Author Archives: Jamie Madigan

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The Psychology of Loot

GamePro.com has posted my article from a recent print issue on The Psychology of Loot. Like last time, it’s in a pdf file, which you can download by performing clicking motions on this carefully highlighted link. The article aims to look at what psychology has to say about why gamers love loot and loot drops so much. Turns out it’s not so much the loot, or even the loot drop. What really gets us is the anticipation of the loot drop.

Nobody every thinks of the donkey in these situations.

I asked the ever faithful Bobo the Quote Monkey to surprise me with an unexpected quote. Here’s what he brought back:

German born neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz was conducting research at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland on the relationship between the chemical dopamine and Parkinson’s disease when he almost accidentally started a line of research that can be used to explain gamers’ love of loot. Dopamine is a collection of just twenty two atoms that plays a huge role in regulating human decision making, particularly goal oriented behavior and the pursuit of pleasure. When we encounter something we like –say a patch of berries or a goretusk liver– our brain releases dopamine. Brain cells that are sensitive to that chemical go bananas when it’s present, which makes us feel good –maybe even euphoric.

Dopamine neurons in the brain also help us predict good things in 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.

I have to say that not only do I like how this article turned out, it’s actually my favorite thing that I’ve written on the topic of the psychology of games in a while, even though it’s essentially an expansion of one of the first articles I wrote for this site. There are a few reasons for this. First, the GamePro article features the phrase “saucy pictures of lady monkeys.” Really, that’s enough right there. But second, it features some quotes from one of my favorite science writers: Jonah Lehrer. I just e-mailed him out of the blue asking if he’d like to give some comments on the subject for the article, and he was kind enough to oblige. Since I started doing this stuff I’ve been repeatedly and pleasantly surprised by how willing authors, academics, and game developers can be to write me back and help out. In fact, just recently I had a nice phone conversation with another one of my favorite science writers, Dan Ariely, who helped me formulate some of my thoughts on my latest article in progress, which deals with the psychological trickery behind Xbox Live Arcade’s Microsoft Points system. It’s weird, but I’m much more glad to have had the chances to talk to Lehrer, Ariely, and the various game developers than I would have ever been talking to some movie star or musician.

At any rate, here’s the link to the article on the psychology of loot in case you missed it the first time. Enjoy and let me know in the comments what you think of it.

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Just World Hypothesis and Homefront

Years ago I watched a friend (hi Chris!) play through some of the later levels in the original Deus Ex and commented on how he was repeatedly subjecting Majestic 12 security personnel to death by natural causes, in so much as shooting them in the face would naturally cause their death. I noted that there were nonlethal ways to deal with the security on this level, such as stealth or knocking them unconscious with stun batons.

“Nah,” he said, murdering another security guard who I personally thought might have doing his job and was glum over missing his kid’s soccer game. “These guys are pretty high up in MJ-12. They have to know the kind of stuff their employer is up to. They deserve it.” (For those of you who have forgotten, MJ-12 hijinks included creating a global pandemic in order to sell the cure. Not too nice.) Apparently feeling that the victims of his progress through the game deserved their virtual fate was important to this player, and I can understand why.

In fact, psychologists have studied this phenomenon and dubbed it the “Just World Hypothesis.” When people witness someone subjected to some misfortune, they’re susceptible to suggestions that the person deserved it and thus see the misfortune as evidence of karma or justice –hence the “Just” in “Just World Hypothesis”.

I'm sure this guy had a wife and kids ...UNTIL HE MURDERED AND ATE THEM!

A few years ago one researcher showed this effect by presenting two groups of people two versions of an interaction between a “Barbara and Jack,” a man and a woman in a relationship. ((Carli, L. (1999). Cognitive Reconstruction, Hindsight, and Reactions to Victims and Perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979.)) The stories presented to each group were identical except for the endings: in one group Jack proposed marriage to Barbara, and in the second he sexually assaulted her. Participants later filled out a survey asking them to recall the situation and those who read the story ending in sexual assault tended to remember (or rather misremember) things from the scenario and thought it more likely that Barbara engaged in risky behaviors like flirting, dressing provocatively, getting drunk, and agreeing to go back to Jack’s apartment. The author argued that people were more subject to remember things in hindsight in such a way that they matched their expectations.

On the flipside, social psychologist Marvin Lerner, who pioneered the concept of the just world hypothesis showed that people are more likely to view lottery winners as harder working students. ((Lerner, M. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, (New York: Plenum Press, 1980.)) So it goes both ways.

I think I see something similar in my friend who was assuming that the MJ-12 security guards he was murdering deserved it, because they “must have known.” Note that the game didn’t really provide any evidence that these fellows knew ANYTHING about their employer’s crimes; my friend just filled that part in because presumably he just wanted to shoot dudes without wrestling with any moral quandaries ((And honestly, in the context of a video game that’s hardly unusual, much less a war crime.))

Go on, murder some dudes. No, no, it's cool. Don't worry about it. They're total jerks.

Now consider the recently released first person shooter Homefront, which has you play as an freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower. The introduction to the game goes to great lengths to relieve you of any moral misgivings you might have about plugging away at the enemies it’s getting ready to throw at you. You see enemy soldiers not only brutalizing American civilians, but outright murdering a mother in front of her children and callously tossing corpses around. The message is clear: Hey, these guys are evil. When we give you a gun, SHOOT THEM and FEEL GOOD ABOUT IT. Doing so is just increasing the amount of justice in the world, which is something your human psyche is naturally all on board with.

Of course, the interesting thing (or, more to the point, the uninteresting thing) about Homefront is that it’s not leaving any blanks to be filled in by the just world bias. By turning it up to 11, the THQ is is making entirely sure that your natural proclivity for blaming people (i.e., the parade’s worth of North Korean soldiers you meet between each level’s start and finish) for their own misfortune (i.e., being at the wrong end of your various guns and explosives) is indulged. And while I appreciate the easy out, I think it kind of robs the game of some narrative depth. Some of my favorite gaming moments over the years have been born of difficult decisions about who to let live and who to gun down. Let me decide, act, and ruminate on those actions once the smoke clears; that will keep the game with me for longer. ((Though in full disclosure, I haven’t played Homefront; maybe it becomes subtle, but the intro video I watched sure wasn’t.))

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The Psychology of Immersion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Unit Effect and Player Perceptions

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

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

The non-idiotic among you ((Which, I think, should be ALL of you.)) may be thinking that those choices are meaningless, since the options within each pair are mathematically equivalent. Presenting people with different units that they can easily convert between shouldn’t influence their choices. An article ((Pandelaere, M., Briers, B., & Lembregts, C. (2011). How to make a 29% increase look bigger: The unit effect in option comparisons. Journal of Consumer Research, 38.)) in an upcoming issue of Journal of Consumer Research suggests otherwise. ((Thanks to reader and my personal friend Frank for bringing news reports of this research to my attention, and to Mario Pendelaere, the first author on the article who graciously sent me an advance copy of the paper so I could read the original source for myself.))

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, brains can be a real pain sometimes.

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Book Review: Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Psychological Weight of History

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

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

Buy stuff AND get in fights? Double sold!

This made me think about a series of experiments performed by Paul Bloom and Bruce Hood, as related in the book, How Pleasure Works. ((Bloom, P. (2010) How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.)) Bloom and Hood wanted to see if invoking an item’s history could make it more valuable. Capitalizing on a recent visit by the Queen of England to the town where the research was to take place, they brought in a bunch of six-year old children and showed them certain items (a spoon or a cup) that had supposedly belonged to the Queen. They then placed the items into a mock “duplicating machine” that would supposedly make copies of the items. The machine consisted of a pair of boxes with hidden doors in the back through which one could slip an item’s twin in order to trick the kids into thinking that the original item had been duplicated. You may think that this is selling the average six year old’s intelligence a bit short, but Bloom explains himself pretty well:

When we showed this machine to children, none thought it was a trick. This fits with other research that finds that children are perfectly credulous about unusual machines. There is no reason why they should be skeptical. They live in a world with giant flying canisters, metal-cutting laser beams, talking computers, and so on. And we already have a rudimentary two-dimensional duplicating machines –you can take a piece of paper with Michael Jordon’s autograph on it, put it in a photocopy machine, press the button, and end up with something indistinguishable from the original. What is so strange about a three-dimensional version of this? For the children we tested: nothing. ((ibid, page 109))

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

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

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

It also has +10 psychological weight.

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

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Procedural Justice and Nerfing

Most of us have been in a situation where we feel that we’ve gotten the short end of a pointy stick. Maybe we were booted from a game server, banned from a message board, or had our favorite MMO game character weakened by a patch in such a way that left us shaking our tiny fists at the injustice of it and vowing that we’ll show them, we’ll show them all. And maybe other times the same exact things have happened but we’ve able to just sigh, say “Well, that sucks, but looking back I can see why they did it,” and move on.

Such differing ideas of what constitute “fair” treatment given identical outcomes have long been in the interest of psychologists, particularly those studying justice in the workplace. The research started off in the 60s by examining what people considered fair pay and distribution of other rewards relative to inputs like work, time, and nice bottles of scotch ((Adams, J.S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. Advanced Experimental Social Psychology, 62 335-343)) Since then, though, the field has expanded to include the fairness of the process by which decisions are made, and several “procedural justice” rules to live by in order to create procedural justice have been discovered.

A ninth of a second cooldown increase on my glowy yellow ball things? NEEEEERRRRF! QQ!

In addition to some applications in consumer psychology of pricing fairness, most of this research has been done in the context of the workplace, specifically trying to understand fairness perceptions of compensation, performance appraisal, and hiring decisions. For example, some jughead named Madigan ((Madigan, Jamie and Macan, Therese. (2005). Improving Applicant Reactions by Altering Test Administration. Applied H.R.M. Research, 10(2), 73-88.)) identified several sure-fire ways in which you could mistreat job applicants during the interview process in order to make them hate you and think that the whole thing was unfair. ((Or, if you preferred, you could NOT do these things and better the odds that people feel treated fairly. Your choice!))

It occurs to me that these same rules apply to the perceived fairness of “nerfing” in MMOs –that is, when the efficacy of a class, ability, or any other part of a game is toned down. It is not hard to find people complaining about a given nerf and calling it unfair. But fairness is not an objective state like having an elevated heart rate being on fire. It’s a judgment made by squishy human brains, and as such it’s susceptible to molding by perceptions and how information is presented or framed. Below are a few lessons from fairness in the world of work that developers and community managers should keep in mind when putting together the patch notes on any big nerfs. I’ve even included relevant quotes from World of Warcraft players on the official Blizzard boards for the sake of illustration. ((Which is not to say I think Blizzard is doing a bad job in this regard. You cannot make all the people happy all the time, and with 15 bajillion players it is not hard to find a few disgruntled ones to quote.))

Voice and Participation

We all know that the community was asking to nerf warriors right? No not really. Almost no one asked that.

One of the clearest and most reliable procedural justice rules is providing those affected by a decision a chance to voice their opinions. This is one reason job applicants tend to think less structured, open-ended interviews containing questions like “Why are you qualified for this job?” are more fair –they give you more of a chance to participate in the process and influence the decision relative to tightly structured interviews that ask the same (often technical) questions of all candidates. ((Latham, G. P. & Finnegan, B. (1993). Perceived practicality of unstructured, patterned, and situational interviews. In Schuler, H., Farr, J.L., & Smith, M. (Eds.) Personnel Selection and Assessment. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)) Likewise, developers who solicit and acknowledge input from players make things seem more fair. You don’t even have to take their advice; just listening to it helps. Of course, if you DO happen to hear something useful and act on it, it’s always good to point that out, too.

Consistency

It has always been this way… random nerf here, random buff there, suprise nerf there, odd buff there…just the rollercoaster of WoW and the whims of the class designer and his buddies.

This one is kind of a no-brainer. Being consistent in your decisions helps them seem fair, even in the absence of bias. For example, research has shown that people tend to see subjecting ALL job applicants to drug testing is more fair than random testing. ((Murphy, K.R. (1986). When your top choice turns you down: Effect of rejected offers on the utility of selection tests. Psychological Bulletin, 99, 133-138.)) Likewise, efforts made to show consistent application of a guiding design philosophy or goals should combat perceptions of unfairness.

Transparency

I often find myself scratching my head at the decisions that get made about how/why to nerf and buff various classes. I chalk it up to I don’t have all the data, the Developers at Blizzard do. …I will admit that some of the changes they make are just completely baffling to me however.

Some researchers have posited that job applicants feel that more simulation-based tests (like disassembling an actual pump or troubleshooting real computer code) are more fair tests of ability than abstract tests (like paper and pencil tests of personality) because it’s easier to draw a straight line from their performance to the hiring decision. ((Smither, J.W., Reilly, R.R., Millsap, R.E., Pearlman, K., and Stoffey, R.W. (1993). Applicant reactions to selection procedures. Personnel Psychology, 46, 49-76.)) Likewise, players want to see a direct line between the decision to nerf or buff a certain class and the performance of that class in the game. To the extent that they can see the data and understand the goals of the change, they’ll see it as more fair. Show them the math.

Freedom From Bias

Being regularly nerfed with no warning or explanation (not that the nerfs aren’t needed sometimes) is one of the main parts of the Warlock class… Shamans don’t usually get many changes. Mage, DK, Warrior and Druid changes I’d guess are the ones that get more blue posts.

People generally don’t like it when decisions are made based on extraneous factors unrelated to the goals of the decision. In employment we call that “discrimination.” In WoW, they call it “you guys hate my class.” Again, some context usually helps, as does showing some kind of big picture or master plan.

Recourse for Bad Decisions

Ah but therein lies the challenge. You have to prove what blizzard is obligated to do. And I’m sorry to say, but gameplay/content changing isn’t something blizzard is obligated NOT to do…

People like to feel that if they disagree with the way a decision was made, they have some formal way of protesting it or asking for it to be reconsidered beyond sitting in a shack in the middle of Montana and banging out angry missives on an old IBM typewriter. Even something as simple as a survey, a poll, or a procedure for voicing displeasure to a class representative in the community can help. Again, you don’t have to actually overturn the decision if it’s the right one (and lord knows developers usually have a lot more data or a broader view than players), but just giving people a chance to appeal it helps.

So there you go. Some of you may be thinking “Well, duh” but that’s kind of the point –these are somewhat, but a lot of time it’s amazing how much work and playtesting and engineering will go into devising a patch, but how relatively little work will go into communicating the process by which those decisions were made.

Anyone else got other fairness rules to follow they want to share in the comments, or examples of these they want to share?

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Freezing Your Decision-Making Synapses

A reader ((Thanks, Martin!)) sent me a tweet recently pointing to something that reminded him of an article he’d read here: the pre-order options for Frozen Synapse, a PC strategy game in development by Mode 7 Games.

BEHOLD:

Frozen Synapse Options

Click to subject to gargantuization.

Here’s the gist of the options, with US Dollars ((USA! USA!))

  • Option 1: game + copy for a friend ($25.99)
  • Option 2: Same as #1 + music, discounts, and other perks ($34.99)
  • Option 3: Same as #2 + another whole game ($34.99)

So, look closely: Option 3 gives you the most stuff, but it’s the same price as Option 2. Why would anyone buy Option 2 when for only an additional $0 they can get more? Or, more to the point, why isn’t Mode 7 Games charging more for Option 3?

Well, for the same reason that I wrote about here. In case clicking on links isn’t allowed in your house, here’s the short version: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely noticed ((Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins.)) when The Economist magazine did something very similar to the above with their print and online subscription packages:

  • Option 1: Economist.com website only ($59)
  • Option 2: Print edition only ($125)
  • Option 3: Print edition PLUS website access ($125)

When he presented just the options to his MBA students, 16% said they’d go for the website only deal, and 84% said they’d take the print magazine plus the website. Nobody was stoned and/or stupid enough to take the print only deal. Why would they? It was the same as the print + website subscription!

Interestingly, though, Ariely turned around and presented the SAME students with the same choice, except he omitted the print only subscription entirely. When he did this, a lot of people flip-flopped: 68% took the website only deal, and 32% chose the print plus website subscription. This meant that while nobody chose the middle option of print only, just having it there made people more likely to spend $66 more for something they wouldn’t have bought otherwise.

Look back up at the Frozen Synapse deals. Same exact thing! My guess is that they read Ariely’s book, too. ((Read an excerpt that discusses The Economist offers in more detail.)) I’ll bet that’s working out, and would love to hear so from them.

Why does this happen? We simply aren’t very good at evaluating things in absolute terms, like the value of having a subscription to a Web site versus a print magazine. Or the value of some bonus thrown in for pre-ordering or buying from a specific retailer. Attaching value to all that stuff takes a lot of mental power, and if our minds are presented with a shortcut we’ll often take it. In the case of Frozen Synapse, I may not know whether two copies of the game for $25.99 is a better deal than two copies and all that other stuff for $34.99. Is that stuff worth $10? Maybe? But you know what? I’m pretty damn sure that Option 2 plus another game for the same price is a better deal than just Option 2. It’s like getting the game for free! And so my squishy human brain identifies THAT as the best value available, and I’m more likely to take it. Hooray for mental shortcuts!

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The Psychology of Fear in Video Games

GamePro.com has published my article about the psychology of horror games, so if you didn’t catch it in the print magazine a while back you can now. IF YOU DARE.

What does this blood spot look like to you? Ink! I mean ink spot.

I sent a moderately frightened Bobo the Quote Monkey to fetch something from this article, and he came back with this:

Researchers say some people just have the right kind of personality for appreciating scares because they’re sensation-seekers attracted to any emotional high, be it from sky diving, shark-punching, or horror films. Other personalities are drawn to situations showing the disruption of social norms in ways that will probably never happen in real life.

But perhaps a more encompassing explanation of horror’s inherent appeal is how it helps us master our fears. This seems to be particularly important for youngsters, who flock to scary media as an ultimately safe way to exercise their emotional chops and deal with real-life scary stuff. “Watching a horror film gives us back some control,” Weaver says. “We can experience an adverse event through film, and we know that it will end. We’ll survive it. We’ll go on with our lives.”

Interestingly, this co-opting of horror only really happens if the player or viewer knows that what they see is fake. In one famous experiment, researchers had subjects watch a movie featuring authentic scenes of live monkeys having their brains scooped out and of children-I kid you not-having their facial skin peeled away in preparation for surgery. Just reading this probably makes you squirm a little, and the vast majority of the study’s participants refused to finish watching the films despite that more grotesque movies playing at the theater down the street could outdo those scenes. We seem to need to know it’s fake.

Bobo is having a lie down right now, but you can read the whole thing here.

By the way, if anyone from Viceral Games or EA is out there, you should totally send me a copy of Dead Space 2. I’ll write about why it’s scary. ((Or why it’s not, if it’s not.))

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The Psychology of Game of the Year Debates

Ah, late December. The time when the gaming press gets its members together and tries to convince each other that one awesome game is more awesome than other awesome games –also known as the Game of the Year Awards. When I worked as part of the creative team on GameSpy.com we would lock ourselves in a conference room and argue literally for hours about the minutia surrounding every big title released that year in order to generate our awards. I’m also listening attentively to the GotY content over on Giant Bomb, which is dedicating a full week of multi-hour podcasts to the raw debates that generated its lists. 1

These podcasts are interesting to me because I keep seeing well established psychological phenomenon coming up, but almost as interesting is when a psychological quirk doesn’t manifest itself because the guys seem to be aware of its danger to the process and have taken steps to avoid it. So in this post I present my list of 2010′s Top 5 Biases That Affect 2010 Game of the Year Discussions. Sponsored by Crest Whitening Tooth Strips.2

#5: The Recency/Primacy Effect

The recency effect describes how it’s often easier for us to recall more information (and more salient information) about things that have happened more recently or items towards the end of a list. Similarly, the primacy effect means the same thing for items at the beginning of a list or that happened towards the beginning of an established time frame. Between the two of these effects, stuff in the middle tends to get forgotten or muddled.

Remember Bayonetta?

The impact on GotY lists should be apparent: If you’re studying a list of games released in the last year, it’s going to be easier to recall stuff about the first and last few games. We’re also more likely to recall details about games we played more recently (like Call fo Duty: Black Ops) or earlier in the year (like Bayonetta). Details and memories of games released toward the middle of the year (like Splinter Cell: Conviction) might not come to mind as easily.3

#4: Confirmation Bias

This is a big one for GotY discussions. Confirmation bias is our tendency to ignore or downplay information that dis-confirms our preconceived decisions or opinions and to pay more attention to and emphasize information that confirms them. If you go into a discussion of the Best Downloadable Game of 2010 thinking that Monday Night Combat should win, you’re less likely to think about its flaws (e.g., limited maps, repetitive comments from the announcer) and more likely to remember its strengths (e.g., class balance, fun character design) relative to someone who didn’t hold the same assumption. What’s more, you’ll probably say that the pros are more important to weighting your decision than the cons.

End of discussion! Wait, what?

Good ways to combat this are to get in the mindset of allowing people to challenge your assumptions and engaging in debate. It can also be helpful to list out the pros/cons (with help from others) so that you see them laid out and from a different perspective.

#3: Over-Emphasizing Salient Features

I wrote at length about this concept earlier, but here’s the quick version: When puny humans are asked to justify a decision, we tend to focus on the most salient or plausible explanations and then give them too much weight. To repeat my example from the previous article: if asked to explain why you favor Red Dead Redemption for the Best Action Game of the 2010, you may think about what should be included in the checklist for evaluating an action game, come up with “the weapons,” and then feel compelled to award or take away credit for how the game’s weapons feel and work. The problem is, the most salient and plausible factors may not be the ones that are really responsible for how much you enjoy the game. The weapons in Red Dead Redemption are largely unremarkable –the game’s appeal lies almost entirely in other areas and any weight given to how cool the weapons are is inappropriate at best.

This gun is irrelevant. Ignore this gun.

I keep seeing this come up in GotY discussions because professional game enthusiasts4 tend to hate using vague, worn out descriptors like “fun” or “awesome” or “polished” even though those words may be perfectly appropriate if a bit mundane. But these Internet auteurs are determined to have something more descriptive to say, so they cast about for something else and end up falling for the trap described above.

#2: Social Proof and Groupthink

This one is kind of a twofer since social proof and groupthink are separate but related. Again, I’ve written about social proof before, and the idea is that we will sometimes accept proclamations that are clearly at odds with our own senses just because we often have a desire to conform to the group’s standards. Soloman Asch showed this in a classic study where he got people to say that a long line was shorter than a short line simply by having someone planted in the group who would immediately pipe up and say so. The effect is even stronger with a group of strangers and statements with a less clearly defined correct answer, such as politics or game of the year awards. Which is why someone may not speak up when others in the group immediately jump on World of Warcraft: Cataclysm as the Best Role-Playing Game of the year, even though by most reasonable definitions it’s not a game.5

Deathwing thinks Line A is shorter. Are YOU going to argue?

The flipside is groupthink, which is when members of a cohesive, established group will ignore information, abstain from critical debate and accept otherwise questionable decisions in order to minimize conflict and maintain warm fuzzies. So again, Cataclysm might win, because so-and-so can be such a pedantic jackass about it and nobody wants to harsh the vibe or destroy the atmosphere of friendly discussion.

Interestingly, the Giant Bomb guys seemed to disarm these two biases from the start by joking about how they hate each other and how they anticipate rancorous arguments. This sets the stage that it’s okay –expected, even– to question each others’ decisions and engage in critical analysis.

#1: The Distinction Bias

Many GotY debates in categories like “Best [Genre] Game” come down to two similar contenders, resulting in protracted discussions where the merits of each candidate are obsessively scrutinized. This is a recipie for what’s known as the distinction bias. The idea comes from a theory that people engage in two modes of evaluation when pondering the merits of an experience: joint evaluation and single evaluation mode. The former is done when comparing multiple things at once and the latter when evaluating something individually.6

The distinction bias describes how when operating in joint evaluation mode we tend to over-emphasize and over weight otherwise slight differences between the subjects. If debating Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and Grand Turismo 5 for Driving Game of the Year, we may make a bigger deal about Hot Pursuit’s lower frame rate than we would have if we were evaluating the game by itself. As a result, when operating in this comparison mode we tend to think worse of the loser than we would have if we had evaluated it without resorting to direct comparisons.

We need speed. And also unbounded rationality.

This is perhaps acceptable in GotY debates when we HAVE to pick a winner –it’s often the fine details that act as tie breakers. But the trouble may come when you have a mix of different types of games where two of them are similar. If you aim to trim the initial list to a set of three finalists, a tempting place to start is by comparing the most similar games (c.f., elimination by alternatives). Because of the distinction bias, the loser in that comparison may end up being evaluated worse than before and may end up getting cut from the list even though it was better than the non-similar games.

So there you have it. Five psychological phenomena that drive game of the year debates. Go listen to your favorite GotY podcast (again, I heartily recommend The Giant Bombcast) and see if you can catch them in action. If you do, post about it in the comments section!