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Why We Get Nostalgic About Good Old Games

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.

Did you find this kind of thing interesting? Well, if you say so. You might want to follow me on Twitter, RSS, or Facebook to see more.

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Endowed Progress Effect and Game Quests

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 paper 1 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 Vegas 5 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.

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Conceptual Consumption and Kicks to the Head

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 coffee ((Don’t do this, by the way. Being a 13 year old is a terrible idea.)) 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. ((Ariely, D., & Norton, M. (2009). Conceptual Consumption. Annual Review of Psychology (60), 475-499.)) 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. ((Keinan, A., & Kivetz, R. (2008). Remedying hyperopia: The effects of self-control regret on consumer behavior. Journal of Marketing Research (45), 676-689.)) ((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.)) 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 ((No, seriously.)). 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 it ((Whether they’d really rather you shut up about it or not.)) 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.

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The Charitable Status Halo Quo

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. ((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)) 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.

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Motion Controls and Presence

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!

Playstation Moves

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 things ((“Things” is a technical term you can never over use. Go on, just try to over use it. You can’t!)) 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. ((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.)) 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. ((Big thanks, by the way, to Paul Skalski for talking to me about his research and forwarding me this paper.))

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 movements ((Pun intended? Yes, pun intended.)) 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. ((I’m telling you, can’t be over used!)) 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. ((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.)) 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?

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The Psychology of Apology (and Hugs)

I’m looking forward to next year’s Portal 2 by Valve, in no small part because of the co-op mode where you team up with another little robot buddy and make your way through test chambers. Mistakes are sure to be made, though, and you may end up flinging or dropping your comrade to his/her death. Or maybe crushing. Or burning. Burning is always a possibility. Burning is really unavoidable when you get right down to it.

Fortunately, Valve has included a variety of emotes for your little robots to share with each other, including one that says “I’m so sorry; let’s hug it out.”

Hugs

Cold, mechanical apologies. They work.

This got me thinking about some research I’ve read on the power of the apology and how it really is missing in a lot of games. In his book, The Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely describes a simple and interesting field experiment he and a colleague conducted to see what effect an apology would have on remedying a minor annoyance. They hired an actor to sit in a coffee shop and ask patrons to complete a short exercise in exchange for $5. I don’t even know what the exercise was –something about circling letters– but that’s not the point; the exercise was just there to take up 5 minutes of time. At the end of that time, the actor would come over and then pretend to overpay participants by “accidentally” mixing in a $5 bill with the singles he was supposed to give them. This was, of course, done so that the researchers could see how people reacted to being overpaid.

There were three experimental conditions. In the first, things happened just as I described above. In the second condition, the actor pretended to receive a cell phone call in the middle of explaining the task instructions, and yakked away like an annoying nitwit while the subject had to wait for him to finish the instructions. Not quite as bad as flinging the person into a thermal deterrence beam, but a little annoying. In the third condition, the actor also annoyed the participants by taking a phone call, but afterwords he immediately apologized.1

The results were that 45% of the people in the first, non-annoyed condition returned the extra money, thereby turning down a chance to hurt the experimenter.2 When the actor pretended to take a phone call in the middle of a conversation, only 14% of the people returned the extra money. Surprisingly, though, if he apologized after taking the call, the number of people who returned the extra cash was the same as those who had not been annoyed at all. As Ariely puts it, “1 Annoyance + 1 Apology = 0 Annoyance.”

Why? In a 1997 study3 Michael McCullough, Everett Worthington, and Kenneth Rachal found that a good apology forged forgiveness through the act of empathy –that is, understanding of emotions between the offended and the offender. Ironically, this is one reason why I think the little robot hugs in Portal 2 work so well: those little guys look like they’ll have a lot of personality and exhibit more emotion than avatars in most other games.

Of course, apologizing is possible wherever there’s voice or text chat, but it’s probably not used as often as it should be, and in a fast-paced multiplayer game with lots of things going on, it’s kind of hard sometimes to apologize or even be heard if you do. But with a slowly paced game like Portal 2 or Little Big Planet, there’s not only every chance to apologize for a goof up, but there’s a lot more riding on it in terms of how well the other person cooperates, communicates potential puzzle solutions, or even if he/she drops out of the game altogether. Fortunately, even simple –or even insincere– apologies are particularly potent.

And this is why I believe that hugging robots should be in every children’s Social Studies textbook. Make it happen, Congresspeople.

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Priming, Consistency, Cheating, and Being a Jerk

How can developers of multiplayer games get their players to behave, cooperate, play their role, and not be such incredible jerks? I have an idea. Psychology is involved. You probably guessed this.

One of my favorite little experiments in psychology was done by John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows1 who were interested in how stereotypes were triggered. In one experiment, they had participants unscramble sentences that made heavy use of words like Florida, old, bingo, wrinkle, ancient and the like. A control group did the same thing, but with words not reminiscent of the elderly. That wasn’t the real experiment, though.

The important part of the experiment actually happened after the participants left the lab. Another experimenter sat in the hallway outside and discretely used a stopwatch to time how long it took participants to walk from one end of the hall to the other. Those who had been working with words related to old people actually walked significantly slower2 than those who had worked with other words.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows also did another experiment where some people unscrambled sentences with words related to rudeness (bold, bother, brazen) and some worked with words indicating politeness (patiently, courteous, unobtrusively). All subjects then walked in on a staged scene where they had to interrupt a conversation to get some needed information. Those in the “polite” condition waited 9.3 minutes on average. Those in the “rude” condition jumped in after just 5.5 minutes on average.3

These are examples of what psychologists called “priming,” which is basically getting people in a particular state of mind or getting them to think about what you want them to. It’s a staple of advertising and surprisingly easy to do. I’ve been thinking for a while that game developers should take better advantage of it.

What if, for example, certain words of phrases were thrown around on loading screens between levels or in the matchmaking lobby for a multiplayer shooter? Would simply showing words like “sportsmanship” or “communication” or “fairness” prime people to behave themselves during games? If you didn’t want to be that transparent, you could include little stories, vignettes, or even comics or movies that included those words or illustrations of them. Or maybe you could use real data, like the number of heals provided by players in the previous game or awards for best defense. Or maybe you could include a graphic of naked, pre-pubescent angels like this:

I know you read this blog, Cliff Bleszinski. This needs to be in Gears 3. You can make it happen, man. There's still time.

In his book, Predictably Irrational,4 behavioral economist Dan Ariely suggests some even better ways of making this kind of thing work. He describes some experiments that he, Nina Mazar, and On Amir did where they asked students at MIT to solve as many math problems as they could in a fixed time. Everyone was entered into a lottery where the winner would receive $10 for each correctly solved problem, so there was incentive to answer lots of problems. Some subjects were given a chance to cheat at the task by self-reporting the number of problems solved, and some couldn’t cheat because a research assistant graded their answers.

But let’s back up a bit. Some subjects in the “cheating is possible” condition were also asked to write down the Ten Commandments before starting the math problems. The others weren’t asked to write down anything.5 Relative to those who didn’t have the opportunity to cheat, those who did but were not asked write down the Ten Commandments claimed to have answered 33% more questions –a clear indication of cheating since that’s way more than could be expected by chance alone.

But what about those who had the chance to cheat but were asked to write things like “Thou shalt not lie” and “Thou shalt not steal?” Dude, they didn’t cheat at all. They answered exactly as many questions on average as the people who didn’t even have a chance to cheat. In a follow-up study, the same researchers replicated these results by omitting the Ten Commandments and having students acknowledge understanding that their actions were “subject to the MIT honor code.” Which, ironically, was a lie; there was no such official code.

It seems that the Ten Commandments or a reference to an honor code was enough to prime people for behaving themselves, but I think the study also tapped what’s called “the consistency bias.” This is where we tend to behave in ways that are consistent with our stated intentions, especially if stated publicly.

Look, if this dude tells you to hang back and build some base defenses, you'd better listen to him.

So what does this mean for gamers? Again, I’m thinking of loading screens and between rounds of multiplayer and matchmaking lobbies. What if you presented subjects players with simple yes/no questions like these?

  • Will you change classes if your team has too many of the class you wanted to play?
  • Will you stick around to the end of the match even if it looks like you’re going to lose?
  • Are you going to curse and be rude in this next match?
  • Will you hang back and play defense if your team needs it?
  • Will you fortify your team’s defenses if needed?
  • Will you give other people a chance to drive the damn tank once in a while? Please? Pretty please? You always just drive it off a cliff, anyway. C’mon, what do you say?

If, while waiting for the match to start, each player could answer those questions, what do you think would happen? Would they be primed in good ways? Would they want to behave consistently? Would having their answers shown to other players have an effect?

Personally, I think this could work. It’s at least worth experimenting with. C’mon, someone out there try it and let us know how it goes.

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Gaming for Mondays

Andrew Miller, a guy I know, ((Well, not really, but roll with it.)) spends his days in an office cubicle, working as a Procurement Officer for a large telecommunications company. Every day he spends his limited patience and good will towards humanity on arguments with various middle managers about why they can’t go out and buy this or hire a contractor to do that without following the company’s procurement policies. He also audits purchasing invoices, haggles with suppliers to get good prices, and tries to keep various budgets from into devolving into chaos. He’s good at his job, but by the end of the week he’s totally beat and ready to get away from work for a while. And so every weekend he goes on raids, rushes capture points, slays ogres, and battles to keep his place on the StarCraft II ladders.

And you know what? Come Monday morning he’s a better employee because he played video games. Science proves this beyond any argument. Well …science suggests it. I mean, a few psychologists have data saying it’s probably true. And they’re German psychologists, so it gets a little more awesome if you imagine them saying it with an accent.

Frankie says, Relax. And pw0n some noobs.

To whit, earlier this year Carmen Binnewies, Sabine Sonnentag, and Eva Mojza published a study ((Binnewies, C., Sonnentag, S. & Mojza, E. (2010). Recovery during the weekend and fluctuations in weekly job performance: A week-level study examining intra-individual relationships. Journal of Organizational and Occupational Psychology, 83(2), 419-441.)) where they looked at what effect using the weekend to recover from work had on one’s job performance. The theory is that people have “resources” that they drawn on to do their job. These could be physical strength, attention, patience, emotional control, or whatever. Eventually those resources become sapped to the point where the person needs to recover them. Recovery happens when those resources are not being tapped, which most frequently happens during nights and weekends. ((And yes, this is the point in the article by which you should have Loverboy’s “Workin’ for the Weekend” running through your head, NON STOP.)) But it just doesn’t happen magically; you have to engage in what’s known as “recovery experiences.”

There are supposedly three different kinds of experiences that lead to recovery: psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences. The first of these, psychological detachment, can be as simple as not gong in to work –it relies on the employee to do and think about something else for a change. Relaxation activities are those that most of us probably think of in response to the phrase “taking it easy.” These kinds of past times can be anything that the person enjoys and which is physically relaxing –reading, lounging, doing yard work, even exercising. Finally, mastery experiences are those that build new skills and a sense of accomplishment and maybe even add new skills to our repertoire.

Using a series of surveys that asked participants about what they did on the weekends while also gathering information about job performance and how grueling they found their work, the researchers found that yes, the types of recovery experiences described above led to feeling recovered on Mondays. And that state of being recovered in turn led not only to better job performance, but also feeling that doing well at work actually required less effort.

While reading this article, especially the parts about the recovery activities of psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences, I kept thinking, “Dude, video games. Playing video games could lead to any and all of those recovery experiences.” We play games to temporarily detach escape from reality, including our jobs or school. While some games leave us whit knuckled, others can be very relaxing. And at their heart, games are about mastery, developing new skills, or acquiring new knowledge.

So I did some more digging, and it turns out that I wasn’t the only one who had had those thoughts. Just last year, Leonard Reinecke had published a different study entitled “Games and Recovery: The Use of Video and Computer Games to Recuperate from Stress and Strain.” ((Reinecke, L. (2009). Games and Recovery: The Use of Video and Computer Games to Recuperate from Stress and Strain. Journal of Media Psychology, 21(3), 126-142.)) Building on the same body of research as the above authors, Reinecke also hypothesized that psychological detachment, relaxation, and mastery experiences could lead to recovery after a daily hassles and a stressful week at work, but he was specifically interested in these activities viz a viz video games.

And indeed, after surveying readers of a German language gaming website, he found that many of them routinely turned to games in response to stress, and that playing games was often experienced as acts of psychological detachment, relaxation, and skill mastery. This was, of course, particularly true for people who regularly turned to games in response to frustration or mental exhaustion. Interestingly, the more stressed by work people reported being, the less they reported playing video games –probably because their crappy jobs didn’t give them much time to play.

With all the typical media attention on the negative consequences of playing games –violence, warped racial and gender views, addiction, and time wasting– it’s nice to see some studies like the above suggesting the ways that video games can be good for your mental health. None of these researchers is saying that playing games is necessarily a better or worse recovery experience than, say, going to the gym or meeting up with some friends for drinks, but hopefully that research will follow. And besides, people differ; what does nothing to relax one person could really help our friend Andrew the Procurement Officer get ready for tackling his workload come Monday morning.

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Jam and Game Reviews

For every one of us, making decisions is part of our daily human existence. Most of them are of little consequence –what to eat, what movie to see, what video game to buy– so we have developed an astonishing array of mental short-cuts to make these kinds of decisions comparatively quick, easy, and not too mentally taxing. We may eat what we have eaten and enjoyed in the past, and by and large we use simple decision rules such as “I like this genre” or “I like this developer” to choose movies or games.

Other decisions, though, are either much more important or much more public and thus we put more work into it. Whom should we date? What college should we attend? Which house should I buy? When faced with questions like these, many of us have probably drawn two columns on a piece of paper, labeling one “Pro” and one “Con” and then listing things in each column. When trying to decide whether to marry or stay a bachelor, famous biologist and five-time Counter-Strike world champion ((If my notes are right)) Charles Darwin did exactly that, producing the list below.

The list admittedly looks a bit sexist by today’s standards, but it illustrates the idea well. ((If you’re curious, Darwin decided to marry and, in very short order, found himself a bride in Emma Wedgewood, who by all accounts turned out to be a wonderful wife. She was also his cousin, which apparently didn’t made it into neither the “pro” nor “con” column.)) But is this sort of thing always a good idea? When video game reviewers ruminate over the merits of a particular title, they are often asked to consider standardized lists of features –graphics, sound, fun factor, multiplayer, value, extendibility, controls, and so on. Should they always try to analyze decisions across every possible variable? Is that the right way to review a game?

Researchers Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler probably wouldn’t think so, or at least they could imagine situations in which this type of approach could lead to poor evaluations. And here’s the best part: jam was involved. Delicious, strawberry jam.

In their study ((Wilson, T. & Schooler, J. (1991). Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Qualities of Preference and Decisions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(2), 181-192.)) the duo were intrigued by a Consumer Reports ranking of 45 different brands of strawberry jam. ((Strawberry Jams and Preserves (1985, August). Consumer Reports, 487-489.)) Panelists in the study were trained sensory experts (i.e., professional food tasters) who sampled each of the condiments and rated them on 16 characteristics including sweetness, aroma, bitterness, spreadability, and others.

Man, those testers at Consumer Reports are creepy.

This is the kind of thing Consumer Reports does all the time, but Wilson and Schooler were curious about something. Some of their previous research had suggested than when asked to analyze their reasons for making decisions or ratings, people tend to screw things up. The theory goes that we are often aware of our preferences for products (or art, or whatever), but when asked to explain WHY, we often feel obligated to include the most salient (that is, apparent) and plausible explanations. Even if we would have otherwise ignored them.

So if asked to explain why you like Red Dead Redemption so much, 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 points 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.

So, thinking along these lines, Wilson and Schooler wondered what would happen if they asked normal people to recreate Consumer Report’s jam ratings. And what would happen if you asked them to ponder the reasons for their ratings the same way the Consumer Reports experts did?

So they fed some college students the 1st, 11tth, 24th, 32nd, and 44th best jams from the report to find out. Those in the control group were just asked to taste the treats and make their rakings. Those students actually did pretty well –their rankings were very close to the professional taste testers’ rankings. But the group that was asked to write down the reasons for their ratings did far worse. They may have favored the jams that the experts thought were gross and scrunched their noses up at the ones the experts thought were great.

Why? Because the subjects started focusing on factors that didn’t really matter. Smucker’s had more chunks of fruit in it, so it gets a higher rating. Wait, what? Is chunkiness really important for them? Doesn’t matter; it sounds plausible so it got factored in. When the XBLA shooter Monday Night Combat came out, some people lamented the small number of maps. Same thing –one could argue that because the gameplay requires a very specific setup, you don’t need –or even want– a lot of maps.

Over thinking it?

Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings. This corrupts the rating process and takes us farther from our “true” feelings or evaluations. ((This isn’t to say that meticulous decisions don’t have their place. I’d want a highly standardized process for deciding if a bridge is safe, for example, and as an Industrial-Organizational psychologist I make my livelihood off creating decision-making tools to make scrupulous, detailed accounts ratings for job candidates. But bridges and job requirements can be held constant and a standardized list of evaluations can be applied to them; games and jelly vary much more widely.)) This is one reason why I prefer more organic, experience-based evaluations of games from message boards or podcasts rather than formal game reviews. I feel like I can listen to someone talk in an unstructured way about how much the enjoy a game and get a much better idea of how much I might like it. Just consider what’s important and ignore the rest.

Now, go get yourself some jam –whatever kind you think tastes good.

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Gamer Dreams

Do hardcore gamers have more bizarre but less threatening dreams than non-gamers? One of the things I love about academics is that if you chain a million of them to a million graduate students, then one of them –by pure chance alone– will study a question like that. For example, I’ve been reading about a research program by psychologists Jayne Gackenbach and Beena Kuruvilla about the ways in which the dreams of hardcore gamers differ from non-gamers.

Curious as this is, it’s actually not that off the wall if you do some digging. Research suggests that people, especially adolescents, use violent and/or scary media as a way to practice dealing with life’s comparatively mundane but nonetheless stressful situations. The theory goes that games (and other media like comics, movies, or books) give us a safe place to either become a little desensitized to anxiety-provoking ideas, or to develop cognitive strategies for coping with them. It’s like play fighting, but for your brain.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of thing that one of the studies by Gakenbach and Kuruvilla ((Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256.)) looked at, except that they examined how our mind may do this mental preparation for real-world threats during our dreams. Termed “threat simulation theory” the idea is that our minds create dreams to simulate aspects of those threats so that we can practice dealing with them and be better prepared for the real deal in real life. So if we’re worried about crime, we may dream about our house getting broken into.

sleeping

A typical gamer at rest.

Gakenbach and Kuruvilla figured that like dreams, video games, are fake realities into which we project ourselves. This is particularly true with highly immersive games where players start to feel like they are spatially present in the game world. The researchers hypothesized that intense gaming sessions can fill the role traditionally handled by scary and threatening dreams, and with lowered needs to practice dealing with real-life anxiety, there will be fewer threat simulation dreams.

And, lo and behold, when they studied the data from surveys asking participants to recount their dreams and game playing habits, Gackenback and Kuruvilla found that this was generally true. With regards to people’s dreams, the survey measured whether or not there was a threatening event, what it was like, who the target of the threat was, how severe it was, whether or not the dreamer was participating in the threat, and the dreamer’s reaction. In short, hardcore gamers ((The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods.)) still had violent and threatening dreams –no surprise, since we often dream about what we encounter while waking, and for hardcore gamers that often includes video game violence– but they reported being less frightened by the dreams and were much less likely to characterize them as “nightmares.” Even more interestingly, this was especially true of those who played lots of first-person shooters.

But is that the only way that gamers dream differently? Nope. In a subsequent study, ((Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231.)) the same researchers also looked at how likely hardcore gamers were to have really bizarre dreams. And honestly, what I found most fascinating about this study was how they conceptualized bizarreness as consisting of three factors:

  • Incongruity or mismatching features of dream images
  • Uncertain or explicit vagueness of dream images
  • Discontinuity or sudden appearance, disappearance, or transformation of dream images

Anyway, the researchers figured that since we see so many really weird things in our video games during our waking hours, that weirdness must seep through into our dreams. Turns out they were right. Upon analyzing more data from surveys asking participants to describe their dreams and gaming habits, the Gackenback et al. found that gamers tended to have dreams with more vague and incongruent content, especially as it related to people and places.

Again, maybe not surprising, but the authors have some interesting theories as to why this is the case, beyond the obvious explanation that we tend to dream about what we see while awake the day before. For example, the more bizarre dreams may happen because gamers’ minds may be conditioned to be open to and even expect unorthodox relationships between concepts and things. This jives with other research showing that playing video games may enhance nonverbal problem solving, especially as it relates to spatial reasoning. Additionally, greater creativity (which also requires one to “get” unorthodox relationships among different things) has been shown to greater dream bizarreness. So hardcore gamers, as a group, may be conditioned to be more creative and better at certain types of problem solving relative to casual gamers or non-gamers. Because …we have really weird dreams. Or rather, we have the weird dreams because of those other things.

At any rate, it’s an interesting line of research, if a little niche. ((Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games.)) Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.