Category Archives: Articles

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Ideal Self Image and Game Choice

So why do you think you choose to play the games you do? NO! WRONG ANSWER! Well, actually, you’re probably mostly right about that, but an recent article in Psychological Science ((Przybylski, A., Weinstein, N., Murayama, K., Lynch, M. & Ryan, R. (2012). The Ideal Self At Play: The Appeal of Video Games That Let You Be All You Can Be. Psychological Science, 23(1) 69-76.)) suggests that your choice of games and your motivation to keep playing them may have something to do with how well they allow you to experience something deeper and more personal.

In the article, Andrew Przybylski (whose work I also cited in my article for GamePro on the appeal of shooters that’s sadly no longer online) and his co-authors hypothesize that we’re motivated to play video games to the extent that they allow us to sample our “ideal self characteristics,” especially when there’s a large gap between our ideal selves and who we actually think we are. This could help explain why people are attracted to games in a way that’s unique to the medium.

Przybylski and his colleagues tested this theory in a couple of experiments in which they had gamers self-report their personality (using a standard “Big 5” measure) in three contexts:

  1. As they think they are IRL
  2. As the type of person would like to ideally be IRL
  3. As the type of person they felt like while playing a certain game

They found that we apparently enjoy games most when they let us feel like an idealized version of ourselves (i.e., #2 and #3 above are similar), and that effect is greatest when there’s a big discrepancy with our ideal self and our perceived self (i.e., #1 and #2 are dissimilar). So if I fantasize about being a loquacious, extroverted type of person, I feel better about myself when I’m able to play a game that lets me do that even though in reality I get tongue-tied in public. Or if I strive to be a more conscientious master of details and micromanagement, I might prefer a real-time strategy game over a first person shooter.

Hmmm... Should I put my augmentation points into Conscientiousness or Emotional Stability?

You may think this is a bit obvious, but I think some of the implications are profound for game designers, especially those working on role-playing games. We’re all probably familiar with the binary “Do you murder the puppy or do you help the puppy?” morality choices in some such games. Many of my favorite games in this genre include choices or developments that were much more complicated than that. Taking Przybylski’s research to heart, effective choices in these games are going to be the ones that allow let players adopt a much wider spectrum of personality, desires, values, and judgments.

I won’t share any spoilers, but those of you who have made it to the end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be familiar with a good example of this. It provides choices that allow you to have Adam –and through him yourself– weigh the importance of freedom, progress, purity, justice, honesty, and the like. Similarly, many paths in Dragon Age 2 ask you to create a persona that reflects varying emphasis on loyalty, dogmatism, anarchy, and justice. And while there’s something to be said about “playing the dark side” in these games for fun ((Dark Brotherhood quest line in Skyrim, anyone?)) one could hypothesize that that kind of thrill comes most strongly from playing something equally complicated, just in the opposite direction from your ideal self.

Okay, for extra light side points, kill this thing using only passive agression.

But there’s more. I haven’t played Bioware’s new Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG yet, but from what I’ve heard there are some improvements to that game suggested by the above research. In keeping with the Star Wars tradition, the game lets you play on either end of the “light side” or “dark side” morality spectrum. But as is with common with such systems, meeting certain thresholds of good or evil are required to use certain equipment and abilities. You get light or dark points by role-playing certain actions, so most players are on the lookout for ways to boost their standing. The problem with this is that it may not only over simplify the role-playing in the game, but by dangling a carrot from such choices the game may actively discourage players from exploring more subtle choices and consequences that let them feel more like their idealized self and thus motivate them to continue playing.

So, game writers take note. When you’re dreaming up your game’s stable of complex supporting characters, don’t leave the player character out of the action. We all love trying on different hats in the way that only video games allow, but some of us have very oddly shaped heads.

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The Psychology of Child’s Play

Many of you may be familiar with the Child’s Play charity that was started by the guys behind the video game webcomic Penny Arcade. Since 2003, the organization has encouraged gamers to donate new video games (or cash or other toys) to children’s hospitals around the world so that little Timmy can distract himself from chemotherapy by teabagging some poor son of a bitch in Call of Duty. Coming from two guys who make a running gag out of a robot that sexually molests fruit and an industry that’s often under scrutiny for too much violence, sex, and teabagging some poor son of a bitch in Call of Duty, this is a refreshingly noble endeavor.

Now, while we’re at it, also consider the earthquakes and tsunami that severely messed up parts of Japan in early 2011. It was interesting to watch the gamer community’s reaction to this tragedy since Japan is frequently associated with the gaming industry. As one example, fans of fighting games organized the Fight For Relief tournament to raise earthquake relief donations. While philanthropy thankfully pops up after any high-profile natural disaster, I found it fascinating that the Japan earthquake created so much energy in the gamer community and to see people participating because they consider themselves gamers. I don’t recall listening to gaming podcasts and hearing about special video game charity tournaments after the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti, for example.

Why is that? What are the psychological reasons why gamers jump behind these causes? To be sure, Child’s Play and the Japan earthquake relief funds thrive because enough people just want to do good deeds. Sure. That’s a given. But are there other factors involved that make gamers like you or me more likely to support these particular charities over others? I think so.

Research into the psychology of charity has argued for a “warm glow giving” theory at least since the mid 80s ((e.g., Andreoni, J. (1990). Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving. The Economic Journal, 100, 464-477.)) Unsurprisingly altruism not a purely rational decision nor is it born only of some strict adherence to a moral code. We donate, in part, to feel better about ourselves. Shocking! But one thing that subsequent social psychologists and economists have found is that we tend to donate more when we believe that the charity or our fellow contributors share a similar social identity. That is, if we think that other people in our in-group are donating, we’re more likely to support, contribute to, and trumpet the charity because it makes us feel better about our social identity and thus ourselves.

As an example, one recent experiment from the Journal of Marketing Research ((Shang, J. Reed II, A., and Croson, R. (2008). Identity Congruencey Effects on Donations, Journal of Marketing Research, 45, 351-361.)) researchers found that they could get people to give more money to a public radio fundraiser by telling them that a previous donor had donated a phat wad of cash, but ESPECIALLY if that previous donor was described in terms that made him/her sound similar to the subject. This was most pronounced in those people with “high identity esteem,” which is basically a measure of how strongly people associate with their social group. Another experiment ((Page, K., and Barone, M. (2011). Warm Glow or Cold, Hard Cash? Social Identity Effects on Consumer Choice for Donation versus Discount Promotions. Journal of Marketing Research, 48, 855-868.)) got subjects to prefer a promotion in the form of “a portion of our proceeds will benefit charity” over a more rational cash discount for the same amount, just by choosing a charity that the shopper identified with. ((Not coincidentally, it’s not unheard of to see vendors advertise contributions to Child’s Play as a benefit of buying their product.))

But wait, there’s more. Research has also shown that we may donate more to charity when we feel bad about ourselves, as a way to repair our self image. This was illustrated in a series of experiments ((Sachdeva, S., Iliev, R., and Medin D. (2009). Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners: The Paradox of Moral Self-regulation. Psychological Science, 20 523-528.)) where subjects were tricked into writing essays about their own character that were either positive or negative. Those that beat themselves up by writing self-critical essays gave more when they were subsequently asked to give to a charity of their choice.

Sad Panda will donate more to your cause than will Happy Panda. This is because of sad panda science.

I know this may be a leeetle bit cynical, but I have to wonder if there’s something at work here with Child’s Play and similar charities that target gamers. We often get criticized for loving a hobby replete with violence, sexism, and whatever it was that “B4dKillahD00d43” was screaming at me over Xbox Live the other night. Making a success of Child’s Play gives us a chance to refute those stereotypes and show that gamers can be good people. The Child’s Play website itself even notes that “In response to the media’s negative portrayal of gamers, [Holkins and Krahulik] called for the gaming community to donate to Seattle Children’s Hospital” during the charity’s inaugural season. And why not? Whether or not the stereotypes are accurate, this kind of moral cleansing makes us happier and mentally healthier to the extent that we consider ourselves gamers.

So, I encourage you to go and donate to Child’s Play this season –I just did prior to posting this article. ((Do you see what I just did there? Eh? Eh?)) Sure, little Timmy can be kind of annoying over voice chat when the nurse isn’t around, but let’s cut him some slack. The kid has been through a lot lately and we can help him out.

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Thoughts on Immersion in Skyrim

Like most Earthlings, I’ve been playing a LOT of Skyrim lately. I hated Oblivion and Morrowind, but this particular role-playing dragon murder simulator has really gotten under my skin, thanks in part to how immersive it is. It’s not uncommon for me to hunch in front of my keyboard for hours, forgetting time and space while I ford fjords and cram my inventory full of Falmer ears (I might NEED them!). I wrote a while back about immersion in video games and Skyrim seems like a textbook case of jamming on all the right buttons:

  • A cognitively demanding environment –you’re constantly scanning for threats, items, and pathways
  • Multiple, coordinated sources of sensory information –sight and sound work really well together here
  • Extensive interactivity –you can pick up, mess with, or kill a heck of a lot of stuff

One thing that Skyrim really goes all in on, though, is limiting the incongruous elements on your screen. The idea here is that presenting players with things that remind them that they’re playing a video game undermines a sense of spatial presence and immersion. Skyrim conspicuously omits or minimizes things like damage indicators, cooldown timers on abilities, level indicators on enemies, icons indicating effects, and HUD elements to activate powers or items. It’s super minimalistic and a far cry from something like World of Warcraft where you’ve got numbers bubbling off enemies like fireworks and half your screen is taken up with icons, minimaps, and hotkeys. The result is that it’s easier to lose yourself in the world, as many of us are finding out.

Just a compass, a crosshair, and that Lydia chick who keeps getting herself killed.

That said, I wonder if Bethesda’s pursuit of immersion has actually gone too far. Skyrim’s anemic UI actually often fails to give you information that you really need and want. Say you’ve just gotten a new Fear spell that affects creatures up to level 10. Soooo… What level is that wolf? Or that bandit? No way to know, really. And how much longer until my protection from frost potion wears off? Is my weapon still poisoned? And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve blithely trooped around the landscape while diseased or cursed because I failed to dive into a UI two levels deep to find out. And don’t get me started on favorites and hotkeys.

One universal complaint of the game seems to be that the UI is awful, and I have to wonder how much of that was exacerbated by an iron clad design goal to shove everything possible off the main screen in order to increase immersion. Despite how much I’m enjoying it, it kind of strikes me as an example of swinging too far to the other extreme.

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Burnout, Crunch, and the Games You Play

The need for “crunch time” in the game development business has been a perennial drum that gets pulled out and beat upon from time to time. The biggest kerfuffle in recent memory was caused by “EA Spouse” who composed a magnum opus on Livejournal in which she recounted the cringe-inducing conditions under which her husband ((Technically, fiance at the time, but whatever)) had to work as a game developer at Electronic Arts. The story blew up big, resulting in lawsuits and widespread, solemn vows to really do something about all this. Despite that, crunch time remained endemic to the industry, ((c.f, Remo, C. (2010). Study: Developers Claim 13 Weeks Of Crunch Per Year. Gamasutra. Retrieved August 7, 2011 from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28669/Study_Developers_Claim_13_Weeks_Of_Crunch_Per_Year.php)) with complaints from Team Bondi about working on L.A. Noire being a recent and highly visible example.

About the only time you'll see "Burnout" "Game" and "Paradise" in the same place.

A couple of weeks ago, though, games business analyst ((1. whatever that is.)) Michael Pachter caused widespread spit-takes by asserting that crunch time without additional compensation was not only necessary, but totally okay and the kind of thing that you just gotta put up with if you want to work in the industry. “If your complaint is you worked overtime and didn’t get paid for it,” said Pachter, “find another profession.” His reasoning appears to be that hard work is rewarded financially (through bonuses for hit games) and by the satisfaction of working in the games industry in the first place. Pachter’s comments riled a lot of …whatever it is that gets riled, and inspired many responses like this one by my close personal Internet friend and game industry veteran Charles Randall. ((Sup, Charles?)) The consensus of these objectors seems to be that excessive crunch time leads to burnout, and burnout leads to bad games, studio failures, avoidable expenses, and possibly hepatitis C.

But does it? Industrial-organizational psychologists have extensively studied the concept of work overload and the burnout that comes it, and I thought it would be interesting to see what they’ve found. Researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter recently published a review of the predictors of burnout ((Maslach, C., and Leiter, M. (2008). Early Predictors of Job Burnout and Engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology 93(3). 498-512.)) and noted the consensus that there are three facets of burnout in the workplace:

  1. Exhaustion
  2. Cynicism
  3. Inefficiency

Exhaustion is just as it sounds: physical, mental, and/or emotional overtaxation. Cynicism covers a range of social reactions, including withdrawal from work or generally bitter or callous attitudes. It often follows from exhaustion as a defense mechanism. Inefficiency means being ineffective, unproductive, and feelings (correct or not) of incompetence.

What causes burnout? In a marvelous case of discovering the obvious, various researchers have determined that the most reliable recipe is too much work and not enough resources. Additional factors that can drive burnout are feeling a lack of control over one’s work, inadequate rewards for effort, the absence of supportive co-workers/friends/family, and unfair treatment. So getting no overtime pay, not getting to spend time with your family, and being lied to about how long crunch time will last make it a lot worse.

Now, some stress appears to be okay. Maslach and Leiter write:

Acute fatigue resulting form an especially demanding event at work –meeting a deadline or addressing a crisis– need not lead to burnout if people have an opportunity to recover during restful periods at work or at home. …When this kind of overload is a chronic job condition, not an occasional emergency, there is little opportunity to rest, recover, and restore balance. A sustainable workload, in contrast, provides opportunities to use and refine existing skills as well as to become effective in new areas of activity. ((ibid, pg 500))

But, you may be asking, so what? Why do I care? Well, research has linked burnout to a number of unwelcome outcomes in the workplace. Generally, it’s detrimental to job satisfaction, attendance, and employee tenure ((Lee, R. & Ashforth, B. (1996). A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Correlates of the Three Dimensions of Burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(2), 123-133.)) which cost game developers money and productivity. The relationship between performance and burnout has almost always relied on questionable self-report data, but just about every expert agrees that it’s there and a few studies have shown it directly. For example, one ((Kop, N., Euwema, M., & Schaufeli, W. (1999). Burnout, Job Stress, and Violent Behavior Among Dutch Police Officers. Work & Stress, 13, 326-340.)) that found burnout made cops more likely to unnecessarily beat the daylights out of civilians. Another ((Leiter, M., Harvie, P., and Frizzell, C. (1998). The Correspondence of Patient Satisfaction and Nurse Burnout. Social Science & Medicine, 47, 1611-1617.)) found that nurses experiencing burnout were rated by their patients as being awful, awful human beings.

Interestingly, Pachter seemed to be right about one thing: rewards in proportion to stress can offset burnout to some degree. If you’re recognized for your hard work, get opportunities to develop professionally, and receive what you see to be fair remuneration, then burnout may be delayed or avoided. ((Maslach, C. and Jackson, S. (1998). Prevention of Burnout: New Perspectives. Applied and Preventative Psychology, 7, 63-74.)) Likewise, tight alignment between personal and organizational values can soften stress and reduce burnout –think working long hours to provide charity or develop new technology. This isn’t a panacea, however, as prolonged, crunch-induced stress will eventually overpower any rewards. And gaming industry insiders are quick to assert that offer meaningful profit sharing programs are rare.

So, to the extent that you’re working in the games industry, burnout is pretty clearly a bad thing. As far as the rest of us go, well, I’m no economist but I suspect that burnout affects us to the extent that it raises the cost of making games (through diminished productivity, higher cost of attracting and training employees, employee sickness, etc.) delays games, or results in shoddy, bug-ridden games. All else being equal, the link between crunch, burnout, and the end product seems pretty clear.

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Benign Envy and The Psychology of Tiny Tower

I’ve been messing around lately with Tiny Tower on the iPad ((It is also on the iPhone/Touch)). If you haven’t played it, the gist is that you build up a tower full of “bitizens” who live in your tower’s apartments and work in its shops. Employed bitizens make money over time, which you can spend to build ever more floors to get more shops to employ more bitizens to make more money. You can speed this process up by spending “tower bux” which you can either earn in-game or buy with real money. It’s very much a “wait to play” game where you check in on it, stock your shops, then check back in a few hours later to restock again and see if you’ve accrued enough money to build a new floor. I’ve currently got 48 floors. ((Wait, now 49.))

You can speed things up by spending tower bux, and you can hasten your accrual of tower bux by exchanging a few real bucks –$30 will net you 1,000 tower bux. Apparently this is doing well for the developers, as Tiny Tower has shown up on the iTunes list of highest grossing apps and it has millions of players. I think they’ve missed an opportunity to make even more money, though, by not taking advantage of something called “benign envy.” ((Yes, this is another one my evil posts about how they could get more money out of you. They’re fun!))

The idea is that there are two kinds of envy: benign and malicious. As explained in series of papers by Niels van de Ven and his colleagues ((e.g., van de Ven, N. (2011). Why Envy Outperforms Admiration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6) 784-795.)) the latter is the kind we may be more familiar with –it’s the “They’ve got something I want, I wish they didn’t have it” variety. It especially happens when we don’t think someone deserves some nice new shiny thing that they’ve got. Benign envy, on the other hand, occurs when someone else has something we want, but we think that they deserve to have it. They worked for it, or it’s a just reward for their good character, or whatever.

When we experience benign envy, we don’t want to tear the other person down as much as we want to build ourselves up to get what they have. If doing so seems relatively easy, research has shown that such feelings of benign envy will motivate us to do what we can to close the gap. This may include spending more money to acquire a product that the other person has. In one study, van de Vern made subjects feel envious of a friend who got a desirable internship, and the result was that subjects, who were college students, studied harder to better their chances. In a follow-up study, they inspired envy for a friend who got a new iPhone, to the point where they subjects they’d be willing to pay 64% more for the gadget than would a control group. ((van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M. Pieters, R. (2011). The Envy Premium in Product Evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 37. 984-998.))

Where I think Tiny Tower is missing out on some extra revenue is that it doesn’t allow you to purchase
specific shops. The game is largely capricious about what specific shops appear –flag a floor for food and you may get either a Sky Burger or a Fancy Cuisine. This is important because some shops are WAY better than others because of how deep their stocks are, which lets them generate more money while you’re away from the game.

And while Tiny Tower allows you to peek in on your GameCenter friends’ towers and see what shops they have, it doesn’t allow you to do much about it if they have, say, a Tutoring Center that stocks an awesome 5,400 units of “Trig Help” at three coins a pop while the best service shop you have only sells a fraction of that before you have to manually restock. If Tiny Tower let you buy a Tutoring Center with real money, I’d bet they’d make a lot more, especially after people visited their friends and got a little dose of benign envy.

Of course, that’s not to say that people would always see this mechanic as fair or feel annoyed over the fact that their friends are cheapening their luck and persistence by breaking out the credit card. It’s a delicate balancing act. I’m just saying, I really want a Private Investigator before I hit 50 floors.

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Netflix, GameFly, and Predicting the Future

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has a great article in the current issue of Wired Magazine (also available to read here) where he discusses how online companies use psychology to squeeze more money out of us. (Incidentally, I have an article in the current issue of GamePro magazine about the same things in the context of video games, and even got professor Ariely to provide input.) One of his more interesting points was about Netflix’s queue and the type of movies people tend to add to it:

There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.

Now that Netflix offers streaming, I’ve dropped the DVDs altogether. With streaming, we no longer get stuck with movies we only want to watch in theory. Instead, we feel like we’re paying for the right to watch any movie at any time—even if we don’t wind up watching many.

I started to wonder if the same thing may happen with game rental services like GameFly. Are you likely to add avant-garde games like No More Heroes to your queue ((Or should I say “Game Flap?” HI WEEKEND CONFIRMED GUYS!)) with intentions of experiencing something unique yet move yet another military themed shooter to the top of the list? Would you consider adding a Japanese RPG for the sake of branching out into genres you haven’t traditionally played but groan in disappointment when it actually arrives int he mail?

Oh yay, the Citizen Kane of video games has arrived in my mailbox. How did that thing get in my queue, anyway?

I bet so, and the question might get more complicated if games-on-demand products like OnLive ever take off. Imagine if GameFly offered a streaming service where you could stream games or download rental copies. Would you think it’s a better value because it lets you avoid having to face up to your aspirational games when they arrive in the mail?

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The Psychology of Fair Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Psychology of Microsoft Points Part 2: Conversion Factors

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

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

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

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

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

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

Then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8

Look closely at both of those. Those of you who understand how multiplication works know that these products are equal –40,320 to be exact. Yet the average estimate for the group that was given the problem starting with “8″ was 2,250 while those who saw a “1″ at the beginning of the problem had an average estimate of just 512. Why? Because one group anchored on a high number and the other anchored on a low number. It turns out that anchoring can really screw with our estimations of everything from crime statistics to hardware failure rates to how much things cost in a foreign currency.

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

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

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The Psychology of Microsoft Points Part 1: Waste Aversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go ahead and read Part 2 of this article by performing semi-precise clicking actions here.

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Situational Judgment Tests as RPGs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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