The Psychology of Video Games

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 scotch¹ 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 Madigan² 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.³

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.⁴

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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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?

1. Adams, J.S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. Advanced Experimental Social Psychology, 62 335-343 [↩]
2. Madigan, Jamie and Macan, Therese. (2005). Improving Applicant Reactions by Altering Test Administration. Applied H.R.M. Research, 10(2), 73-88. [↩]
3. Or, if you preferred, you could NOT do these things and better the odds that people feel treated fairly. Your choice! [↩]
4. 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. [↩]
5. 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. [↩]
6. 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. [↩]
7. 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. [↩]

A reader¹ 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:

Click to subject to gargantuization.

Here’s the gist of the options, with US Dollars²

• 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 noticed³ 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.⁴ 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!

1. Thanks, Martin! [↩]
2. USA! USA! [↩]
3. Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins. [↩]
4. Read an excerpt that discusses The Economist offers in more detail. [↩]

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!

1. Someone could write a full dissertation on Brad and Vinny’s debate over Minerva’s Den vs. Lair of the Shadow Broker as best DLC of 2010, by the way. Get on it. [↩]
2. Not really. [↩]
3. Which might actually help in this case, as Splinter Cell: Conviction was awful. You heard me. [↩]
4. God, what a weird phrase. But more accurate than “gaming journalists.” [↩]
5. Shut up. It’s an expansion pack. [↩]
6. You see joint evaluation mode all the time in game discussions, actually. It’s usually given away by comparisons of a game to some benchmark of the genre or platform. “Medal of Honor is not as good as Call of Duty“, for example, even though the discussion is ostensibly supposed to just be about Medal of Honor. [↩]

I recently wrote about the endowed progress effect, which makes us more likely to complete progress towards a goal if we have the impression that we’ve already begun taking the necessary steps. For example, people who get 2 free stamps on a “buy 10 get 1 free” card are more likely to put in the purchases needed to earn the freebie –even more so than people who got no free stamps but needed two fewer stamps to qualify.

Valve, the masters of digital distribution and the art of Steam, recently illustrated another application of the endowed progress effect when they launched The Great Steam Treasure Hunt. The idea is that you earn Steam-based achievements by completing game-specific tasks such as earning a score of 1,124,400 in Chime, which just happens to be on sale for $1.25 today.¹ Earn any ten of these achievements and you get entered into a lottery for 100 free games. You can also earn progressively cooler Team Fortress 2 hats by completing any 5, 15, and 28 Treasure Hunt achievements.

Of course, many of these are game-specific achievements, so you have to buy the game to earn them. But the clever thing Valve has done, at least on this first day, is to insert some easy to earn achievements to get you started. In fact, the first one is simply “Setup an avatar,” which is so easy that many people currently using Steam will have already started their progress towards 10 achievements:

Bam. Endowed progress effect. Well played, Valve. Well played.

1. Coincidence? I THINK NOT. [↩]

Apparently the Xbox Kinect is a retail success despite the fact that I haven’t personally bought one. Enough people seem to enjoy flailing their extremities about and barking simple commands that Microsoft has sold 1.5 hoojillion of the devices and the holiday shopping season has only just begun. I’ve written before about how motion controls can create more immersion in players by engaging our sense of body location, but there might also be another vector in play. Over on his blog, author Jonah Lehrer has some interesting thoughts about how buttons free controllers like the Kinect affect our emotional reaction to games given that physiological and mental states present psychologists with a bit of a “chicken or the egg” problem:

Let’s say we are playing a shooter on the Kinect. Unlike other game consoles, which leave us stranded on the couch, this console (like the Wii before it) actually makes us move. If we want to kill off the bad guys, we need to run around and break a sweat. We are no longer just twiddling our thumbs.

In order to prepare for all this combat, the brain automatically triggers a wave of changes in our “physical viscera,” such as quickening the pulse, flooding the bloodstream with adrenaline, and contracting our intestines. While even stationary entertainment can lead to corporeal changes – that’s why the heart rate quickens when watching a Hitchcock movie – the physical activity of the Kinect exaggerates these effects. Although we might look a little foolish flailing around the living room, the game has managed to excite our flesh, and that means our emotions aren’t far behind. As a result, we are more scared by the possibility of virtual death (and more thrilled by the virtual victory) because our body is fully engaged with the game.

Lehrer argues that high definition graphics and surround sound offer diminishing returns, so kinetic movement is the next big win for game designers wishing to engage us in their game. This is hardly an unprecedented idea. In his book, The Science of Happiness Stefan Klein¹ notes that “As [neuroscientist Antonio Damasio] reminds us, our mind is, in the true sense of the word, embodied, not ‘embrained.’ A disembodied being would feel neither happiness nor sadness.”²

Xbox, dashboard! Xbox, smile! Xbox, love! LOVE, XBOX, LOVE!

In 1993, researchers Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson even studied this question scientifically by testing to see if simply smiling can make you happy.³ All of us can fake a smile of one sort or another even when we’re pissed or bored, but it turns out that “true” smiles –those that erupt whenever we’re genuinely happy– involve a specific muscle: the obicularis oculi. This is the muscle around the eyes that causes us to make that particular, gleeful face during moments of unmitigated merriment. Some people can fake using the obicularis oculi to make apparently genuine smiles⁴ and Ekman and Richardson screened potential subjects for their study based on this criteria and then trained them further on how to do it at will. After taking some baseline measures, the researchers found out that faking a “real” smile led not only to higher self-reports of good moods, but brain activity as measured by EEG⁵ during fake smiles was practically identical to activity measured during genuine amusement.

But it’s important to note that the subjects had to smile the “right” way. Those who didn’t manipulate the obicularis oculi and related muscles didn’t become happier; they just looked a little bit like it. If the Kinect and other motion control game devices are going to trick our bodies into making us feel more engaged or emotional, they’ve got to do it convincingly and really mimic those genuine physiological reactions. They also need to either put out some games that will entice us to play, or offer us $5 and 10 extra credit points for our Psychology 101 class.

1. Klein, S. (2002). The Science of Happiness. De Capo Press. [↩]
2. Lehrer also references this idea from Demasio in the blog post I liked to, but grad school taught me nothing if not how to pad out my references. [↩]
3. Ekman, P. & Davidson, R. (1993). Voluntary Smiling Changes Regional Brain Activity. Psychological Science, 4 342-345. [↩]
4. Stefan Klein seems to think it’s hereditary [↩]
5. Or “electroencephalography” for those with more time on their hands to pronounce really long words [↩]

Imagine for a moment that you’re a Swiss mercenary away from your homeland and fighting for some European king during the 17th century. Now suppose that over cups of hot coco and hair braiding you and your fellow mercs begin to pine for the good old days when video games came with thick manuals and forced you to micromanage your system memory in order to get things to run. Most likely you would all be referred for treatment of a neurological disease, not only because video games didn’t exist in the 17th century, but also because nostalgia in any form was considered a malady of the mind on par with any other physical disease. Proto-psychologists of the time thought that the condition was limited to the Swiss people, and attributed it to all kinds of weird stuff, including pressure from tiny demons squeezing the wrong parts of your brain, changes in air pressure forcing blood up into the skull, and brain damage resulting from the prolonged clamor of cowbells.¹

Current research has progressed quite a bit, and generally defines nostalgia along the lines of an emotional state characterized by sentimental longing for things in one’s past. It’s a common concept, and it’s not unusual to encounter some old fart of a gamer reminiscing about how much better and more fun things used to be back in the old days. If you ever find yourself in a room full of gamers and want to cull out these people, just say the following words in a loud, clear voice: “Man, how about that Nintendo Entertainment System?” Then just tag all the people who won’t stop talking. Double tag the people who use words like “DOSBox” or “gog.com.”

This begs the question, though, of why we feel nostalgic about games² at all. And more curiously, why do we so often look at the past through rose-colored glasses and claim that old games were so great? This despite the honest fact that today we’d rather chew our own faces off than use pencil and graph paper to find our way around a dungeon or type IP addresses into a command line to find a multiplayer match –with vanilla deathmatch as the only option, no less. Yes, some games are classics and serve as important signposts on the medium’s road to maturation, but seriously even today’s mediocre games and hardware represent improvements on every front. So why do we get all nostalgic?

The N64 is the greatest gaming console ever! Because I was delighted to get it for Christmas one year!

(Photo credit: Hendricks Photos.)

To answer that question it might be useful to look at what psychologists think are the triggers and reasons for nostalgia in general. A few years back several researchers from the University of Southhampton published an article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that revealed a few things about the content, triggers, and functions of nostalgia.³

For example, the researchers found that our nostalgic narratives most often featured a “redemption sequence” where the subject started off down in the dumps, but found a way to parlay that experience into something positive. So maybe your love of games made you a bit of a social outcast in general, but you formed one really solid friendship with a kindred soul. Or maybe you learned something about lawn care and the gray market for kidneys⁴ in the course of saving up for a Sega Genesis.

The link between negative moods and nostalgia also came up when the researchers looked at what triggers bouts of the emotion. They found that feeling down in the dumps or displeasure over current circumstances is likely to prompt people to reminisce about some uplifting experience in the past. So maybe you’re more likely to get nostalgic for the 8-bit era when some high def, high poly foes are sucking all the fun out of your current experience.

These findings all point to the idea that we engage in nostalgia because it has psychological benefits. It makes us happy and improves our state of mind, especially when we need that kind of mental pick-me-up. Specifically, nostalgic reverie about a time when we were enjoying ourselves or finding ourselves particularly competent or connected to other people raises feelings of self-regard, which is a feeling that well-adjusted people tend to like. Today’s role-playing games are all about grinding that I don’t have time for, remember when I got my entire party of characters in Final Fantasy IV to level 99? Man, I was hardcore then.

Name? Job? Lack of dialog tree?

But is what we’re remembering accurate or really representative of what we felt at the time? The fact that we seem to engage in nostalgia specifically to make us feel better suggests that we may be unconsciously biased towards remembering things that make us happy and against remembering the things that don’t. We have a remarkable propensity towards that kind of thing. It’s cute, really. We require less information to confirm beliefs when they are consistent with our current state of mind⁵ and a substantial body of research⁶ has shown that we are predisposed to remember more of the good things in life. For example, one pair of researchers⁷ asked subjects floating in a sensory deprivation tank to recall and rate experiences from their past. Sixty-six percent of the recollections were considered positive (or “of positive affective valance”, as it’s said in the biz) while the remainder were neutral or unpleasant.⁸

An additional wrinkle in memory’s landscape is that the emotional footprints of positive memories tend to fade more slowly than those of negative ones.⁹ This is something known as the “fading affect bias” though I prefer “fading affect effect” because it’s punchier. Regardless of what you call it, this might be due to the fact that downplaying negative memories is an effective coping mechanism and leads to better mental health –a far cry from having tiny, nostalgia-inducing Swiss demons swimming around in your brain.

Or it could all be a case of bad mental aim. Another group of researchers claim that vividly remembered events seem so great relative to the hum-drum of the present because simply remembering something feels good. Jason Leboe and Tamara Ansons reported on studies¹⁰ showing that people tend to have an “Ah-ha!” moment when experiencing easy recall of information, and that kind of moment is innately pleasurable. It’s just a cognitive quirk in the brain. What we tend to do, the researchers argued, is mistakenly attribute the pleasure not to the easy recall of the experience, but to the experience itself. While some stand-out experiences obviously were pleasurable, this kink in the human brain biases us towards erroneously remembering such events as more positive than they were.

So, next time you’re feeling nostalgic about how great Quakeworld or the original Donkey Kong Country was, I recommend going with it. It’ll make you feel better even if you overlook the problems at the time or the improvements that have been made since. Just don’t over commit yourself to any opinions born of memory’s fickle biases. Because graph paper, himem.sys, and two buttons on a controller were worse than you really remember.

1. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Baden, D. (2004). Nostalgia: Conceptual issues and Existential Functions in J. Greenburg (Ed.) , Handbook of Experimental Existential Psychology. Guildford Publications. [↩]
2. Or anything, for that matter, but I write about games here, so let’s stick with that. [↩]
3. Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91 (5), 975-993. [↩]
4. Not necessarily yours [↩]
5. Something known as the “confirmation bias” [↩]
6. e.g., for a summary see Walker, R., Skowronski, J., & Thompson, C. (2003). Life Is Pleasant—and Memory Helps to Keep It That Way! Review of General Psychology, 7 (2), 203-210. [↩]
7. Suedfeld, P., & Eich, E. (1995). Autobiographical memory and affect under conditions of reduced environmental stimulation. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15, 321–326. [↩]
8. An especially powerful result once one considers that how many of the negative memories were probably along the lines of “This one time, two crazy psychology professors locked me in a sensory deprivation tank for an hour.” [↩]
9. Holmes, D. S. (1970). Differential change in affective intensity and the forgetting of unpleasant personal experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3, 234–239. [↩]
10. Leboe, J. & Ansons, T. (2006). On Misattributing good remembering to a happy past: An investigation into the cognitive roots of nostalgia. Emotion, 6, 596-610. [↩]

Imagine that two people, Kim and Carlos, notice that their cars are filthy and both go to the same car wash to make things right. With their wash they each receive a special card that lets them earn a free car wash if they get the card stamped enough times during future visits. Kim’s card says it requires 10 purchases for a free wash, but the perky girl at the counter gave her a head start with two free stamps. The card Carlos got doesn’t have any free starter stamps, but it only requires 8 future purchases instead of 10. So both Kim and Carlos are looking at the same number of purchases to score their complimentary car cleaning.

Who do you think is more likely to come back enough times to fill up his or her card? Kim or Carlos?

It turns out that it’s Kim, who got saddled with a card that required 10 total stamps, but who received enough free stamps to get her 20% of the way towards her goal. This is thanks to a phenomenon called “the endowed progress effect.” Basically, the idea is that when you give people just a feeling of advancement towards a distant goal, they’re more likely to try harder and try longer to reach that goal, even relative to people who have an equally easy goal but who got no sense of momentum off the bat.

Researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze coined the term in a paper¹ where they did the car wash experiment described above. They found that 34% of people who got a 10-stamp card with 2 freebies ended up coming back enough to redeem the cards, compared to 19% of customers who started with an unstamped card requiring only 8 stamps. This despite the fact that both sets of customers only needed 8 stamps for a free wash. Nunes and Xavier also found that those endowed with the two free stamps tried to reach their goal faster by waiting less time between washes.

Buy 6 heartbeat sensors and win a chance to punch Bobby Kotick in the arm AS HARD AS YOU CAN.

Why? The researchers argue that the reason for the results is that by giving out free stamps, the merchant was framing the task (i.e., buying enough car washes to get a freebie) as one that has already been undertaken. There’s a substantial body of research that shows people are naturally motivated to complete tasks that they feel they’ve started and will want to remain consistent with previous intentions.² Other research has shown that the closer someone gets to completing a goal the more likely they are to increase their efforts towards closing that last little gap.³ Apparently, giving people a couple of free holes on a punch card is enough to trigger both of these effects.⁴

This has a few interesting possibilities for game design. Imagine, for example, that I’m playing through Fallout: New Vegas⁵ and I get a quest to save 10 slaves from a nearby encampment. One way to deliver that quest to me would be to meet a NPC and have her say “Hey, there’s 10 slaves. Go free all 10.” And so I’d go off, and the quest would tick up “0 out of 10 slaves rescued, 1 out of 10 slaves rescued,” et cetera. Alternatively, if the game designer wanted to invoke the endowed progress effect, I could first receive the request upon opening the cell door for a pair of slaves on the outskirts of the encampment. One of the slaves could say “There were 12 of us altogether! Free the others!” and my progress would start off as “2 out of 12 slaves rescued” as the first two sprint off over the horizon. According to everything discussed above, I’d be much more motivated to complete this quest if it were presented this way.

Other examples aren’t hard to imagine. What if some NPC wanting 12 Goretusk livers in World of Warcraft gave me two to start with and raised the request to 14? What if, upon learning a new crafting skill that requires combining 5 widgets into one superwidget, the game gets me started with 1 widget and makes the recipe call for 6? What if, when I’m waiting impatiently in a multiplayer matchmaking lobby for Halo: Reach to find me 10 opponents, the game populates the first two slots with “Player Found!” after a couple of seconds even though it’s still looking? Would I be more likely to wait for the rest even if the search takes a long time?⁶ Well, you get the idea. If you’ve got other examples, let’s hear them in the comment section.

1. Nunes, J. & Dreze, X. (2006). The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort. Journal of Consumer Research. 32, 442-52. [↩]
2. e.g., Fox, S. & Hoffman, M. (2002). Escalation Behavior as a Specific Case of Goal-Directed Activity: A Persistence Paradigm. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 24 (4), 273-285. [↩]
3. Hull, C. (1932). The Goal Gradient Hypothesis and Maze Learning. Psychological Review, 39, 25-43. [↩]
4. The more astute among you may guess that it has something to do with loss aversion –maybe those with the two free stamps valued them more than shoppers in the other condition and didn’t want to lose them. That’s a pretty good thought, but it occurred to Nunes and Dreze too. Without going into too much detail here, they did a follow-up study to test that hypothesis and found that the value of the endowment didn’t really affect whether or not people persisted in earning the free prize. [↩]
5. Which I actually am at the moment! [↩]
6. Sorry, is that evil? Lying to your players may be a little evil. Your conscience may vary. [↩]

When it comes to video games, I’m not much of an achievement guy. But when I pop in a new game I usually bring up the achievement list to see what’s there and to look for anything interesting. When I recently did this with Halo: Reach I had to give a snort upon seeing the “A Monument To All Your Sins” achievement, which can only be gotten by playing through the entire single-player campaign on Legendary difficulty. ALONE. As in without a co-op buddy. I liked Reach well enough, but on higher difficulty levels the game is brutal and forces you to replay sections over and over and over again using a tiresome trial and error approach. Unless you’re a thirteen year old who’s mixing cocaine in his coffee¹ it’s anything but fun, especially without a co-op buddy or three.

Wait, you want me to what?

And it’s not hard to find other examples of punishingly difficult achievements that net you more controller-biting frustration than gaming pleasure. Beat this cheap boss without taking any damage. Complete the game using only the weakest weapon. Beat this tricky level in a stupidly short amount of time. So why would anyone do these things if they’re unnecessary and no fun?

A paper entitled “Conceptual Consumption” and published in the Annual Review of Psychology last year suggests some clues.² The authors explore a theory of “conceptual consumption,” which holds that people are as interested in consuming ideas, information, and concepts as they are physically consuming things –sometimes more so. People want to “possess” an experience simply because it’s novel and rare, and will sometimes forego other more rational choices in order to do it. For some people, there’s a drive to add that concept or experience to their list of “stuff I’ve done” just so they can have the satisfaction of a longer list. Researchers Anat Keinan and Ran Kivetz liken this to ticking items off an experiential checklist or “experiential resume” so that they can die feeling like they’ve accomplished more in life. These are the same kind of people who elect to stay in hotel rooms carved out of ice instead of a Florida Marriott or to eat bacon-flavored ice cream instead of chocolate.³⁴ And get this: there may even be a correlation between this kind of nonsense and how productive people are in other aspects of their lives!

This is why I think achievement systems that show what percentage of players have seized a given achievement are more motivating. Knowing that the Monument to All Your Sins achievement is worth 150G is okay, since it gives you some reference against which to compare it to that achievement that gave you 5G for watching the intro sequence to Soul Calibur 4 ⁵. But the way that Steam does achievements is a lot more likely to capitalize on conceptual consumption drives because it lets you know just how rare your little triumph was relative to other players.

Because it’s not just about a longer list –it’s about a more varied and interesting list that tells people that you’re a varied and interesting kind of person. Getting that A Monument To All Your Sins achievement in Halo: Reach is a way of signalling to friends and strangers that you’re the kind of hardcore person who has really mastered the game and best of all, you can tell them all about it⁶ After all, that experiential resume is no good if you can’t show it to anyone. Just remember to pad out your professional resume, too.

1. Don’t do this, by the way. Being a 13 year old is a terrible idea. [↩]
2. Ariely, D., & Norton, M. (2009). Conceptual Consumption. Annual Review of Psychology (60), 475-499. [↩]
3. Keinan, A., & Kivetz, R. (2008). Remedying hyperopia: The effects of self-control regret on consumer behavior. Journal of Marketing Research (45), 676-689. [↩]
4. And don’t tell me that bacon ice cream would taste great. No number of Internet memes is going to make that anything but gross. [↩]
5. No, seriously. [↩]
6. Whether they’d really rather you shut up about it or not. [↩]

I wrote a while back about the Status Quo Effect and how puny humans are likely to stick with a default or pre-selected option when presented with multiple choices. It’s why e-mail subscription opt-outs are more “successful” than opt-ins, and it’s how services gently steer new customers towards the more profitable options like annual subscription instead of monthly ones.

While installing Civilization V today one of the many messages demanding my attention was this:

Personally I think they should have had one type of charity associated with different types of Civ victory: science, culture, military annihilation.

2K Games is giving away a wad of cash to the charity that gets the most votes from Civ 5 players. Pretty awesome, but it occurs to me that the first charity, Scholarship America, kind of has an unfair advantage over the others because it’s not only listed first, but selected by default. Because of the status quo bias, a lot of people probably just left it selected and hit “Launch Game” without thinking much about it. ¹ If Firaxis wanted a more pure measure of user preferences, they’d make none of the charities selected by default and make players select one before they could proceed.

This got me thinking of somewhere I had also seen player voting in another context: Halo Reach’s matchmaking lobbies. When you and a lobby full of other players in Halo: Reach get ready to start a new game, you’re presented with three choices with different maps and game modes, plus a “None of the above” option. Players get to cast a vote on which they prefer. Also, you get to call other people terrible names for not voting the way you want. But besides the homophobia, one important difference between Civilization V’s charity voting and Reach’s game selection is that Reach doesn’t have a default option selected or flagged for selection. So the status quo bias isn’t at work there. It’s possible, though, that the first person to cast a vote gets to influence the voting of others by creating a de facto default vote.

1. Unless, of course, my sample of 1 data point is insufficient to see that Firaxis is doing something clever, like randomizing which charity is listed first and thus selected by default [↩]

Does motion control help us feel like we’re “in” a game’s world?

A few weeks ago I published an article on presence and video games, discussing a model of what puts us in the curious psychological state of feeling like we’re in a game world. When we experience presence we ignore the technology between us and that world, and we’re more likely to enjoy the game and more quickly able to learn its rules. I hypothesized at the time that motion controls that more closely mimic real movements are more likely to create presence, but that the research still had some ground to cover. I continued to read about the topic and given the recent release of Playstation Move and the imminent release of Kinect for the Xbox 360 I thought it would be a good time to revisit the relationship between motion control and presence. Topical!

Move! Move! Move! Move!

Besides the fact that absent or extremely simplified controls give us a lot less technology to forget about on our way to presence in the first place, the other reason to think that motion controlled games can create more presence has to do with mental models. In the context of video games, mental models are the representations we build of a game world –how the space is arranged, what its characteristics are, what the hell that thing is, what’s the deal with all the screaming when I press this lever, and so forth. One could hypothesize that more natural game controls help players more easily build and access those mental models by allowing us to take information from the real world (“I’m swinging a bat!”) and immediately understand what that action means for things in the game (“My little dude is swinging a bat in the same way!”). This creates consistency between things¹ in game and what we know about their real life counterparts –and that’s just the kind of thing that has been shown to create presence.

Paul Skalski at Cleveland State University and several collaborators decided to put idea this to a test and published their results earlier this year in the journal New Media & Society.² They were interested in how “naturally” a controller was used to play a game and what effect that had on presence and enjoyment. To kick things off, they proposed an interesting typology of natural control mapping.³

Directional natural mappings are the least natural, represenging simple up/down/left/right mappings and maybe some buttons. Think Street Fighter 4: up to jump, left/right to move, down to crouch, and buttons to punch or kick.

Kinesic natural mappings are those that involve gross body movements⁴ to control the game without holding a controller. This is pretty much every Kinect game, plus some of Sony’s EyeToy games.

Incomplete tangible natural mapping gives players something that feels like an in-game object. Wii Sports, for example, uses this kind of mapping when it asks you to use the wiimote like a tennis racket or golf club. A lot of Playstation Move controls are going to fit in here, too, like the ping pong game or the archery game in Sports Champions.

Realistic tangible natural mapping, though, is the most realistic kind of controller. This gives you a thing that is a thing and behaves like the thing in the game …thing.⁵ Steering wheels for racing games fall into this category, as do drum sets for Rock Band or Guitar Hero –not to mention that nutso stringed guitar controller that Mad Catz wants you to buy for Rock Band 3.

(As a side note, I actually think this typology is deficient because it lacks a place for motion-tracked controllers that are used in ways that are not asking you to mimic holding something specific. Wiggling the wiimote to make Mario spin in Super Mario Galaxy or aiming it at the TV to make Samus fire rockets in Metroid: Other M doesn’t fit in anywhere here, but those kind of controls certainly exist.)

Flailing around like a nincompoop really makes me feel like I'm flailing around like a nincompoop IN THE GAME!

Skalski et al. were interested in whether more natural mapping of controls would lead to greater self-reports of presence while playing games, so they ran two experiments. In the first, they had one group play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 on the Nintendo Wii using the wiimote like, appropriately enough, a golf club. Another group played the Playstation 2 version of that same game using the dual shock controller. The results were that the wiimote did indeed feel more natural, as measured by questions like “The actions used to interact with the game environment were similar to the actions that would be used to do the same thing in the real world.” No surprise there, but they also found that use of such controls did correlate with spatial presence (“To what extent did you experience a sense of ‘being there’ inside the environment?”) and people who played the game on the Wii were more likely to report experiencing presence than those who played with the PS2 controller.

The researchers then decided to kick it up a notch and compare several different types of controllers on the same game. They had participants play the racing game Need for Speed Underground 2 using a keyboard, a joystick, a gamepad, or a steering wheel. Same results: the steering wheel, which represented a “realistic tangible natural mapping” according tot he taxonomy above, was perceived as the most natural and players in that group were the most likely to report feeling like they were “in the game.”

This all suggests that if the goal of your game is to make players feel like they’re part of a game world, motion controllers are better than traditional game pads or keyboards.⁶ Of course, not all games have presence as a design goal, not all games can be controlled with motion, (imagine trying to play Starcraft II with just motion control) and there are probably other characteristics of motion control (like exhausting or uncomfortable movements) that could detract from the overall enjoyment of a game. Again, this is an area rife with possibilities for research …things.

Anyway, has anyone played around with the Playstation Move yet? Does it make you more likely to forget that the game you’re playing is mediated by technology?

1. “Things” is a technical term you can never over use. Go on, just try to over use it. You can’t! [↩]
2. Skalski, P., Tamborini, R., Shelton, A., Buncher, M. & Lindmark, P. (2010). Mapping the road to fun: natural video game controllers, presence, and game enjoyment. New Media & Society. [↩]
3. Big thanks, by the way, to Paul Skalski for talking to me about his research and forwarding me this paper. [↩]
4. Pun intended? Yes, pun intended. [↩]
5. I’m telling you, can’t be over used! [↩]
6. Though I should note that Skalski et al. never tested a “kinesic natural mapping” a la Microsoft’s Kinect or a pure EyeToy game. Someone should do that. [↩]