McGonigal, a Ph.D. in Performance Studies best known for designing alternate reality games and thinking really big thoughts. After reading her book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can Change the World, McGonigal strikes me as part cheerleader, part social scientist, part entrepreneur, and part that crazy lady in the downtown L.A. parking lot that would always throw pigeons at me. It’s an interesting combination.

I wanted to review Reality is Broken here because McGonigal does what I do: she examines the intersection of psychology and video games. Only where I tend to look at the larger world and apply theories about human behavior to explain game design and player behaviors, she does the inverse by starting at maxims of game design and player desires to understand how we do things in the real world.

Or rather, how we should do things in the real world. The central thesis of the book is that reality –that is, everything that’s NOT a game– is inferior to games and we can learn a lot about how to make reality better by looking at what makes games so wonderful. This idea is codified in fourteen different “fixes” for real life, such as getting in a epic mindset (Fix #6), opening yourself up to having fun with strangers (Fix #9), and doing work that’s intrinsically satisfying (Fix #3). The book is at its best when it draws these straight lines from the things that make video games great to ways to improve our work, philanthropy, and relationships outside of games. Specific, actionable goals subject to clear feedback, for example, are things that every game designer aims for and every player seeks out, and to the extent that we can adopt those same standards in real life and frame our everyday activities in game-like terms, we can be happier and more productive. The game-cum-todo-list Chore Wars is a perfect example, and I find that kind of stuff fascinating.

That’s a pretty cool topic, and I have to admit that McGonigal has a knack for drawing these parallels in ways that are really clear and make you think “Yeah, I can see that!” This made the early chapters of the book (grouped under the heading “Why Games Make Us Happy”) my favorites, since they focused on building her argument and really nailing in a clear way many of the things about video games that can make us happy and mentally healthy. The second group of chapters (“Reinventing Reality”) start to deal with applying these rules to alternate reality games. My favorite one of these was “Cruel to Be Kind,” which was a re-purposing of the old “Assassins” game that many of us played on college campuses. The difference is that instead of sneaking up to people and squirting them with water pistols, C2BK players would perform random acts of kindness –such as a warm greeting, a helping hand, or a kind compliment– in order to take each other out of the game. Only you never knew who your fellow players were, so many perplexed but pleased bystanders are often caught in crossfires of friendly words and offers of aid. It’s the kind of thing that perfectly captures the kind of “let’s make the WHOLE WORLD totally awesome HELL YEAH!” attitude that McGongal is so well known for.

Things start to fall apart in the third section of the book, however, which includes description after description of McGonigal’s various other alternate reality and crowdsourcing projects. It’s here that I kind of started to lose the thread, because describing things like Wikipedia other collective intelligence projects as “games” starts to strain credibility and the premises put forth earlier in the book. How exactly did we get from “Players seek out experiences that create psychological flow” to “Let’s get gamers to blog about solutions to the energy crisis?” Is that really a game the same way that Halo or The Sims are? It sure doesn’t feel like it, and that’s kind of where I think Reality is Broken is itself a little broken.

Still, it’s a very interesting book, and it gave me some great ideas. I should also mention that McGonigal’s tone takes some getting used to and more than a couple of pinches of salt. She obviously believes these big thoughts and thinks that games can serve as models for making the world better, to the point where she (somewhat infamously) thinks there should one day be a Nobel prize for game design. But like I said her claims sometimes strains credibility and you often wonder what the point B between points A and C looks like, because you apparently missed it. But at the very least, the chapters on what makes games work are worth reading, and the rest of the book will at worst make you feel pretty good about being a gamer. Still, her joy and optimism are infectious, and having champions like McGonigal for our hobby is hardly a bad thing.

By the way, if you want to get a taste for McGonigal’s grandiosity and ideas, you can do so by watching her TED Talk here.

Despite a huge backlog of games trying to get my attention, I found myself playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately. This is in part because of the loot system, which drops random items –mainly hats or weapons– for you to use in customizing your avatar.¹ This system has been in TF2 for a while, and it used to be that the only way of getting the gear you wanted was by getting it from a drop or by crafting it from raw materials (which also essentially came from drops). Many players rejoiced and were very proud of their silly hats and weapons.

Then, in late September 2010 Valve introduced the Mannco Store, which allowed you to buy –with real money– almost all of the items that you used to have to score from lucky drops. Players were suddenly faced with the prospect that the Kritzkrieg or Backburner that they had been running around with would now be indistinguishable from those bought from the store. Comments began to arise on message boards that this would lower the appeal of those original items, the implication being that the “pre-Mannconomy” versions should be worth more than the new copies readily available in the store.

Buy stuff AND get in fights? Double sold!

This made me think about a series of experiments performed by Paul Bloom and Bruce Hood, as related in the book, How Pleasure Works.² Bloom and Hood wanted to see if invoking an item’s history could make it more valuable. Capitalizing on a recent visit by the Queen of England to the town where the research was to take place, they brought in a bunch of six-year old children and showed them certain items (a spoon or a cup) that had supposedly belonged to the Queen. They then placed the items into a mock “duplicating machine” that would supposedly make copies of the items. The machine consisted of a pair of boxes with hidden doors in the back through which one could slip an item’s twin in order to trick the kids into thinking that the original item had been duplicated. You may think that this is selling the average six year old’s intelligence a bit short, but Bloom explains himself pretty well:

When we showed this machine to children, none thought it was a trick. This fits with other research that finds that children are perfectly credulous about unusual machines. There is no reason why they should be skeptical. They live in a world with giant flying canisters, metal-cutting laser beams, talking computers, and so on. And we already have a rudimentary two-dimensional duplicating machines –you can take a piece of paper with Michael Jordon’s autograph on it, put it in a photocopy machine, press the button, and end up with something indistinguishable from the original. What is so strange about a three-dimensional version of this? For the children we tested: nothing.³

(Indeed, one could actually imagine doing this study using scanners and 3D printers without resorting to tricky. We live in the future, people. Let’s start using our technology to more thoroughly deceive our children in the name of science.)

The researchers then had children assign value to the original and duplicate items. Not surprisingly, they valued the original items much more highly because they had history and that history was seen as not transferable to the copies. To see if the same effect would happen when it was YOUR history that went with the object, Bloom and Hood conducted a follow-up study where they offered to duplicate kids’ security objects –for example, blankets or stuffed animals that some kids will never sleep without. Some kids refused to allow their special objects to be subjected to such shenanigans, but for those that did, the researchers offered to let them take home either the original or the copy. Almost all of them chose to keep the original.

Bloom argues that this is all because we perceive items as having essences based on their history or who they belonged to. I’ve written about the endowment effect, which causes us to value an object more once we own it. Similar thing. And I don’t know if Valve was thinking of blankies and teddy bears when they rolled out the Mannco store, but they did apparently realize that items with a history –that is, that were acquired from drops before they were available to buy– would be seen as more valuable and players would feel a sense of loss if it was suddenly considered –or perhaps more importantly seen as– equivalent to readily available duplicates.

It also has +10 psychological weight.

Their solution: put the word “Vintage” in front of the item. So “Force of Nature” is what you can buy from the Mannco Store or find via drops after the update. “Vintage Force of Nature” is the thing you’ve had all along. It’s different, even if it looks the same and acts the same and may have been owned by the Queen of England. I’m curious what would happen if Valve ran an experiment where they offered to buy back duplicate items and asked people what they’d sell them for. How much more would the “Vintage” versions of items be worth relative to the non-vintage? I’d guess a LOT more.

1. Hey, by the way, I have an article on the psychology of loot drops in an upcoming issue of GamePro. COINCIDENCE? You decide. [↩]
2. Bloom, P. (2010) How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. [↩]
3. ibid, page 109 [↩]