Author Archives: Jamie Madigan

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How Reciprocity Yields Bumper Crops in Farmville

One day when going to check on my friends’ status updates on Facebook, this jumped out at me:

Attention Facebook friends: Please for the love of God stop sending me gifts and invites for Farmville, Mafia Wars, Vampires, and whatever other crappy THING you’ve been playing. DO NOT WANT. Just …STOP. GOD.

Those of you on Facebook or MySpace can probably sympathize. How many times have you checked your notifications and thought “Gee, you sent me a …virtual goat. THANKS. I guess. Guess I should click on your link.” Indeed, developers of these social games have gone to great lengths to make “gifting” of imaginary stuff a core element to the gameplay, and they’re even starting to offer pixilated gifts for real money. Why is that? Why do people do that?

The answer has to do with one of the most powerful habits in social psychology: the reciprocity effect. When people give you something, you feel the need to give something back; it’s that simple. Or possibly if you’re like my friend quoted above, you yell at them. But usually you want to reciprocate. Some evolutionary psychologists think that this is an evolutionary advantage in that it encourages societies to form –and enforce– mutually beneficial norms. Adhering to the norm is seen as a good deed, and others want to return that deed; breaking the norm is an attack, and will earn you a misdeed in return, like shunning or a punch to the neck.

Sheep

Thank you for the sheep, Guy I Knew in High School.

The reciprocity effect is put to use by marketers and savvy businesspeople all the time. Every year the March of Dimes charity sends me a lovely set of return address labels for use with my Christmas cards ((Tip: if you try to use them with e-mail greeting cards, it gets your monitor all sticky)). The labels are a free gift, but not coincidentally, they come in the same envelope as a plea to donate. The message is clear: “Dude, we totally just gave you some free stuff. You should return the favor with a donation.” Psychologist Robert Cialdini explained in a 2001 article in Scientific American how the Disabled American Veterans organization used this same trick to increase the success rate of their appeals for donations from 18% to 35%. ((Cialdini, R. (2001). The Science of Persuasion. Scientific American. February 2001))

The same technique is used by supermarkets giving you free samples of new cheese crackers, or the video game developer who gives out free tee shirts to the press or buyers during a trade show. I’m not saying that you’ll be mind controlled and compelled to return the favor by buying the crackers or giving a favorable writeup, but you’ll at least think about it more than you would have otherwise. Many organizations even invoke “no gifts” codes of conduct to guard against things like the reciprocity effect.

But what about Farmville? That’s a free game, right? And most of the gifts are free, too, right? For the most part, but Zynga, the makers of Farmville and other social games like Mafia Wars, nevertheless want new players to come in and existing players to stick around. The gifts in these games are useful to their recipients within the game, so seeing a notification that you’ve gotten one encourages you to log into the game and put it to use. And actually just clicking on the link will start you down the path to installing and playing the game, which increases Zynga’s numbers. Then the reciprocity effect then encourages you to return the favor by sending a gift back, which creates a cycle of reciprocating fruit plants, livestock, and penguin statues flying back and forth. Even worse is when you realize that if you DON’T perpetuate the gifting loop, you’ll hurt your friends by making them waste in-game money for things they were hoping to get from you as gifts, you heartless bastard.

This is an effective mechanism for getting people to perpetually log back in to Farmville, for example, instead of moving on to other games. There’s the notification telling you that you need to log in to reciprocate the gift, and while you’re there you might as well play for a while. You can even send gifts to people who don’t play the game yet, encouraging them to pay you back by starting up a game as your neighbor or teammate. Farms everywhere in an unholy amalgamation of psychology and agriculture!

But wait, there’s more. The real money for companies like Zynga comes when you feel compelled to spend REAL money to reciprocate a “premium” gift. In fact, let’s see what Mark Pinkus, CEO of Zynga, had to say in a recent interview with Charlie Rose ((And if there’s one thing I know it’s that the kids, they can’t get enough Charlie Rose)):

We are excited about the future of social games and virtual goods as a revenue model within social games. What I mean by that is …these are free games, and one to two percent of the users will spend money in the games. And they can spend it on virtual goods, virtual gifts we just started selling, and that has been a revenue model that has enabled our company to be profitable for eight straight quarters.

So, enjoy your free sample. But don’t underestimate its effect on you.

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Bayonetta: Witches With Halos

I’m not sure where I first noticed Bayonetta, Sega’s crazy action game starring a witch of the same name (“Bayonetta,” not “Sega”). But I can tell you that I immediately wrote it off as something I wasn’t interested in based on very little actual information. Why? Well, on the 12/25/09 edition of the 4 Guys 1 Up podcast, GamePro’s John Davison gave a pretty amusing assessment:

There’s a guy in our office that you could put a picture of him up on the wall and the guys at Bayonetta would be like “We are making this game for THIS guy. It’s got boobs and hair and guns, and crotch shots, and she sucks on a lollipop, and her hair is her PANTS, and and it’s just AWESOME and things explode and and and and …she’s wearing librarian glasses just in case that does it for you as well!”

My first glance at the game gave me pretty much the same impression and I felt that it was all I needed to know. Hey, I appreciate sexy ladies, but Bayonetta’s appearance immediately made me think it was nothing but fan service for 14 year old boys. ((Which is totally accurate, at least from a character design point of view, though I still fail to see why a woman covered in thick black hair is supposed to be sexy)) From that, I inferred that the rest of the game would be childish, shallow, and cliche so I drop kicked it off my radar.

Bayonetta

Clearly, my fears that Bayonetta would be half-assed were unfounded.

So imagine my surprise when Bayonetta was recently released and actually started getting good word of mouth and reviews, scoring in the very impressive high 80s to low 90s on Metacritic. While my snap judgment of the “sexy witch fan service” was dead on (and then some), apparently the mechanics are both deep and fun, not to mention the ridiculously awesome presentation of it all.

So why did I assume the whole game shared traits with its protagonist’s character design?

Psychologists call this “the halo effect” ((No relation to Master Chief)) or sometimes the “affect heuristic.” ((I like “affect effect” myself, but nobody listens)) It’s a cognitive bias that happens when your evaluation of one trait unjustifiably bleeds over into your perceptions of others. It’s basically the same reason that interviewers tend to think that if you’re a sharp dresser or have a firm handshake, you’ll be a good employee. ((Mack, D., & Rainey, D. (1990). Female applicants’ grooming and personnel selection. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5, 399-407.)) Perhaps more infuriatingly, it’s also the reason that beautiful people often get preferential treatment, even by members of the same sex, when people subconsciously assume that because someone is physically attractive, he/she must also be smart, competent, and likable. Research has shown that this even happens in courts, with uglier defendants receiving less lenient sentences. (( Stewart, J. E. II. (1980). Defendant’s attractiveness as a factor in the outcome of trials. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 10, 348-361.))

Two researchers named Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson used a clever experiment to reveal how powerful the halo can be. ((Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). The halo effect: Evidence for unconscious alteration of judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 250-6.)) They twice filmed a professor ostensibly answering students’ questions. In the first film, the proff acted kindly. In the second film, he was a jerk. Two groups of subjects were then shown one film or the other and then asked to describe how appealing they found his appearance, mannerisms, and even accent. I bet you can guess which version of the professor people thought was better dressed, more suave, and possessed of a more charming accent.

As another example, crack open a history textbook (books are like if Wikipedia were made of trees) and consider the first Presidential campaign debates that were broadcast simultaneously on radio and television in 1960. Richard Nixon looked like crap for the cameras while John F. Kennedy looked well rested and snappy. Later polls showed that radio listeners (who obviously couldn’t form impressions of the candidates’ appearances) thought Nixon had won the debates while those who had watched the EXACT SAME exchange on the television thought Kennedy had nailed it.

So when I first saw Bayonetta, her lascivious appearance formed a halo in my mind (or horns, if you prefer ((No “horny witch” jokes PLEASE))) which led me to believe that every other aspect of the game would be so shallow, base, and uninteresting. In a market with SO many games and so little time, this may actually be an adaptive strategy since first impressions can often be right. But in this case I was surprised to find out that I’m wrong, at least according to Metacritic.

Of course, one man’s horns are another boy’s halos, and maybe I’m just not in the target demographic after all.

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How Social Identity Theory Predicted the Console Wars of ’07

Fanboys. You don’t have to be a very experienced browser of gaming-related forums to see your share of discussions fouled by flames between people hysterically defending their favored game/console/genre/whatever and attacking everything else in sight. Some of it is deliberate trolling, for sure, but not always. There were (and still are) way too many Xbox owners ready to point and laugh at the Playstation 3′s lack of games. Or good luck trying to find someone who will stand up as a fan of BOTH Halo AND Killzone. ((And don’t even get me started on the whole “table versus jetski” debacle.))

Why do gamers do this? One word: “social identity theory.”

Fans

Typical Fans

This theory explains (or at least predicted) the Great Console Wars of today and tomorrow. In one study, psychologist Henry Tajfel and his colleagues brought together teenage boys ((There’s the bulk of your console war soldiers right there, in fact.)) and asked them to express preference for one of two sets of paintings, saying that their choice would place them in one of two otherwise arbitrary groups. Thus sorted, the boys then participated in a separate study where they distributed (fake) money to their fellow subjects under a variety of conditions. But here’s the key: each boy was told whether those to whom he was doling out the virtual cash were in “his” group or in the “other” group.

I’ll bet you can guess the results: subjects showed stark favoritism for people who had liked the same set of paintings as they had and who were thus in “their” group. Remember that like messageboard denizens, these kids had absolutely no self-interested reason to do this –they weren’t rewarded for favoring their group and they weren’t given any reason to expect their fellow group members to return the favor and be best friends forever. They just did it because they considered those strangers to be “us” and –perhaps more importantly– the rest to be “them.” ((Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149-178.))

Tajfel and his collaborators theorized that people have a natural tendency to construct identities based on group membership. Part of who you are –and how you communicate that to others– is defined by what groups you belong to. And we naturally want to belong to high-status groups, right? Okay, fine, but everything is relative; a group isn’t high status unless there’s a low status group for it to be contrasted against. So not only do some people identify themselves as Xbox fans, they attack Playstation owners in order to raise their status. This tendency is human nature, the researchers concluded, and a lot of other data support them. What’s more, we’re perfectly willing to do it at the drop of a hat.

Some savvy game designers even build this kind of thing into their game, the biggest example being Blizzard’s long-standing “Horde vs. Alliance” rivalry in World of Warcraft. Some folks will roll toons on either side of the divide, but many hardcore players will vigorously stick to just one side, and Blizzard happily plays this rivalry up in the player versus player aspects of the game.

One of the most interesting uses of social identity theory I’ve seen, though, was pulled off by Valve Software during their recent “Demoman versus Soldier” event for Team Fortress 2.

Valve uses social identity theory for fun and profits

Harnessing their flabbergasting ability to track gameplay stats through Steam, Valve promised a new in-game weapon for the class (Demoman or Soldier) that scored the most overall kills against his opponent during a certain time frame. The results were nuts as people chose sides, let rockets/stickies fly, and created renewed buzz for the game. ((In case you were wondering, Soldier won the shootout, but just barely –6,372,979 Soldiers gibbed vs 6,406,065 Demomen.))

I think the Soldier explained it best on the Official Team Fortress Blog:

Gentlemen, I have NO IDEA what this weapon is. I don’t even know if I’ll WANT it. But BY GOD, I know what’s IMPORTANT, and it’s that WE get it and the DEMOMAN DOES NOT.

This is psychological warfare at its finest.

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Fundamental Attribution Error and A Tale of Two Tigers

For those of you who somehow don’t know, pro golfer and occasional video game star Tiger Woods has recently been in trouble over not keeping his club in his bag, so to speak. The casualties include endorsement deals with companies who capitalized on Woods’s previous reputation as focused and reliable, but interestingly game publisher EA isn’t dropping him. EA Sports President Peter Moore recently said that they intend to stick with the athlete on properties like the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series:

Our relationship with Tiger has always been rooted in golf. We didn’t form a relationship with him so that he could act as an arm’s length endorser. Far from it. We chose to partner with Tiger in 1997 because we saw him as the world’s best, most talented and exciting golfer. We struck that partnership with the assumption that he would remain near or at the top of his sport for years to come.

By his own admission, he’s made some mistakes off the course. But regardless of what’s happening in his personal life, and regardless of his decision to take a personal leave from the sport, Tiger Woods is still one of the greatest athletes in history.

This is surprisingly rational behavior, because Moore (and EA by extension) is explicitly avoiding a very fundamental bias in human psychology: the “fundamental attribution error,” or “FAE.” It’s so fundamental, it’s got “fundamental” right there in its name. You can’t get more fundamental than that!

Tiger doing his best Darth Vader impersonation.

FAE is people’s tendency to rely too much on internal attributes (like personality) to explain others’ behavior and to underestimate external attributes (like the situation or environment). ((Curiously, we do just the inverse when attributing causes to our own behavior)) The classic example is to imagine that someone is talking to you and that they cross their arms. FAE would lead us to believe that this body language is because they’re defensive or dislike you. But maybe the thermostat is set low and the person is just cold.

The other classic example of FAE was provided by Edward Jones and Keith Harris in an experiment where they asked subjects to read essays that were either in favor of or against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. ((Jones, E. E. & Harris, V. A. (1967). The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 3, 1–24.)) Even when told that writers were randomly asked to manufacture a pro or anti Castro essay on the basis of a coin toss, subjects STILL tended to believe that the authors wrote what they wrote because they held the views espoused in their essays. In other words, they attributed the essays to internal factors (beliefs) instead of external ones (instructions by the experimenter).

Where does this tie in to Tiger? While browsing Jonah Lehrer’s excellent blog, I came across his post on the Woods controversy, which quoted from a New Yorker article on the same subject:

Woods’s appeal was based, ultimately, not on his physical abilities but on his mental toughness, his extraordinary capacity for focus and discipline. He was the man who always made the key putt, who never cracked under pressure. That’s why Gatorade, introducing a new drink with his face on the label, called the drink Tiger Focus. And it’s why the most powerful Nike ad about him is the one in which his father, in a voice-over, says, “I’d say, ‘Tiger, I promise you that you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn’t . . . and he never will.’”

In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness. Indeed, when, in 2008, Woods won the U.S. Open while essentially playing on one leg, the Times’ David Brooks devoted a column to his extraordinary ability to block out distraction and focus on the matter at hand, dubbing him “the exemplar of mental discipline” for our time. For millions of people–many of them, to be sure, affluent middle-aged white guys–Woods embodied an approach not just to golf but to life.

Lehrer goes on to expand on how this relates to the FAE. Before the scandal, we attributed all of Tiger’s success to his fundamental, internal qualities –his drive, talent, focus, and personality. When the headlines hit the fan, everything we heard about Woods was that he was unfaithful, dishonest, and unreliable. We were shocked (and thus interested in the story) because we couldn’t figure out why someone with such focus and drive could do what he did. It did not compute, because the FAE makes it hard to consider how his behavior on the greens could have more to do with the fact that he was ON THE GREENS and that his behaviors could vary so much across situations.

But squishy human brains tend not to work that way; we think that everything he does is based on the little slice of character we’ve seen on TV, so everyone drastically re-evaluated who he “is.” Which is not to say, of course, that infidelity is excused in any circumstances; it’s just a matter of how shocking it is to us when we held someone in high regard based on seeing him mostly in just one situation and can’t resolve the “two Tigers” we think we see, when it’s really just one Tiger who acts differently when he’s golfing.

This is why I think EA’s decision (for now, anyway) to stick with Woods for their PGA Tour series is commendable, or at least rational. Woods may be a philanderer in some situations ((such as when he’s philandering)), but on the golf course, real or virtual, he still embodies all those things that EA wants to associate with its brand –competence, focus, reliability, and top-tier play. Despite his cheating on his wife, Woods is still a great golfer.

Well, he would be, if he hadn’t dropped out of the game. But you know what I mean.

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Loss Aversion, Achievements, and Trial Conversions

How could publishers get way more people to buy an Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network game after trying the trial version? Let me glue on my goatee and practice my maniacal laugh a few times and then I’ll tell you my idea.

But first, let me ask you a couple of hypothetical questions made famous in certain circles by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman: ((Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. (1981). The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science, 211, 453-458.))

Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.

If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

Which of the two programs would you favor?

Which would you pick? The researchers found that most people chose Program A: 72% versus the 28% who chose B.

So then the researchers asked the following version of the same question:

If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.

If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.

Which of the two programs would you favor?

Which would you pick? Most of the experimental subjects picked Program D by a wide margin — 78% versus the 22% for Program C. The thing is, both sets of choices are identical. Look closely. Programs A and C both result in 400 people dying and 200 living. Programs B and D both have a 1/3 chance of saving everyone and a 2/3 chance of killing everyone. The ONLY difference is that Programs A and B are phrased in terms of lives saved and Programs C and D are described in terms of lives lost.

Tversky and Kahnaman said this points to “loss aversion,” which is one my favorite kinks in the human brain. In short, loss aversion is our willingness to go to great lengths to avoid losses –much farther than we’ll go to get an equivalent gain. In other words, losing $10 is more painful than gaining $10 is pleasurable.

Consider another quick question and suppose that a company were offering two subscription plans for an online MMORPG.

  • Option A gives you a $5 credit
  • Option B lets you avoid a $5 monthly surcharge

Assuming both options were otherwise identical, which do you think would be more popular? In all likelihood it would be Option B, since people prefer not losing $5 to gaining a $5 discount. This despite the fact that the monthly costs would be identical. This is also one of the reasons you’ll more often see “$10 late registration fee” advertised instead of “$10 discount for early registrations” for events where the organizers want you to register early.

So what does this have to do with getting people to buy a Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network game after they play the trial version? Right now, it’s not uncommon for such trials to pop up a message saying something to the effect of “You would have just gotten an achievement/trophy just now! Buy the full game to get it!”

And that’s pretty good. Pretty sneaky. Pretty psychological. Because we obviously like getting things we value. ((The “I don’t care about Gamerscore” folks can just put a cork in it, here)) But the phenomenon of loss aversion suggests a way to be better, more sneaky, more psychological. Instead of saying that you will get the achievement or trophy if you buy the game, actually give it to them and then say you’re going to take it away if they DON’T buy the game. And I mean really give it to them –have it show up in their gamer score and on their achievement/trophy list. Just take it away if they exit the trial version of the game without buying the full thing, and make sure they know it.

So, to all the game developers/publishers out there, I guarantee that your conversion rate will go up, because while people like the promise of getting something, they hate the promise of losing it way more. Just don’t tell the gamers that you got the idea from me.

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Duke Nukem Forever: Escalating Commitment and Chewing Bubblegum

You probably know about Duke Nuke Forever, the sequel to the trailblazing blockbuster Duke Nukem 3D that became the laughing stock of the industry on account of how it spent 12 years –TWELVE YEARS– in development and burned through tens of millions of dollars before being canceled. Wired magazine recently published a fascinating analysis of what happened here, and it suggests at least one psychology-related reason (among others) for the game’s prolonged agony.

Why did Duke Nukem Forever stay in production for so long? More to the point, why did some employees at the game’s developers, 3DRealms, stay committed to the project for so long in the face of unlikely payoffs and irreparable harm to their careers? Would you have?

3D Realms

3D Realms. Not pictured: Duke Nukem Forever.

Before we answer, let me present you with another question: would you pay $10 for a $1 bill? No? Under the right conditions you might, and many of the folks at 3D Realms did basically that because of a psychological phenomenon called “escalation of commitment.”

Consider an auction ((first conceived of by Martin Shubik in Shubik, M. (1971). The Dollar Auction game: a paradox in noncooperative behavior and escalation. Journal of Conflict Resolution 15, 109–111.)) where a $1 bill is up for bid and the rules are (and this is the important part) that everyone who bids has to cough up their last bid whether they win or lose. Even when this is clearly explained to a room full of MBA students who should know better, someone always springs the trap by throwing out a bid of 1 penny in hopes of an easy $.99 profit.

Invariably someone else jumps on the bandwagon and outbids the first person, raising the stakes to two cents and a $.98 profit. But now the first person must either bid three cents or let the other person win and lose his initial 1 cent bid.

But people really hate losing money, so the second bidder is pretty likely to raise his bid to 4 cents, and the spiral keeps spinning until the break-even point of $1.00. Now one sheep-faced bidder has to decide whether or not to actually keep raising the bid and face a 1 cent loss even if he wins. Much of the time he will actually do it, presenting his opponent with basically the same conundrum.

Researchers running this experiment with groups of otherwise rational adults and had final prices go up to ten or even twenty dollars for a one dollar bill. ((For an illustration of auction in comic form, see Dinosaur Comics, 10/1/09.)) The reason is that bidders escalate their commitment to the auction by citing prior investments as justification for future ones, even though those costs are gone, immutable, and completely out of the picture. ((Sound familiar? You may be thinking of the closely related habit of honoring sunk costs, which helps explain why retailers try to get you to pre-order games.)) Think of it this way: should you invest even one more cent on an auction that will only cause you to lose money even if you “win?” Or is it more rational to just cut your losses and bow out?

This is basically what many folks at 3D Realms did with Duke Nukem Forever. ((among other things, for sure)) According to that Wired article, the developers constantly threw money at the game, citing past expenses as the reason for continuing to invest money even when it was apparent that the game was doomed. And since they were self-funding the game, it wasn’t until the very end that they had a publisher standing over them and forcing them to end the cycle and either kill the game or polish it off for release.

This kind of thing happens in finance and business all the time. They probably wouldn’t have a name for it if it didn’t, though I kind of like the idea of calling it “Duke Nukem’s Disease.” But escalation of commitment doesn’t just happen with money. In fact, this quote from the Wired article suggests that this kind of dilemma was very much on the minds of 3D Realms employees and caused many of them to stick around longer than was good for their careers:

For longtime employees, the incessant delays posed two big problems. One was professional cred: Duke Nukem Forever was the only modern 3-D game some of them had worked on; if it didn’t ship soon, they’d have spent nearly a decade with nothing to show for it.

As a result of this, I imagine that a lot of them felt that the time they had invested up to that point was reason enough for them to persist, even if they felt their careers were taking a big hit. So it was back to escalating commitment and chewing bubblegum …until they ran out of gum.

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Phat Loot and Neurotransmitters in World of Warcraft

How are loot-based games like World of Warcraft, Torchlight, and Borderlands related to slot machines, chemical bliss, and evolution? Read on for the answer.

During my early days with World of Warcraft (WoW) I remember tromping through Westfall killing crowds of Defias bandits when I was shocked by a loot drop: a rare pair of “blue” gloves that perfectly fit my class’s needs at the time. For those of you who don’t know, killing enemies in WoW gives you a random chance at one or more pieces armor, weapons, or other items called “loot” in WoW parlance. These are stratified according their text’s color: gray, white, green, blue, purple, and orange in order of increasing quality. For a level 20-something character to find a blue item on a random enemy was actually very rare, and I experienced a huge rush from it. But more importantly, with that came an acute desire to keep playing the game and to murder more Defias bandits.

Other games do this, too. Borderlands gives you random guns from drops or chests, which compels us to check EVERY container, vending machine, and item dropped by felled enemies. Torchlight essentially uses the WoW system, and you can bet your thumbs that the upcoming Diablo III will push it even farther. But why are gamers so susceptible to the loot hunting addiction found in these games? Why is this gameplay mechanic so incredibly effective in getting us to keep playing?

Wow Drops

Which of these do you think would create a bigger dopamine neuron freakout if it dropped in front of you?

To answer that question, let’s consider slot machines and a type of brain cell called “dopamine neurons.” The latter are the bits of your gray matter responsible for monitoring levels of the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine in order to regulate behavior and figure out how to get more of a good thing. It’s these cells that light up when something nice happens in your life (say a delicious Hot Pocket or a fuzzy puppy belly) and triggers a gush of the neurotransmitter dopamine. But what’s more, dopamine neurons play the role of trying to predict the rush from nice things, and they may fire before you actually encounter them. Given a couple of chances, they’ll learn to light up when you hear the microwave timer beep that precedes your delicious Hot Pocket. This is a pretty useful thing as far as evolutionary advantages go, since it clues you in ahead of time that something good is in the vicinity.

But this is only part of what makes loot-based games work so well. The real key is that while dopamine neurons fire once your brain has figured out how to predict an event, they really go nuts when an unexpected, unpredicted gush of dopamine shows up, giving you an even bigger rush. It’s like DUDE! UNEXPECTED HOT POCKET! Again, I’m guessing that this is an evolutionary advantage that causes us to obsess over unexpected pleasures and try to predict them so that we can get more of them.

dopamine

This is either dopamine or a map for the optimal arrangement for dps and off-tanks in some raid encounter.

But we can’t predict the inherently unpredictable. This is how slot machines get you. Your dopamine neurons are trying really hard to learn what precedes a jackpot in terms of what bells, you hear, pictures you see, or even which cocktail waitress last walked by. But in reality, it’s utterly random and by definition can’t be predicted. More rational parts of your brain may understand this, but not the dopamine neurons. They’re stymied, but that doesn’t stop them from flaring up and saying “HEY! THERE’S SOMETHING HERE! KEEP DOING WHAT YOU’RE DOING UNTIL WE FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN AGAIN!” So you keep playing.1

So, getting back to World of Warcraft, just replace “slot machine jackpot” with “phat loot drop” and you should have a pretty good idea why the loot game mechanic is so successful. Like all the best motivators, it uses a core concept of psychology as a lever to keep you playing and paying. But like with the slot machines, you DO have the ability to understand what’s happening and put a stop to it.

On the other hand, those blue gloves were pretty sweet on my Hunter. Maybe if I had killed a few more Defias bandits I could have gotten the matching leggings…

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Hot Hand Fallacy and Kill Streaks in Modern Warfare 2

What do basketball free throws, Modern Warfare 2, and murdering 11 people in a row have in common? Read on to find out.

In psychology, there’s a phenomenon called “the hot hand fallacy” (a.k.a., “the gambler’s fallacy” or “the hot streak fallacy” or “the clustering illusion”). The seminal work on this kink in the human mind was done by thee guys named Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky and published in a 1985 edition of the journal Cognitive Psychology. ((Gilovich, T, Vallone, R, & Tversky, A. (1985). The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences. Cognitive Psychology 17, 295-314)) These fellows weren’t much into online shooters, but they had noticed something about basketball. Specifically, a belief among fans and players in the “hot hand” phenomenon, which dictates that a player’s success in sinking one basket is determined in part by his making the previous shot –success feeds on success and creates a type of momentum or streak.

The problem, though, was that when the researchers studied records of the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia ’76ers making shots, they found that the idea of a hot hand was a fallacy. In fact, if anything, a player’s success on a previous shot slightly predicted the failure of a subsequent shot, perhaps because overconfident players were taking riskier chances. So the idea of a hot hand was all in your hot head.

What does this have to do with video games without “NBA” in the title? Enter Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), Infinity Ward’s military first person shooter. The multiplayer side of MW2 has a feature called “kill streaks” that, as far as a player motivation tool goes, is fairly reminiscent of the hot hand phenomenon. In short, killing a certain number of opponents in a row without dying yourself rewards you with powerful perks like dropping supply crates, calling in heavily armed gunships, or at the extreme end bringing down a nuclear strike to cut the match off at the knees.

Modern Warfare 2

This guy is just one kill away from his killstreak bonus. Unfortunately the guy behind him beat him to it.

To be sure, some players get lots of kill streaks because they are tiny, radiant gods of destruction whose skills at the game put every last member of the Boston Celtics to shame (who prefer Halo 3, after all). But skill aside, does the kill streak system in MW2 work in the sense that it gives players some momentum that propels them towards otherwise unreachable acts of virtual carnage? Is a player who has 10 kills in a row any more likely to get the 11th one needed to unlock a kill streak reward than he is to get the first kill?

Nope, says the science of psychology and basic probability theory. It’s all in their head because splash damage and javelin glitch abuse aside, each shot is basically an independent event. For any given player, any perception of kills clustering together more than usual is just a product the human brain’s tendency to see patterns where there are none –a phenomenon called “apophenia” by psychologists trying to win at Scrabble.

In fact, I’d wager that MW2 players are less likely to get those capstone kills than they are to get the first few in a streak. Interestingly, Microsoft, Activision, Infinity Ward, or someone else connected with the game probably has the data to directly test this kind of thing –they track everything these days. It’s be really neat to recreate Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky’s 1985 study of basketball shots using data from Modern Warfare 2 to see if someone is more likely to kill or be killed as they approach the killstreak payoffs. Heck, somebody get me the data and I’ll do the analyses myself!

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Red Rings and Research Methods

Why do surveys overestimate the number of people experiencing the Xbox 360′s dreaded Red Ring of Death?

Lord knows I’m familiar with the Xbox 360′s “red ring of death,” or “RROD” as it’s not so affectionately called. I’ve encountered it twice myself. The term refers to what you get on the front of Microsoft’s console when its notoriously high failure rate kicks in and the thing stops working. This tends to be a touchy subject for Xbox owners, who tend to light up the torches and grab the pitchforks whenever it’s brought up.

Earlier this year the magazine Game Informer made a lot of headlines by reporting that according to their research, a mind blowing 54.2% of Xboxen crapped out, which is a failure rate traditionally reserved for mundane things like marriages. ((Just kidding. I LOVE MY WIFE!)) Immediately across the Internet people started screeching this number as fact.

RROD

I should know about the RROD. I've had 2 myself.

But how much stock can we put in the survey and the methodology used to conduct it and interpret its findings? Sure, I think it’s safe to say that the RROD rate is high (Microsoft’s Peter Moore admitted as much publicly), but is that 54.2% overblown? (SPOILER ALERT: Yes. Yes it is))

Game Informer surveyed 5,000 of its print subscribers to gather the data. I couldn’t find a copy of the actual survey, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that there were no leading questions or other shenanagains that would influence subjects’ responses. The problem that persists, though, is related to what psychologists and others refer to as “sampling errror.” This is when the sample of data you collect is somehow biased, skewed, or otherwise not representative of the larger group of people that you’re really interested in (“the population” in inferential statistics parlance).

Presumably, what Game Informer wanted to do was infer that was was true of its sample (the readers it surveyed) was also true of the population of interest (all Xbox 360 owners). ((At least they got an adequate number; 5,000 is actually way more data points than you need for something like this)) What Game Informer did was send out a survey and then ask people to voluntarily respond. I can easily think of three reasons why this may have inflated their results:

  1. People who had experienced a RROD and been justifiably pissed off about it would be more likely to respond to the survey (an example of what’s known as “self-selection bias”)
  2. People who subscribe to enthusiast magazines probably play more games and thus put their machines through more wear and tear
  3. People who subscribe to enthusiast magazines are more likely to be early adopters who bought initial runs of the console before Microsoft improved their process and reduced RRODs

Think of it this way: If you were interested in measuring the prevalence of drinking in your home town would it be wise to only survey patrons at bars? ((SPOILER ALERT: No. No you would not.))

So what should Game Informer have done? The best way to eliminate sampling error is to survey people from the population of interest randomly and not rely on self-selection to be in the sample. Sending surveys randomly to people who have registered an Xbox 360 would reduce (but not eliminate) sampling error. Same for randomly surveying people in a shopping mall or cold calling them. Sure, this is hard and expensive and not always practical, but the bottom line is that if your research has flaws like potential sampling error you should note it, and reporters –even in the gaming enthusiast press– should be savvy enough about these things to note them when reporting on them instead of screaming “54%! 54%!” because it makes for good headlines.

As an example, look at this online survey done by CNET UK on exactly the same question. The survey has most of the problems described above, but the authors are good enough to cop to it:

This was a self-selecting survey, so it doesn’t represent a random sample of console owners. It’s likely that people whose consoles have had problems are more motivated to fill out the survey, but the results are still interesting when you compare the Xbox 360 to its competitors.

…The survey did not distinguish between the Xbox 360 Arcade and Elite versions, which are very similar, or the PS3 and PS3 Slim, which has only just been introduced.

So good on them. The next time you see survey results cited anywhere, think about how credible they are by taking sampling error into consideration.

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Just One More Level: Decision Making Under Arousal

As gamers, I think we’ve all been there: You’re jamming along, feeling the rush as you shotgun foes in an online shooter or tear your car through the twists and turns of a realistically rendered race track. It’s exciting and in the best cases it may actually get our heart racing and our palms sweating. And when the match is over or the latest “Level Complete” screen pops up, you remember all the other things that you really should be doing. Maybe you have school tomorrow and it’s getting late. Or maybe your laundry is piling up and there are dishes in the sink. Hadn’t you intended to limit yourself to just half an hour of gaming?

And yet, you decide on just one more match, one more level, or one more quest. Why? Why would you do that?

To find out the answer, let us consider pornography. I know, I know. Some of you are thinking “Wait, what?” and the rest of you are probably thinking “Already way ahead of you, dude.” But bear with me.

In his book, Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely discusses research he and George Lowenstein did on the effects of sexual arousal on decision making. ((Ariely, D. & Lowenstein, G. (2006). In The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 19 87-98.)) Featuring one of the more interesting experimental designs I’ve seen, the researchers equipped male subjects with …well, you know there’s really no way to describe this without coming out and saying it: They gave a bunch of dudes laptops full of porn. Subjects watched said porn and at the zenith of their arousal, were asked some questions. You guys, THEY EVEN GOT PAID TEN BUCKS TO DO THIS!

Not quite an example of experimental stimulus materials. And apologies to Ariely and Lowenstein.

Included were queries about how likely the subjects would be to engage in behaviors of questionable morality or judgment. Like, “Would you encourage your date to drink to increase the chance that she would have sex with you?” or “Would you always use a condom if you didn’t know the sexual history of a new sexual partner?”Upon comparing the responses to a control group ((Bet those guys were mad when they found out which straw they’d drawn)) Ariely and Lowenstein found that yeah, acute arousal made you more likely to kick thoughts of consequences to the back seat and say you’d do some pretty stupid stuff. It’s the same reason that Nancy’s “Just say no” advice to teens simply doesn’t work.

What does this have to do with staying up late playing games when you know you have to work tomorrow? The study above is kind of unique, but it stems from an entire body of research by psychologists who have shown that emotional arousal and excitement of many kinds can hamper rational decision making. Despite any intentions born of rational thought, you’re just not thinking with the same brain after some infuriating punk has bested you in a shooter or you’re just pulled off some thrilling act of derring-do in some other game. Rationality gets elbowed aside and you look up to realize that it’s a quarter to three on a weekday morning. And yet you’re still muttering “Okay, just one more match…”

Interestingly, marketers use this fact all the time to manipulate you. Let’s say you’ve downloaded the demo for a game and just when a fevered battle is at its most heart poundingly intense, the demo pulls up short and says “That’s it! End of demo! But you know what? You can totally buy the game RIGHT NOW!” The God of War III demo did very kind of thing by having Kratos go through an exhilarating ascent before leaping towards the Titan Perses in a fist pumping display of badassitute and then abruptly ending the demo. More than one pumped up player has probably formed an intention to buy the game right then, despite lacking funds or time to play the huge backlog of games they already bought. And this kind of thing is likely to be even more effective when the game is downloadable and you can purchase and play it immediately.

So how do you protect yourself from this kind of thing? Research shows that the most effective thing to do is not to put yourself in those situations to begin with. Barring that, simply being aware of the phenomenon can help.