Author Archives: Jamie Madigan

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Creativity, Puzzle Games, and Brain Damage

Have you ever encountered a puzzle in a game that utterly stumped you, then wondered why it seemed so trivially easy when you stepped away and came back to it after doing something else for a while?

I have, especially on a recent playthrough of an indie puzzle game called “QUBE” (http://qube-game.com/). For those not familiar, QUBE is a first person puzzle game (kind of like Portal) where you manipulate special blocks in the environment to solve puzzles and exit testing chambers. Different colored blocks do different things, and once you enter a room where multiple blocks come into play, the puzzles can get really tricky and require some real insight to solve. For example, in one area you cause a clear globe to roll down a slope towards a purple receptacle, and when the ball passes through a blue field it turns blue. The insight needed to solve the puzzle is that you need to get the ball to roll first through a red field, then a blue field so that it turns purple (red + blue = purple) to match the purple receptacle at the bottom of the slope.

Now click this to make it go here, then AH NO NO NO! NOT THERE! Start over…

I found some of the puzzles in the final stages of QUBE devilishly difficult because they constantly required you to combine the different game mechanics in new and unprecedented ways. The solutions seemed obvious in hindsight but I simply did not see them at all prior that “ah-ha!” moment.

That’s the hallmark of a good puzzle game, but upon getting stumped in games like these, people (myself included) will often immediately head to GameFaqs or YouTube to find the solution so they can get on with things. But QUBE doesn’t even have a story or any other kind of gameplay. The sole point of the game is to solve the puzzles, so I didn’t want to cheat. Instead I was reminded that when faced with a difficult problem requiring a creative insight we are often greatly aided by stepping away and doing something relaxing for a while instead of trying to brute force things and keep staring the puzzle down until we figure it out. The insight needed for the solution then often comes to us in the midst of a hot shower, during a relaxing walk, or in the moments right before we drift off to sleep. Adopting this strategy, I stepped away when stumped and eventually finished the game.

Weeks later I was reading Jonah Lehrer’s new book Imagine: How Creativity Works and discovered that psychologists have extensively studied this phenomenon and actually honed in on the neuroscience of it a bit. Lehrer cites a study by Simone Sandkuhler and Joydeep Bhattacharya where the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain activity of subjects trying to solve riddles. They found that a reliable indicator of when someone was about to figure out a puzzle was a steady rhythm of alpha waves from parts of the brain associated with relaxation and free association, and much less activity from areas of the brain associated with attention and focussed thought. When people lacked sufficient alpha waves, they were less likely to solve the riddles, even when given overt clues.

I don’t understand. I keep doing the same thing and not getting a different result.

Lehrer argues in his book that this is an illustration of how different parts of our brain work –or don’t work– when it comes to creativity and problem solving. Creative insights come about when our minds can wander in a way that lets them to break free of assumptions and constraints to create unprecedented combinations of concepts. This results in the pattern of alpha waves cited in the above study. As such, highly focussed effort and attention are actually the bane of creative problem solving, since they activate parts of our brain like the prefrontal cortex that overemphasize what we think we know and censor possibilities simply on the grounds that they’re weird or supposedly outside the context of the problem. Too much focus can be a bad thing.

Take, for example, another study that Lehrer cites: Carlo Reverberti et al.’s 2005 examination of the problem solving prowess of patients who had damage to their prefrontal cortexes and who thus had difficulty concentrating and avoiding distraction. The researchers started by giving these subjects a relatively simple puzzle involving Roman numerals and math. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

Move any single line from the expression below to make it true.

IV = III + III

Many of you probably see that the answer is to simply move the “I” from the left of the “V” to the right of the “V” to make “VI = III + III” or “6 = 3 + 3.” More than 90% of the subjects got that one, similar to a group of control subjects without brain injuries.

But now consider a trickier one:

Move any single line from the expression below to make it true.

III = III + III

Chew on that one. Can you figure it out? If so, good work. Only 43% of control subjects got it right. However, 82% of those with deficient attention spans solved the riddle, seeing how you just have to rotate one of the lines from the “+” sign to make it another “=” sign so that the expression reads “III = III = III” or “3 = 3 = 3.” The subjects who had difficulty focussing their attention also had difficulty restricting their search for solutions and didn’t hold on to unstated assumptions like “you can’t screw with the operators in the equation.”

Remember how creative you had to get in Batman Arkham City’s Mr. Freeze boss fight?

And so it is with games like QUBE and games of its ilk. In one of the later levels the solution to a puzzle (spoiler alert!) where you shuffle blocks around in a glass-covered pit requires you to realize that you can manipulate the blocks in such a way that one of them gets launched up at the glass cover to shatter it and completely change the rules of that puzzle. And it’s not just puzzle games like QUBE or Portal. It could be a Zelda game where you have to figure out how to beat an end dungeon boss, an RPG where you load out different stats and abilities, a strategy game where you try different build orders, or a combat game where you try different weapons and loadouts. Relaxation and shoving your attention somewhere else are likely to help because of the different parts of the brain that they activate.

So next time you’re stuck, don’t go straight to GameFAQs. Take a walk, play with your dog, fold some laundry, or do anything else that lets you mind wander. Or I suppose you could try getting brain damage. Apparently that works, too.

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Competition, Cooperation, and Play

One of the topics that’s conspicuously absent from this blog is that of the relationship between violence and video games. The short version of the reason why is that I think the issue is too polarizing and too much tends to get read into findings on either side.

Something I did recently find worth discussing, however, is a kind of inversion of that topic: does playing cooperative games make you less likely to be aggressive and more likely to cooperate with people outside of the game? A big tip of the hat to Wai Yen Tang over at the blog VG Researcher, who recently wrote about three recent studies that explored this topic.

The earliest of these studies was by Mike Schmierbach (2010), who was interested in how game mode (single player, coop, or competitive) affected aggression. He shoved subjects into rooms to play games of Halo on the Xbox either campaign solo, campaign coop, or Slayer mode. After playing for a while, the researcher gave subjects surveys that measured various cognitions and emotional states. One part of the survey involved a word completion task where perplexed respondents were given two letters –KI, DE, BL, etc.– and then asked to use them to complete any word they liked. If you wrote KILL, DEATH, and BLUDGEON then you got more points than someone who said KISS, DEAN, and BLOKBUSTER. Also, you’re a better speller.

Schmierbach found that, as expected, people who played a coop mode were far more likely to come up with non-violent words, which he took as evidence of less “aggressive cognition.” Other self reported measures of frustration and arousal (in the general physiological sense) showed similar results.

This is interesting, but like most people I’m generally more interested in actual behavior than simple internal thoughts or emotional states. Fear not, because this year has seen the publication of two other studies that follow the same basic reasoning as Schmierback’s research, but which actually look at whether people engage in more cooperative behavior after setting the controller down.


Both Greitmeyer, Traut-Mattausch, and Osswald (2012) and Ewoldson et al. (2012) had subjects start off by playing games like Far Cry, FlatOut, and Halo 2 in either a competitive or cooperative modes. One unlucky group of people in a control condition got to play Tetris and frown at each other. Both sets of studies then had players set down the controllers and take part in social dilemma type games (of the non video game variety) where they had the chance to either cooperate with other players or screw them over.

Ewoldsen et al. found that players who had played the coop video game were more likely to engage in “tit-for-tat” strategies where they would open by cooperating and then either reward or punish the other player depending on if they played competitively or cooperatively in turn. Such a gambit is a very common tactic for players looking to cooperate and maximize outcomes for everyone involved.

Greitemeyer and his colleagues took things a bit further and measured perceptions of things like group cohesion (or dyad cohesion if you want to be pedantic about it; I don’t) and trust between players. Again, after teaming up to do violence to some common foe, people felt more cohesion and were more trusting in the subsequent task. And it’s important to note that these were all violent games –they were just ones that could be played in a helping, cooperative context.

There are some interesting takeaways and ideas from this in terms of crafting your own gaming experiences and for developers looking to capitalize on these findings. One is that timing matters. These effects are typically short lived, so if you want to hit players up for things that require cohesion, trust, and cooperation do it right after they’ve collaborated or interacted with each other in a cooperative way. It’s the ideal time to ask them to do things like send/accept friends requests, bestow gifts, heal each other, join groups, trade items, and so forth. Just finished a quest in a pickup group or successfully defended a capture point with the help of a new buddy? That may be the perfect time to pop up a prompt to “Rate this player” or to trade crafting materials. Better than after one of you won a dogfight or shootout against each other.

Similarly, if you’re a player try not to let the fact that you’re competing against someone keep you from cooperating with them next round or accepting their friend request. They may be a pretty cool dude or gal once you’re wearing the same colored uniforms.

REFERENCES

Ewoldsen, D. R., Eno, C. A., Okdie, B. M., Velez, J. A., Guadagno, R. E., & DeCoster, J. (2012). Effect of playing violent video games cooperatively or competitively on subsequent cooperative behavior. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15 (5), 277-280.

Greitemeyera, T., Traut-Mattauschb, E., Osswaldc, S, (2012). How to ameliorate negative effects of violent video games on cooperation: Play it cooperatively in a team. Computers in Human Behavior, 28 (4), 1465-1470.

Schmierbach, M. (2010). “killing spree”: Exploring the connection between competitive game play and aggressive cognition. Communication Research, 37 (2), 256-274.

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The Psychology of High Scores in Edge Magazine

Did you find that last article on social comparisons and leader boards interesting? Really? Weird. Well, If you want to read more about social comparison, competition, and video games, you can do so in this month’s Edge Magazine, issue #243. It contains the last of my series of “Psychology of…” articles for them, The Psychology of High Scores.

Here’s what a relieved Bobo the Quote Monkey retrieved for us:

The second big thing game designers can do to make you feel more pleased with yourself and your performance is to make you feel like a big fish in a small pond. This is because people who are ranked near the top of a remedial group actually feel better about themselves than those ranked near the bottom of a higher performing group, even though the latter may be performing better than the former in absolute terms. Sometimes all it takes to make you feel like the smartest person in the room is to step into a closet full of dullards.

In fact, this so-called “big-fish-little-pond Effect” has been studied extensively in other areas, especially education where it has been found to be true in schools of all levels across 40 different countries. But it goes beyond that, because simply looking at your performance in the context of a smaller group tends to override any comparisons you may make with the world at large. For example, Ethan Zell and his colleagues Mark Alicke and Dorian Bloom at the University of Ohio split groups of 10 college students into two five-person teams and had them try to identify who was lying in a series of video taped statements. The researchers then provided each student with bogus feedback about their performance on this task (psychologists do this kind of thing all the time; in other contexts it would be called “lying” but here it’s known as “scientific research”) that indicated that they were ranked fifth or sixth out of the 10 people in the room. Some students, however, were given the additional information that they were either the best or worst performing member on their team of five. The researchers found that even if they were on the team that supposedly did best on the task overall, people had lower self-esteem than those who were the top performing on the losing team –even if they did better.

Big thanks to the folks at Edge Magazine for giving me the opportunity to write this series of articles. They were much more challenging and time consuming to write than these little blog posts, but also more rewarding and interesting. I hope to do more of these kinds of works in the future.

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Trials Evolution, Social Comparisons, and Second Place

Is it worse to come in second to last or second to first? I’ve been playing a lot of Trials Evolution lately and this question kept occurring to me as the results of my run at each track came up. Trials Evolution is a side scrolling, motorcycle driving game with a heavy emphasis on physics. Your controller triggers map to the bike’s throttle and brakes, but the real trick is using your left thumb stick to control how far your little driver dude leans forward or back. This, along with your momentum and how much gas you give it, will determine if you crash and eat it. Or rather, when you crash and eat it. Because not only are you going to eat it, you’re going to go back for seconds, thirds, and a hundred and fifths. It’s that kind of game, and it’s awesome.

Oh god, they’re right behind me!

Among the several things that the game’s developer, RedLynx, really nails with Trials Evolution is the social competition aspect. The game is replete with leaderboards and indications of how well you’re competing against others, and RedLynx seems to be aware that it’s more meaningful to compete against our friends and other people we know instead of strangers. This is one of the tenants of what’s known in psychology as “Social Comparison Theory.” First proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger back in 1954,1 the theory has since been elaborated upon and expanded, but the gist is that we like information about our performance, and if we can’t get that information directly we’ll compare ourselves against other people to get the next best thing.

But not just any other people. One thing that researchers have determined pretty clearly is that we prefer to compare ourselves against smaller groups of people –the so called “frog pond” effect named, I think, after Dr. Antonio Frog and his work with motocross racers at of the University of Pond, Connecticut. Even better, we like to compare ourselves to smaller groups of people we know, because those comparisons are more meaningful and give us more information. This is why Trials Evolution is smart to show leaderboards consisting of people on our Xbox Live friends list by default. But you don’t have to wait until the finish line to compare your performance. Each time you run a track the game shows you where your friends were on their best run by moving a little dot with their gamer tag attached along the track with you. It’s amazingly effective –much more so than showing you a dot belonging to “xxXTrialzd00d42Xxx,” the world record holder for that track. Because he’d simply zip off past the right edge of your screen and not offer any kind of meaningful comparison.

So good job, Trials Evolution people. The thing is, though, that we can drill down even further because two neighboring leaderboard rankings are not always equidistant from each other, psychologically speaking. For example, I kept noticing that I was much more likely to try and shave off a few seconds and creep up a notch on the leaderboards if I was in either last place or second place.

A 2006 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin article by Stephen Garcia, Avishalom Tor, and Richard Gonzalez2 explains why. They posited that our upward comparisons are predicated on the existence of a meaningful standard –the top. But other standards –such as the bottom– could exist as well. Furthermore, the closer we get to those standards, the more the social comparisons to others near them matter, and we are more inclined towards competition and less inclined towards cooperation with those in our way.

To test their theory, the researchers ran a series of 8 studies where subjects were asked to role-play the parts of business executives, philanthropists, poker players, or rock stars. The details varied a bit across studies in order to test various aspects of their theory and rule out alternative explanations, but in general they presented subjects with a chance to either cooperate or compete with a rival. If they choose to cooperate, they might benefit more than if they competed, but the rival would benefit more and come out on top in the rankings. For example, here’s the instructions that one group got:

Imagine that you are playing in a 1-day poker tournament with 500 players. For the final round, you are deciding whether or not to team up with one of your rivals. Strategy A: If you play solo, your tournament earnings will increase by 5% and your rival’s by 5% . OR, Strategy B: If you play as a team, your tournament earnings will increase by 10% and your rival’s by 25%.

Subjects were then asked what strategy they would pursue if they were ranked #3 in the tournament and their rival were ranked #4. What about if they were #6 and the rival was #7? #24 vs. #25?

The consistent finding across these studies was that people were more likely to compete when they were closer to a meaningful standard like being the top ranked poker player or being the CEO of a company ranked high on the Fortune 500 list. This despite the fact that cooperating would earn them more money in absolute terms. Interestingly, players exhibited the same irrational behavior in order to avoid being ranked too close to the bottom of the charts. Just like I would throw myself against the brick wall of the “Physics Factory” track in Trials when in second place on my local leaderboards –much more so than if I were in fifth or eighth.

Game developers could hack this phenomenon into their design if their goal is to inspire competition or make the choice to cooperate more meaningful. More finely diced leaderboards like what Trials offers is a good start, but to take things further they could plant additional goal posts along our paths so that it’s not just first or last place that we focus on. Crossing thresholds to be in the top quartile of overall scores would be one example, but I suspect that even just adding weird metrics like “Amount of damage done with the rocket launcher” or “Number of bunnies irradiated” would have some effect. And, above all, calling out to the player the fact that you’re SO CLOSE to hitting one of those milestones relative to a friend should cause them to grit their teeth and buckle down.

Games should be facilitating these social comparisons when they’re most meaningful, like when players are on the cusp of stardom or at the brink of ignominy. And for good measure, carve out some more things for us to be proud or ashamed of.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to beat my friend Tungholio’s score on Gigatrack.

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Seven Psychological Sins of SimCity Social

I have recently been hearing a lot about SimCity Social, the “Farmville with a candy coating of SimCity” game from Bigfish and EA. Mostly I’ve heard about how the game pulls all kinds of tricks to get players to spam each other, trade items, recruit new players, and spend real money. All of these things are par for the social game course, but apparently we have a more egregious than usual offender here. So I decided to investigate what psychological tricks SimCity Social pulls by forking over all kinds of pervasive permissions to my Facebook account and trying it out.

Wow. There’s so much going on here that within a few seconds I blacked out and woke up some time later in a puddle. I don’t know how this happened.

What I do know, though, is that SimCity Social wears many of its machinations on its custom tailored sleeve. I counted seven pretty much immediately and decided to stop there, because I love alliteration and had this great idea for a blog post title. The convenient thing is that these are all things I’ve written about before, so instead of going into depth on each I’ll give you the gist and then point you at other articles if you want more.

Sin #1: Reciprocity

Reciprocity is the impulse we feel to return favors, and it’s a pretty fundamental factor in human society and psychology in general.1 Whenever you get a free sample at the supermarket, the nice lady in the hairnet is banking on reciprocity to at least listen to her enthusiastic description of this new snack cracker if not buy a box right then and there. Famed psychologist Robert Cialdini explained in a 2001 article in Scientific American how the Disabled American Veterans organization used reciprocity to increase the success rate of their mail-based fundraisers from 18% to 35% simply by free return address stickers as a tiny gift with each appeal.

SimCity Social has gift trading baked into almost every aspect of the game. You can, once a day, gift other players with a few resources. If you’re low on specific resources –say a scientist to staff your research lab– you can request them as gifts. And you get points for every gift you accept. The game makes it easy for you to return the favor, and each exchange sends you a Facebook notification that prompts you to launch the game and keep playing. Non-players can receive gifts too, provided they first install the game and start playing themselves.

Read more about reciprocity:

Sin #2: Funny Money

Like most “wait to play” games, SimCity Social lets you spend real money to accelerate the game and get past the time and resource restrictions. Need more “bliss” to finish construction of your toy factory? I don’t know what “bliss” is, but you can get out your credit card and buy some! But, of course, you can’t just charge stuff straight to your card. You have to buy some of the game’s currency, little purple diamonds, and then spend those.

The problem is that like travelers spending money in a foreign currency, spending purple diamonds makes you susceptible to several biases and errors in thinking, ranging from being too lazy to do the mental currency conversions, to applying different (and irrational) mental accounting to diamonds than you would real money, to overspending unused diamonds because you don’t want to “waste” them.

Read more about funny money:

Sin #3: The Status Quo Effect

Let’s stick with the little purple diamonds for a minute. When you click to buy some, you’re presented with six different denominations you can buy, ranging from 900 diamonds for $100 to 35 diamonds for $5. Notice in the screenshot which of those options is selected by default, though: the most expensive one.

This is designed to take advantage what’s called the status quo effect, which describes our tendency to accept default settings, decisions, or options rather than make the often trivial effort to change them. This is especially true in ambiguous or cognitively demanding situations. For example, in one study,2 researchers were able to drastically increase the number of employees who participated in a savings plan just by requiring them to opt out of the program rather than opt in.

Similarly, more people shopping for diamonds should go with the default choice of 900 for $100. Of course, many of you may be thinking that this is too extreme to work in most cases; most people are looking to spend just a few bucks, not $100. And you’re probably right, but SimCity Social uses the status quo effect elsewhere as well. Whenever you have to confirm sending a request to another player via Facebook, the system automatically checks a box that says “Don’t ask again before sending requests to [NAME] from this app.” When you accomplish something in the game, it often throws up a notification that includes the ability to “Share Rewards” to your Facebook wall after you click “OK.” This is, of course, selected by default as shown in the screenshot above.

Read more about the status quo effect:

Sin #4: Artificial Scarcity

Sometimes we just want something because we soon won’t be able to have it. This is known as the scarcity effect. Consider a simple 1975 experiment by psychologist Stephen Worchel3 where researchers offered subjects a chocolate chip cookie from one of two jars. One of the jars had many cookies in it. The other had only a few. In reality, they were THE SAME COOKIES but people reported the cookies from the mostly empty jars as more delicious, more desirable, and more expensive. Just because they were more scarce, and our brains are wired to be averse to losing the option to have something once it’s available.

We see the same thing with plentiful goods or digital goods with limited time offer. If something is on sale for one day only, we’re averse to losing our chance at getting it for a good price and are more likely to buy it than we would if it were that same low price every day. Just look at Steam sales or Amazon.com’s deal of the day. SimCity Social creates this artificial scarcity by offering you a deeply discounted new building every time you level up. But you have to buy it RIGHT THEN before dismissing the “Level up!” notification –the text stresses “One Time Offer! You will NEVER see this offer again!”

Read more about scarcity:

Sin #5: Endowed Progress

Once we get started down the road to a goal, we’re reluctant to give it up. This is a great hack you can use to motivate yourself to reach goals, but it can also be used against you. And what’s more, it turns out that we’re super susceptible to suggestions that we have already started an undertaking, even right off the bat.

My favorite example of what’s called the endowed progress effect is a 2006 study by Xavier Dreze and Joseph Nunes4 where they gave half the customers at a car wash a rapid rewards card that required 8 total stamps to get a free wash. Others were given a similar card that required 10 total stamps, but were given two freebie stamps to get them started. So both groups needed only 8 more stamps, but the one that got kick started with the two freebies were more likely to come back for future visits and to wait less time between them.

SimCity Social leverages the endowed progress effect in a few ways. Upgrading building requires various resources, but you’ll often have at least some of these before you start and will thus immediately see something like “2 of 20 hard hats” when you check the progress of your upgrade. Each game chapter also has multiple, specific goals for completion (e.g., “Build a Bakery”) and I found that I had often already satisfied one of those goals in the course of messing around on my own.

Read more about the endowed progress effect:

Sin #6: The Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic kicks in when we overestimate the frequency of event because instances of that event are easy to recall from memory –they are, in other words, more available for recall. (Interestingly, the converse is true as well; if we have difficulty remembering examples of something, we underestimate its frequency.)

Many things can make an event easier to recall from memory, including seeing it happen to friends. SimCity Social capitalilzes on this by encouraging you to spam the living daylights out of your wall with notifications of things that you’ve done in the game and the fact that you’re playing the game in the first place. Friends who see these notifications recall them more easily and are thus likely to overestimate the popularity of the game when they see an ad or receive an invitation to play.

Read more about the availability heuristic:

Sin #7: Benign and Malicious Envy

Social comparisons are, unsurprisingly, important to social games. This includes that old standby, envy, especially what’s been called “benign envy.” As opposed to “malicious envy” where you want to tear down the other person and take away their pretty shiny thing, benign envy is elicited when we think that a person deserves what they have because they earned it. Benign envy motivates us to improve ourselves (or pay money) to get the same rewards. In one study5 researchers instilled benign envy in a group of college students by having their friends earn a new iPhone. As a result, subjects said they were willing to pay 64% more to get their own iPhone.

SimCity Social capitalizes on benign envy when you visit other players’ towns. You can see everything they have built and bought. What’s interesting (and probably the most amusing thing about the game) is that you have the option to be either kind or mean to them as you click on all their stuff. You can “knock over display stands” in their stores, or you can “compliment the decor” when you visit their Mayor’s home. You can even send either hot air balloons across their skies, or a flock of incontinent seagulls. And, of course, if you experience benign envy over their accomplishments and layout, you may be more motivated to recruit more friends or buy some of those purple diamonds to keep up with them.

Read more about the benign envy:

So, there you go: my epic post on the psychological shenanigans of SimCity Social. I’m not saying Playfish set out to brainwash you –these are old design principles and the people who make videogames tend to be smart so they figure out and remember what works. Nor are they unique to SimCity Social, in that most of them apply in one way or another for most social games in this vein. But if you decide to engage in a little urban development on Facebook, everything above is good to keep in mind.

P.S., Thanks to readers Zachary and Danielle for stepping up and accepting the friends request to play the game with me and pose for some screenshots.

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The Psychology of Game Nostalgia in Edge Magazine #242

Another of my articles on the psychology of video games has been published in Edge Magazine, Issue #232 July 2012. This time I wrote about the nostalgia we feel for good old games and how game developers and marketers capitalize on nostalgia to sell us reboots, sequels, and retro games. I have written about nostalgia before, but as is typical with the Edge articles I did a lot more research this time and investigated some additional ground.

For example, a lot of what I learned about nostalgia pointed towards how when we feel the emotion it makes us think about interpersonal relationships. I sent Bobo The Quote Monkey on his monthly fetch quest, and here’s what he got:

Nostalgia and social connections go hand in hand, then. Thinking about the loss of social connections, as nostalgia often makes us do, primes us to think about repairing those connections, maintaining current ones, or establishing replacements. Wildschut and his colleagues also found that when asked to describe nostalgic memories, most people recalled social contexts and good relationships with others. And research on the power of music has found that song lyrics emphasizing social relationships, including friendship, love, and familial bonds, were the most likely to induce nostalgia in subjects.

…You may reminisce about playing the original StarCraft, but the chances are you’re most nostalgic thinking about throwing down with friends in multiplayer or at least bonding with them over the shared experience of discussing how you managed the campaign. For gamers, our most nostalgic memories probably revolve around sharing the hobby with others, making new friends, and enjoying a good couch co-op experience.

That idea flows into something interesting that occurred to me about the nostalgia that today’s new gamers will feel years from now:

If nostalgia is tied so closely to social connections and a sense of community, games have the potential to evoke it more than any other medium, because they are so inherently social and are becoming more so every year. Early games might have been shared experiences on the couch or via playground discussions in much the same way as movies or TV, but the majority of new games coming out this year will feature mechanics or tools that encourage players to share, compete, communicate, help, and socialise. The same can’t be said of music, movies, TV, or other common vessels of nostalgia. It seems that games might someday boost more moods than anything else in history.

So, if any of that sounds interesting to you, check out the issue on either the news stand or via the digital edition. I’ll also note that I particularly loved the graphics accompanying this article. They took portraits of a bunch of people wearing tee shirts featuring logos from old gaming properties. There’s everything there from Crazy Taxi to Doom to Space Invaders. Just looking over those pictures made me nostalgic.

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Some stuff lost in a restoration…

Ack. Sorry, folks, something went awry and I had to do an emergency restore of the site from an incomplete backup. This means that comments on the last three articles –of which there were a few dozen– are now gone.

I’m so sorry, there were some really good comments in there. I’ve backed everything up again (I really should create a new backup every time I update) so if you’re so inclined please feel free to repeat your comments or leave new ones. Things might possibly look unusual while I polish the edges back off over the next few hours but everything is working.

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The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 4 Historical Items

Wait, did I say the series on Diablo III loot would be a three parter? By that I obviously meant it would have four parts. Don’t put words in my mouth.

I was listening to the always excellent Giant Bombcast podcast recently ((Seriously, you should be listening to the Bombcast every week; these guys are great.)) and the gang was talking about their experiences using the Diablo III auction house:

Vinny: I’d love to see how many times stuff is used. I want a pristine, new sword, I don’t want it used.

Jeff: How many owners has this thing had?

Vinny: Yeah. How many people has it touched?

Jeff: It’s a single owner, smoke-free home.

Vinny: They should definitely allow item descriptions. That’s the next thing, like little bubbles that are like “Get this amazing dagger right now! A+++”

Patrick: “Killed Diablo THREE TIMES!”

Brad: “Get the dagger used in a Hardcore, Inferno Diablo takedown!”

Ryan: Forget that, I want the Carfax. I want the owner history of this item. How many hands has this passed from? I want to know the mob that dropped it, the first guy that picked it up, if it’s been sold through the regular auction house or the real money auction house. I want to know that entire past. What’s the VIN on this axe? I don’t want some lemon.

You know what? These guys are totally right. Having this kind of history on an object –even a virtual one– would drastically affect auction house prices. Because history matters. A few months ago I was visiting Tulsa, Oklahoma ((Go Thunder or something? I dunno.)) and on a lark took my kids to the Tulsa Air and Space Museum. In the lobby there’s a big rock encased in plastic and settled behind a sign indicating its place of origin: the friggin’ moon. I stood there staring at this rock for a good 60 seconds, intrigued by its extraplanetary history. This despite the fact that the thing was virtually indistinguishable from any of the thousands upon thousands of rocks of similar size that I’ve seen in my life. If the sign in front of it had read “We found this out back. Woo!” I would have been baffled for a second before moving on, but this rock was special because it had once been on the damn moon.

Yale University psychologist and author of the book How Pleasure Works ((Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works. W.W. Norton & Company: New York)) Paul Bloom would understand. He notes in his book several ways in which the history of an object affects its value to us. This ranges from wanting a little more money to sell back a coffee cup we’ve only owned for a few seconds (c.f., the endowment effect) to selling a tape measure from the Kennedy household for $48,875, to the theft of Napoleon’s penis by the priest who conducted his last rights despite the fact he presumably had a perfectly good penis already.

Bloom and his Yale colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck conducted a series of experiments to test what they called a “contagion” hypothesis –the idea being that an object’s value is affected by its history of contact with someone else. ((Newman, G., Diesendruck, G., and Bloom, P. (2011). Celebrity Contagion and the Value of Objects. Journal of Consumer Research, 38.)) As part of the study, they asked subjects to write down the name of a celebrity they admired (examples included Barack Obama and George Clooney) and then consider an article of clothing (e.g., a sweater, a pair of gloves, or a wristwatch) owned by that person. Subjects were then grilled on how much they would be willing to pay for that item versus an identical item from a non-celebrity. Unsurprisingly, people valued the item owned by the famous person more.

Nice stats

In subsequent experiments, though, the researchers drilled down into the phenomenon by tweaking the scenario. What if you were forbidden from reselling the item? That dropped the price a little, but honestly not much. What if the item had been thoroughly dry cleaned and sterilized after being used by the celebrity? That reduced the price people were willing to pay by almost one third. What if the celebrity had been given the item as a gift but had never actually worn or otherwise used it? According to Bloom, another study showed that this also drastically reduced the value of the item. What seems to be important here is that subjects felt the object had some kind of residue or essence about it because of its prior association with an admired celebrity.

Similarly, I think that if Blizzard were to enact the Giant Bomb crew’s suggestion of including historical information with auction listings it could really spike the prices on some equipment, though I think they have it backwards in that an item with a more interesting history would be more valuable. Would you pay more for a sword that has dealt over 15 million points of damage in its lifetime? Would you pay more for a helmet dropped by a champion mob with a particularly nasty attribute combination like Horde/Jailer/Mortar/ Teleporting? How about this off-hand power source that was only used by one little wizard on her way to church on Sundays?

No? Okay, let’s switch games and talk about World of Warcraft. Would you pay more to own the original armor worn by Leeroy Jenkins in that famous video?

Yeah, I would too.

Done? You can go back to go back to Part 1 about anchoring in the auction house, or back to Part 2 about the availability heuristic. Or back to Part 3 about dopamine and the auction house.

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The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 3 Dopamine Binds On Pickup

In Part 1 of this series on the psychology of Diablo III loot I talked about how the anchoring effect can affect our estimates of value for auction house items. In Part 2, I described how the availability heuristic can trick us into thinking that epic item drops are more common than they are. In this part, let’s look at the interaction between the auction houses and loot drops, including a suggestion on how to reclaim some of the fun of the loot drop.

Instead of Tristram, let’s head to Sweden to begin. Wolfram Schultz was working there as a neuropsychologist studying Parkinson’s disease in lab monkeys when he almost accidentally started a line of research that ultimately suggests a way that Blizzard could encourage us to keep grinding for new loot. Schultz’s research involved dopamine and dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical that’s released when we encounter something pleasurable, like a piece of fruit or a Legendary Mighty Weapon for our Barbarian. The chemical is hugely important for learned behavior and motivation to persist in a task, since when it’s released certain brain cells go bananas and make us feel good. Maybe even euphoric.

A yellow Rare drop? Ho hum…

What this means is that dopamine receptors are part of a system that’s about pattern recognition and figuring out how to get more good things out of life. Schultz and his colleagues discovered that presenting a lab monkey with a bit of fruit caused the creature’s dopamine neurons to light up. They also discovered that when they repeatedly preceded the treat with a light or a sound, the neurons would start to fire when the monkey saw the light or heard the sound, but then remain relatively inactive when the fruit showed up. The system they had discovered was, at its core, about anticipation and trying to predict rewards based on what was happening in the environment.

What’s more, it turns out that unpredicted gushes of dopamine really get us fired up. This is because unexpected dopamine rushes highlight failures in our predictive system, and it’s a system that’s designed to help us figure out why we didn’t see life’s good things coming and thus how to find them again in the future. This is why the random nature of loot drops in many games is so effective at getting us to keep playing: it capitalizes on our brain’s attempts to predict the unpredictable. (See here for more on dopamine and loot drops.)

Loot drops were indisputably core to the Diablo and Diablo II experience for all these reasons. Hearing the little “ting!” sound and seeing the beautiful, colored text indicating that a unique item had dropped produced a rush that every player looked forward to.

Only, not so much with Diablo III.

The reason is that the auction house is actually a FAR more effective but much more predictable way of finding better gear for your character than hoping for good loot drops from fallen enemies or treasure chests. In my experience it was super easy to buy equipment so good that the magical “ting!” sound soon lost its effect because the loot that dropped was no longer a reward. It was just gold in a slightly more inconvenient form, destined to be sold to a vendor or at best on the auction house for a little more. In effect, the auction house system excised the entire dopamine rush, loot drop appeal of the game. ((Yes, high quality items still mean big returns on the auction house, but the whole process of listing, selling, and transferring the money is too far removed to elicit the same dopamine rush.))

I suspect that the execs from Blizzard are too busy cackling and having money fights with the cuts that the company takes from real money auction house transactions to care, but this seems like a huge part of the game’s core appeal is now lost. I think there’s some middle ground, though, which is why I think the game should have a class of super items that are bind on equip.

In MMO parlance, “bind on pickup” or “BoP” items are treasures that bind to your character’s account once they’re equipped. This means they can’t be given away, sold, or otherwise transferred. You can just equip them, break them down for crafting materials, or just sit there and stare at them in your inventory. Finding a really good, color-coded item that’s BoP would restore some of that “ting!” feeling and dopamine rush, because it will be something that you won’t be able find on the auction house. Making the best items in the game BoP would go a long way towards creating those familiar dopamine rushes because they would signal a clear and strong reward, but even making them run the full range of quality would probably still work, since seeing one drop would signal the tantalizing possibility of something otherwise unobtainable. Suddenly, the loot drop would be back, baby.

So there you have it: three suggestions for tweaking Diablo III loot based on psychology. If you’re a game designer I’d love to hear your thoughts on these, especially if you’ve experimented with anything similar.

Done? You can go back to go back to Part 1 about anchoring in the auction house, or back to Part 2 about the availability heuristic. Finally, there’s a bonus part 4 about the effect of item history on auction house prices.

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The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 2 Availability Heuristic and Loot Drops

In part 1 of this three part series, I suggested that Blizzard could move more money through its auction house economy if it sorted prices from high to low by default, thanks to the anchoring effect. All of those items still had to be found from drops, though ((Well, minus the ones that are crafted, but shut up shut up shut up!)), and that involves a lot of tedious grinding. And even though, sometimes it feels like rare drops are just too rare and will never happen. What can Blizzard do to keep us grinding?

There’s a setting in Diablo III that lets you see when someone on your friends list pops achievements. For example, when your buddy beats Diablo ((OMG SPOILARZ!!)) for the first time on Hell difficulty and earns the associated achievement, you get a little notification near the chat area, along with an icon. It’s a neat social system that I think could be expanded to make people keep grinding for super awesome Rare or Legendary item drops.

To illustrate why, consider a simple, 1973 experiment by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman ((Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5, 207-232.)) where they created a tape recording of 39 names. Nineteen of these names belonged to famous people, and the remaining 20 did not. When asked, 66% of the subjects were able to recall more famous names than non-famous, and the vast majority –80%– incorrectly claimed that there were more famous names on the list than non-famous.

The reason for that last result, the researchers argued, has to do with what’s called the availability heuristic. In short, it refers to the fact that to the degree that recalling instances of an event or class of things from memory is easy, we will judge them to be more frequent or more numerous. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow ((Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow New York: New York.)) Daniel Kahneman digs even deeper into the phenomenon, arguing that it’s an example of how part of our mind (the eponymous “Fast” part) will slyly substitute an easier question (How easy is it to recall an example of this phenomenon?) for a more difficult one (How frequent is this phenomenon?).

Killed Maghda on Inferno? Happens all the time.

There are many factors that make an event or thing easier to remember. For example, it may have happened in a very dramatic manner, it may have just happened recently, it may have affected you personally. The availability heuristic is the reason people thought school shootings were more common right after the 1999 massacre in Columbine, Colorado. It’s the reason most people overestimate the divorce rate in highly visible Hollywood couples. It’s why you think the Xbox 360 “red ring of death” failure is more frequent after it happens to you.

This is why I think that the achievement notification in Diablo III is a good start. It makes the number of people getting the achievement seem larger because it happened recently and to someone you know. The same effect could be used to make players think that the upper tier of “Legendary” item drops are more frequent if they saw a notification every time it happened to a friend. This would motivate players to keep playing in the (perhaps inflated) hopes of getting a similar drop. Blizzard could also post similar notifications about crafting high-end gems or blacksmith items. Or cracking the 10,000 dps threshold for the first time. Seeing notification of these events will make them seem more frequent and thus more likely to happen to you if you just keep at it.

Done? You can go back to go back to Part 1 about anchoring in the auction house, or skip ahead to a discussion of what effects the auction houses have on dopamine rushes and loot hunting in part 3. Finally, there’s a bonus part 4 about the effect of item history on auction house prices.