The Psychology of Video Games

GamePro.com recently put up my article on the psychology of fairness as it applies to video games. You can read it here once you’ve managed the art mouse clicking. Again, it’s in the form of a nicely formatted pdf file so you can see the nifty layout work they did.

The irony is that both the hammer and bomb were pre-order DLC bonuses. Click to read the whole article.

This article also has one of my favorite openers so far, which Bobo the Quote Monkey has retrieved for us:

Here’s an Old Testament story that many gamers may identify with more than they realize: Jacob had 12 sons, but he liked little Joseph the best. So one day he gave Joseph an awesome coat of many colors. It may have given damage reduction against all elemental attacks, but we don’t know for sure; the scripture is kind of vague on the stats. What is clear is that Joseph’s brothers, who had been pretty happy with things before, thought this was unfair, and when Joseph rather blithely told them that he was having dreams of them bowing down to him and his snazzy coat, they decided to throw him down a well.

In gaming parlance, Joseph’s coat represents a clear case of “twinking,” which is when players get extravagant gifts that would otherwise be out of their reach. This may come from generous guildmates or players buying in-game money—or even whole accounts—from third parties. Most of us won’t throw someone down a well, but retaliations to these activities range from message-board mutterings to throwing up our hands and canceling subscriptions.

The idea was to examine what “fairness” means to people, and to do so with a psychological slant. Is it fair to play on special servers in Team Fortress 2 or other shooters designed to let you farm achievements and unlock new weapons? Is buying gold from a World of Warcraft gold farmer fair? Is it fair to get a bucket full of unlocks off the bat in Dead Space 2 just because you played the previous games in that series? Is it fair to use a FAQ to solve Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood while others figure it out on their own yet get the same achievement?

I thought these were interesting questions, and psychology does have some things to say about them. Fairness is a judgment, and we know that judgments can be radically different depending on how the situation is framed or presented. Unfortunately while the question is interesting (I think) I didn’t have a chance in this article to really reach out game designers, academics, or other experts on the topic, so I think the article suffers a bit because of it. But still, I love the artwork and layout that goes along with this one. It’s a nice example of what print magazines still do that web usually doesn’t.

Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part article on the psychological effects of using point-based currencies like Microsoft Points or Nintendo Points. Part 1, which you can read by executing precision clicking acts here, dealt with the psychology of waste. Below, I’ll look at how research on anchoring and consumer behavior using foreign currency suggests other psychological factors at play..

In a way, buying things with Microsoft or Nintendo points feels like spending money in a foreign currency. Tourists have long noticed this “Monopoly money” effect where the unfamiliar bills and coins with funny little holes in them don’t seem as real as the currency back home. This has to do with the fact that they don’t usually put the mental effort into doing the conversion every time they buy something.

“Though travelers know the exchange rate, it’s too much trouble to do the math for every little purchase,” says William Poundstone, who writes about the psychology of spending in the book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value.¹ “There is thus a zone of uncertainly about how much you’re ‘really’ spending, and this makes it a little harder to feel so bad about splurging. By setting 80 points to the dollar, Microsoft intentionally makes it hard to do the mental conversion! They could just as well have made it 100 points to a dollar, or 1 point = $1.”²

That Modern Warfare map pack is going to cost you three eggs, a goat, and five lengths of knotted string.

This mental error also happens because people often pay more attention to the face value of the foreign currency (i.e., the number of Microsoft Points in this case) when estimating how much they spend. This is called “anchoring” in psychological parlance, and while I’ve discussed it before in the context of Steam sales I’ll repeat a quick illustration from one classic study by Kahneman and Tversky.³ In the experiment, the researchers asked some subjects to estimate this product:

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

Then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8

Look closely at both of those. Those of you who understand how multiplication works know that these products are equal –40,320 to be exact. 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. It turns out that anchoring can really screw with our estimations of everything from crime statistics to hardware failure rates to how much things cost in a foreign currency.

But you guys! Wait! At an exchange rate of about 80 points per 1 dollar, that means that anchoring on the number of Microsoft Points should lead us to feel that we’re spending more than we really are. Because while 1,200 points may equal $15, the 1,200 number is more salient and through the magic of anchoring its magnitude systematically nudges our estimations of cost upwards. Indeed, studies comparing spending where the exchange rate for foreign currency is a multiple of the dollar (e.g., 1 US dollar = 4 Malaysian ringgits) to exchanges where the currency is worth a fraction of the dollar (e.g., 1 US dollar = 0.4 Bahraini dinar) have shown underspending in the former and overspending in the latter.⁴ And if spending MS Points is like spending Malaysian ringgits in that 1 dollar gets you 80 points, Microsoft could actually be letting us off easier than they could if they gave you just .8 points for a dollar and charged 12 points for a new game. But shhhh! Don’t tell them!

So there you have it. Maybe you’ll be a little better informed next time you plunk down money for MS Points, Playstation Network funds, or Nintendo Points. Hey, if you really do want something and think it’s a good price by all means do what you need to do to buy it! Just consider everything above first.

But wait, there’s more! There’s actually a sooooper sekrit third part of this article that deals with MS Points and what’s called “mental accounting.” To read it, though, you’ll have to pick up a future issue of GamePro magazine that contains my article on 5 psychological phenomena that affect how you buy games. I’ll update when that issue is available on new stands and again if they put it online.

1. Poundstone, W., personal communication with author, April 21, 2011. [↩]
2. Which is pretty much what Nintendo and Sony do. [↩]
3. Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131. [↩]
4. Raghubir, P. & Srivastava, J. (2002). Effect of Face Value on Product Valuation in Foreign Currencies. Journal of Consumer Research, 29 335-347. [↩]

Note: This article got a little out of hand, so I’m breaking it up into two related posts. Enjoy Part 1 below, then come back next week for Part 2. Doesn’t that feel like you’re getting more for your money? Woo psychology!

Ever bought something from Xbox Live Arcade? The first time you may have been a bit bamboozled by the process because Microsoft doesn’t just let you put $15 on your credit card to buy a new game; purchases are done in “Microsoft Points” that you deposit into a virtual wallet. Then you spend the points on stuff.¹

Gamers possessed of equal parts suspicion and curiosity may wonder why our gaming overlords adopted such a strange system instead of just letting us pay real money for our purchases. Sure, it lets parents put finite funds in kids’ accounts and lets you buy points on gift cards, but are there psychological factors at play with these kinds of point-based systems that affect how we spend our money? I’m glad you asked, because yes there are. Let’s take a closer look.

Wait, I think I'm going to have some points left over in my account...

Leaving money on the table or in our Xbox Live account² makes most of us a bit uncomfortable because it feels wasteful. Hal Arkes, who pioneered the study of the psychology of waste, theorized that this is a holdover from what’s called “the sunk cost effect.”³ This is when not losing unrecoverable money you’ve already sunk into a losing proposition becomes the main justification for throwing new money in.

But at this point the more clever among you may be thinking “But that doesn’t really apply to unspent Microsoft Points and their ilk because they can be spent whenever you want. They’re not sunk; they’re still fungible.”⁴ True. But ingrained habits (or in this case, decision-making biases) die hard, and we are averse to, as Arkes says, “insufficiently utilize the item that has been purchased.”

For example, in one unpublished study⁵ researchers Lisa Bolton and Joseph Alba presented subjects with a scenario where a business traveler laid over in a city decided to buy a one-month gym membership for $75 and enjoy a workout, even though he was only able to use it one night. Relative to the man in another scenario who paid $75 to get an equal amount of enjoyment out of a baseball game, people saw this traveler as “less intelligent,” “foolish” and “less sensible.” This despite the fact that the two people enjoyed their evening equally for the same cost.

So, following this logic, we see that gamers may dislike leaving money sitting in an account because it represents waste, especially if you’re considering spending real money on a disk based game. So you’re a little more likely to get rid of those 400 Microsoft Points by buying something on sale that you normally wouldn’t, or even by buying an additional 800 points so you can pick up another full digital game that you might not have been interested in otherwise. It’s similar to overeating at a buffet or doubling your paper towel use after buying the 124 roll jumbo pack. Even though you could just let those paper towels or Nintendo Points sit there until you have a good reason to use them, spending real money on something else seems wasteful.

So there’s waste aversion. But there’s one other psychological phenomenon at play with Microsoft Points (and their ilk) that I’d like to point out, and curiously enough it may actually be leading us to spend less instead of more. For more on that, come back next week for Part 2. BAHM-BAM-BAAAAA!

1. And Microsoft isn’t the only one –Sony and Nintendo have similar systems, and Valve has even rolled out a “Steam Wallet” for in-game microtransactions. [↩]
2. Or our Playstation Network account or our Nintendo Points account for that matter. [↩]
3. Arkes, H. (1996). The Psychology of Waste. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 9 213-224. [↩]
4. Fungible: dictionary.com Word of the Day April 14th, 2008. [↩]
5. Bolton, L. & Alba, J. When Less is More: Consumer Aversion to Waste. Unpublished Manuscript Submitted for Publication. [↩]

As is my habit, I recently attended the annual conference for the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP), which is the professional organization for people who apply psychology to understanding human behavior in the workplace. Trust me, we I/O psychologists actually do know how to party.¹ Apparently some of us also know how to play video games, because I happened upon one panel discussion called “Serious Games and Virtual Worlds: The Next I/O Frontier.” The purpose of the panel was to explore how video games, virtual realities, and other immersive technologies can help us measure and predict worker behaviors.

One concept that particularly clicked with me was the idea of making games out of what are called “situational judgment tests,” or “SJTs.” These are tests used to screen job applicants and help decide if a person likely has abilities needed for success on the job. They typically present test-takers with a situation, give them relevant facts, and then ask them how they would react or solve a problem requiring some kind of application of rules and a judgment call. For example, a SJT for first line supervisors might describe (or show via video) an employee coming in to work late and giving an explanation of his tardiness. Using this scenario, a copy of the fictional company’s attendance policy, and access to the offending employee’s past time sheets, applicants are asked to indicate what they would say in response to the employee’s request to make up the time later. This can help prospective employers decide if an applicant should be able to appropriately handle similar situations on the job.

Think about that. If you’ve ever played a Western role-playing game, especially something by Bioware, you’ve taken a situational judgment test. I was recently playing The Witcher, for example, and during the tutorial you’re tasked with having to decide how to deal with an attack on your stronghold –do you want to chase down the powerful mage who’s trying to steal your stuff or do you want to deal with the monster rampaging through your courtyard? Your choice may say something about your preferences and your priorities, not to mention your tactical skills. Or take the conversation in Mass Effect 2 that has you guide Commander Sheppard through a conversation with Mordin about the alien doctor’s involvement with the bioengineered, near-destruction of an entire species. That’s a delicate exchange, and true to the character of a good role-playing game, Bioware lets you proceed through it in a number of different ways, each of which could reflect something different about you.

Ahhh, Mordin, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday to wrap up that whole genophage thing, 'kay?

I think the idea of using these kinds of games to test job applicants on their ability to make various real-life judgments is a fascinating one. One could easily imagine a game where applicants are told to interact with an in-game character and solve problems as they would in real life –sort of a role-playing game where the point is not to role-play.

What’s more, we know other things about human psychology in video games that could improve our measures of work-related abilities. We know, for example, that people who are deeply immersed in a technology or engaged in psychological flow are more likely to forget about their surroundings and forget (or at least downplay) the fact that they’re playing a video game. One of the biggest problems in using tests or interviews to assess job applicants is that they may behave differently relative to a normal day on the job. But if casting an assessment in the mold of a game helps them forget that they’re taking a test or disregard it, then we’ve got a much more accurate measurement of their ability. Game designers could be brought in to make the assessment more like a game, and while you’re at it you could take the opportunity to convey important information about the company and its values in order to make the assessment informative to the applicants, too.

As I’m so fond of saying, somebody get on that. And remember: I’m available for consulting work.

1. Seriously. Ask any I/O psychologist to tell you the one about the priest and the Likert scale. It’s hilarious. [↩]