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 two 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 did asked not 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.

Footnotes:

1. Bargh, J., Chen, M. & Barrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2).
2. You know, like an old dude
3. …Jerks.
4. Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
5. Actually, there was also a condition where subjects wrote down the last 10 books they read, just to rule out the unlikely possibility that it was the act of remembering and writing something down that affected rates of cheating or math performance.

Oooh, alternate covers!

So, for at least one of the variants, I guess I have the cover story. Which is kind of cool.

The whole issue is themed around the idea of shooters, with previews of a gaggle of upcoming games from that genre plus some articles like mine addressing the theme. Here’s a quote:

Researchers Andrew Przybylski and Scott Rigby, who work with game designers, believe people are motivated to play a particular video game based on how well it satisfies three basic psychological needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Competence deals with a sense of control, mastery, and feeling like you’re making things happen the way you want. A well designed difficulty curve makes us feel an ever-increasing sense of competence, as does appropriate matchmaking in multiplayer games. Games high in autonomy give you the opportunity to make many meaningful decisions about what goals to pursue and how to pursue them. Finally, relatedness is concerned with a feeling that you matter to other players and social interactions with them.

These needs certainly aren’t unique to shooters, but one could argue that many of the qualities inherent to virtual gunplay create well worn paths to satisfying these needs.

This article is actually one of my favorite things that I’ve written on the psychology of games since I started this project, but I didn’t expect it to end up that way at first. In fact, when the folks at GamePro asked me to write something that “explores gamers’ fascination with the genre and why the primary interaction point in the majority of games seems to be through a gun and bullets,” I just blanked out and stared at my computer monitor for a few minutes. I had no idea off the top of my head about how to address that question, and my initial impulse was to turn down the assignment for fear of not being able to deliver on it.

Fortunately I decided instead to push back from the keyboard and ruminate on it a bit first. That gave me time to realize that even if I didn’t know the answer off the top of my head, I did know how to do research and find someone who does –they don’t let you out of graduate school without stuffing that particular skill in your back pocket. So I hit my local university library one evening to browse PsychINFO and was delighted to almost immediately find out about the research program described in the quote above. Those guys are doing some really cool stuff around what motivates us to play video games, and they were even kind enough to talk to me via e-mail for the article.

All that was left to do was to pull together half a dozen or so articles and a couple of books into one narrative for the GamePro piece. Fortunately they also taught us how to do that in school as well. So I guess the lesson is: stay in school, kids. Like, uniil your early thirties. At least.

So if you’re not already a GamePro reader, thumb through a copy the next time you can find one on the store shelf to see if you think it’s worth buying or subscribing to.² I’ve got another article due out in next month’s issue dealing with the psychology of horror games, and I’m currently adapting my article on the psychology of immersion for another feature the month after that.

Speaking of which, if you’re a game developer who has something to say about immersion and what makes games immersive, I’d love to hear from you and maybe quote you in the GamePro article. Drop me a line.

Footnotes:

1. Shooters, as in the genre of video games. Not, like, people.
2. Protip: subscribing is way cheaper.

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 study² 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.³ 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.”⁴ 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.

Footnotes:

1. Well, not really, but roll with it.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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 champion¹ 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.² 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 study³ the duo were intrigued by a Consumer Reports ranking of 45 different brands of strawberry jam.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.

Footnotes:

1. If my notes are right
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Strawberry Jams and Preserves (1985, August). Consumer Reports, 487-489.
5. 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.

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 Kuruvilla¹ 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.

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 gamers² 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,³ 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.⁴ Now, go to bed –you’ve got some really weird but strangely non-threatening dreams to get to.

Footnotes:

1. Gackenbach, J. & Kuruvilla, B. (2008). The Relationship Between Video Game Play and Threat Simulation Dreams. Dreaming, 18 (4), 236-256.
2. The researchers actually called them “High End Gamers” but that label seems weird to me, like we’re luxury goods.
3. Gackenback, J., Kuruvilla, B. & Dopko, R. (2009). Video Game Play and Dream Bizarreness. Dreaming, 19 (4), 218-231.
4. Says the guy who has a blog about the psychology of video games.

After I finished fist pumping, I said that I most definitely was.

Fast forward to today and if you pick up this issue of GamePro you’ll see my article on the psychology of anonymity starting on page 49 and accompanied by some awesome artwork by Andrew Yang. Here’s the cover of the issue:

Just look for the murderous Alice and you'll find it.

Here’s a snip:

Psychologists actually have models of what anonymity tends to do to people because they’ve been studying its effects long before the first person ever rage quit a game of Pong. While little of that early research involved video games, it did employ painful electric shocks, children in Halloween costumes, and college co-eds dressed up as nurses –sometimes two of those things at the same time.

…But is “antisocial” our default mode when we bring up a web browser or multiplayer menu? Is donning a virtual version of Jack’s face paint by adjusting the “brow height” slider on a character creation tool sufficient in and of itself to make us punt all morals out the window? Psychologists say no, it’s not. According to recent research on the topic, there are additional factors at play, which redefine the whole issue.

I had written a bit on deindividuation and anti-social behavior here, but while conducting actual research for the article I found out that I didn’t know the entire story with the current state of research on deindividuation and anonymity. You can read the GamePro article for the whole thing, and if they ever put ito n GamePro.com I’ll certainly link to it there as well.

All in all it was a fun experience writing the article, with the not unsubstantial bonus that they paid me to do it. When the anonymity piece was done my editor Patrick went on to assign me a second article, which has at this point also been written, turned in, and scheduled to appear in next month’s issue.¹ And as of this moment I’m working on a third piece, so apparently they like what I’m doing well enough so far. If you like the anonymity piece or have something else interesting to say about it, please let GamePro know at feedback@gamepro.com. If you don’t like it, then write your Senator or something. I dunno.

While we’re on the topic, though, I really like changes that GamePro has made to its print magazine in the last several issues. They seem to realize that they can’t compete with websites for timely content or reviews, so they seem to be going for more in-depth stories that require some actual research and reporting. Stuff like the history of GameStop, the impact of Metacritic on the gaming scene, the nature of bug testing in games, the impact of piracy on the games industry, and more.

I’ve been published in “legitimate” outlets both online and in print before, but I’m still happy to be in the pages of GamePro. Blogging dreams do come true! Plus it’s nice that nobody has to die.

Footnotes:

1. Print scheduling lag is weird.

Except they don’t call it “immersion.” Instead, they call it “presence,” which, admittedly, isn’t as cool. Regardless, researchers have identified several kinds of presence in regards to how we perceive media, but it’s spatial presence that I think comes closest to what gamers think of as “immersion.”

Briefly, spatial presence is often defined as existing when “media contents are perceived as ‘real’ in the sense that media users experience a sensation of being spatially located in the mediated environment.”² The idea is just that a game (or any other media from books to movies) creates spatial presence when the user starts to feel like he is “there” in the world that the game creates. People who experience immersion tend to only consider choices that make sense in the context of the imaginary world. Someone immersed in Red Dead Redemption, for example, might be more likely to use travel methods, like stagecoaches, that make sense within the game, instead of methods that don’t (like fast traveling from a menu screen). People immersed in media also tend to enjoy it more.

A Theory of Spatial Presence (aka, Immersion)
But how does this happen? What about a game and what about the player makes her feel like she’s leaving the real world behind? Theories abound, but a few years ago Werner Wirth and a team of other researchers sat down to consolidate the research and come up with one unified theory³ Here it is:

Figure 1: It's just that simple...

Woah, woah, woah. Sorry. Let’s just back up and take a simplified look at the parts most relevant to us gamers.

Basically, Wirth et al.’s theory says that spatial presence happens in three steps:

1. Players form a representation in their mind of the space or world with which the game is presenting them.
2. Players begin to favor the media-based space (I.e., the game world) as their point of reference for where they “are” (or to put it in psychological gobblety-gook, their “primary ego reference frame”)
3. Profit!

So, basically, the process starts with players forming a mental model of the game’s make-believe space by looking at various cues (images, movement, sounds, and so forth) as well as assumptions about the world that they may bring to the table. Once that mental model of the game world is created, the player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she’s in that imagined world or in the real one. Of course, it’s worth noting that this isn’t necessary a conscious decision with the prefrontal cortex’s stamp of approval on it. It can be a subconscious, on the sly, slipped into sideways and entered and exited constantly.

Researchers have extensively studied how these two steps happen, but I think it’s more interesting for our purposes here to skip to the bit about what qualities of the media (i.e., game) and person (i.e., player) that they’ve found facilitate both of these steps and create immersion. So let’s do that.

Game Characteristics Leading to Spatial Presence
Characteristics of games that facilitate immersion can be grouped into two general categories: those that create a rich mental model of the game environment and those that create consistency between the things in that environment.

Let’s take the concept of richness, first. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but richness relates to:

• Multiple channels of sensory information
• Completeness of sensory information
• Cognitively demanding environments
• A strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story

Multiple channels of sensory information means simply that the more senses you assault and the more those senses work in tandem, the better. A bird flying overhead is good. Hearing it screech as it does so is better. 3D may also play a role here, and we can all agree that smell-o-vision will herald in a new era of spatial presence.⁴

Red Dead Redemption is immersive in part because so many things work in tandem and it doesn't leave many gaps to be filled in by the player's imagination.

Completeness of sensory information means that the fewer blanks about the mental model of the game world that the player has to fill in, the better. Abstractions and contrivances (there are no people in this town because of, uh, a plague! Yeah!) are the enemy of immersion. Assassin’s Creed 2 was immersive because its towns were filled with people who looked like they were doing …people stuff. Dealing in a familiar environment also allows the player to comfortably make assumptions about those blank spaces without being pulled out of the world to think about it. Knowing what the wild West is supposed to look like and having Red Dead Redemption conform to those stereotypes goes a long way towards creating spatial presence.

Cognitively demanding environments where players have to focus on what’s going on and getting by in the game will tie up mental resources. This is good for immersion, because if brain power is allocated to understanding or navigating the world, it’s not free to notice all its problems or shortcomings that would otherwise remind them that they’re playing a game.

Finally, a strong and interesting narrative, plot, or story will suck you in every time. In fact, it’s pretty much the only thing in a book’s toolbox for creating immersion, and it works in games too. Good stories attract attention to the game and make the world seem more believable. They also tie up those mental resources.

Turning to game traits related to consistency, we have:

• Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world
• Consistent behavior from things in the game world
• An unbroken presentation of the game world
• Interactivity with items in the game world

Lack of incongruous visual cues in the game world is one of the more interesting precursors to spatial presence. If we were discussing the same concept in movies, I’d cite the example of seeing a boom mic drop into an otherwise believable scene. It’s anything that reminds you that “Yo, this is A VIDEO GAME.” Examples might include heads up displays, tutorial messages, damage numbers appearing over enemies’ heads, achievement notifications, friends list notifications, and the like. It’s also the reason why in-game advertising wrecks immersion so much –seeing twenty five instances of ads for the new Adam Sandlar movie while trying to rescue hostages kind of pulls you out of the experience.

Seriously, who would use one of these things to keep an audio diary?

Believable behavior from things in the game world means that characters, objects, and other creatures in the game world behave like you’d expect them to. It’s also worth noting that the cues need to make sense and be constant throughout the experience. This is one reason that I think Bioshocks’s audio logs kind of hurt the game’s otherwise substantial immersion: Who the heck records an audio diary, breaks it up into 20-second chunks, puts them on their own dedicated tape players, and then wedges those players into the various corners of a public place? It doesn’t make any sense.

An unbroken presentation of the game world means that the spatial cues about the imaginary world your game has created should not just up and vanish. Which is exactly what happens every time you get a loading screen, a tutorial, or a game menu. When that happens, the game world literally disappears for a few minutes, and we can’t feel immersed in something that isn’t there.

Interactivity with items in the game world could probably fit under the “richness” list above, but I include it with consistency because it’s another way of giving the player feedback on actions and a sense of consistency between various parts of the environment. Operating machines, talking to NPCs, and fiddling with physics makes it seem like the various pieces of the world fit together consistently.

Games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 are immersive because they let you interact with almost everything.

Player Characteristics Leading to Spatial Presence

Of course, players have some say in how immersed they get in a game. Some people just have more spatial ability and can build those mental models of game worlds more readily and make them more vibrant. And researchers have found that people have an “absorption trait” which means that they’re quicker to get fascinated by something and drawn into it –something I like to think of this as “the fanboy gene.”

Other times the player takes a more active role. Some players simply want to believe in the illusion, and will induce their own bias towards accepting the “I am there” hypothesis. In this state, they’ll require less confirmatory information to accept that hypothesis and less disconfirming information to reject it. This is also similar to the idea of “suspension of disbelief” where players wilfully ignore stuff that doesn’t make sense (like thunderous explosions in space or the fact that enemy soldiers can soak up a dozen of gunshots without going down) in order to just have a good time.

Other researchers have also pointed to a concept they call “involvement” which is a media user’s desire to act in the make-believe world, to draw parallels between it and his life, and to effect changes in it according to their own design. To me, this seems like an overly fancy way of saying “some people like to role-play” which leads directly to greater immersion.

So there you have it. Everybody can cite examples of things that yank them out of the game experience, and it turns out that psychologists have examined, classified, and isolated a lot of them. This isn’t to say, though, that ALL games should strive to BE immersive. I think games are kind of unique in all media in that this is so. A game can still be a good game without being immersive, and maybe some types of games are better if they AREN’T immersive. But that’s the great thing: game designers have a lot of paths that they can take to good art.

What about you? Do you have any great examples of games or features of games that either create or undermine immersion? What’s the most immersive game you’ve ever played? I’d like to hear about it in the comments section.

Footnotes:

1. Which my spellchecker says isn’t actually a word, but you know what? It IS.
2. Wissmath, B, Weibel, D., & Groner, R. (2009). Dubbing or Subtitling? Effects on Spatial Presence, Transportation, Flow, and Enjoyment. Journal of Media Psychology 21 (3), 114-125.
3. Wirth, W., hartmann, T., Bocking, S., Vorderer, P., Klimmt, C., Holger, S., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Ravaja, N., Gouveia, F., Biocca, F., Sacau, A. Jancke, L., Baumgartner, T., & Jancke, P. (2007). A Process Model for the Formation of Spatial Presence Experiences. Media Psychology, 9, 493-525.
4. Tangentially, I don’t think research in this area has really caught up with the whole motion control and how having your movements match the in-game action leads to immersion. Somebody get on that.

So why is this? Why do I invest so much mental and emotional energy into this pointless choice between make-believe people in a video game and why am I so reluctant to commit?

Well, part of the reason is that humans hate to lose choices. Or, more to the point, we hate to lose options. Psychologist Jack Brehm³ coined the term “psychological reactance” to explain the concept that we really hate to lose options or freedoms once we think we have them. A child will want the toy they showed no interest in moments earlier just because her sibling is playing with it now. When shoppers in Florida were told that a certain kind of laundry detergent was banned, they rushed to not only horde the soapy goods, but they began organizing caravans to import them from neighboring states.⁴ And some members of one messageboard community I regularly visit reacted to having a particular curse word⁵ automatically replaced by the word “tapir.” They found progressively more insidious ways of circumventing the ban and by adopting “tapir” as a well known code word for the very thing it was supposed to replace, resulting in more name calling than before.

Oh, which doors to close?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely provided a neat example of psychological reactance in his book, Predictably Irrational, and I think it’s directly relevant to my inability to let go of romance options in Dragon Age. Ariely and his colleague created a little computer game where participants could choose between three doors –red, blue, and green. Players had only 100 mouse clicks to “spend” in the game by clicking to navigate between doors and then clicking in the rooms on the other side of each door. Clicking once inside a room yielded a random amount of money within a certain range. The red room, for example, could pay between 3 and 9 cents for each one of the player’s limited clicks, but the blue room may pay between 8 and 16 cents per click. Only the players didn’t know the ranges; they had to experiment to determine the optimal way to play the game and maximize their payout. But here’s the trick: If a player ignored a certain room for 12 turns (i.e., clicks), the door to that room would shrink and eventually disappear –gone was that option! But players could “reset” the door by clicking on it just once before it disappeared (an act that cost 2 clicks without generating any money).

So what did people tend to do? Even after discovering which room yielded the highest payout –in real money– they STILL tended to go back and waste clicks on lower paying doors just to keep those options open even thought they didn’t intend to actually exercise them. This was totally irrational, but psychological reactance made them reluctant to lose those options.

I think the same thing is at play when we wring our hands over closing the door to one of Bioware’s trademark NPC romances, especially after the point where we have nothing to gain by stringing the other players along. I’m not sure that the wizards⁶ at Bioware call it “psychological reactance” in their design documents, but I bet they’ve figured out that this approach adds a lot of drama and tension to the game, which we react to well in the end.

This kind of thing is so common in character progression as to be mundane (do I spend my talent points upgrading weapons or stealth abilities?) but game designers can certainly aim to do the same thing by giving us irrevocable choices in narrative branches. Making choices that kill the player have little tension, because you can always load a saved game. But forcing a player to make a choice that will result in losing one party member or another will cause real consternation. Remember the fates of Ashley Williams and Kaiden Alenko in another Bioware joint by the name of Mass Effect? The tension could be highlighted even more when we have to allocate (some might say “waste”) limited resources to keeping options open as long as possible. Or force a player to choose between upgrading an ability or getting a chance to complete an entire side quest. By leveraging psychological reactance designers can inject a lot of hang wringing into the experience that will be remembered for a long time.⁷

Footnotes:

1. Literally
2. Viconia, before you ask.
3. Brehm, J. (1966). A Theory of Psychological Reactance. New York: Academic Press.
4. Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice. Boston: Pearson Press.
5. The one that starts with “C” and refers to a certain part of female anatomy, if you must know
6. And doctors –Canadian ones at that!
7. Thanks to PoG reader Martin for his insightful e-mail about Fable 2 romances and Ariely’s doors experiment, which reminded me that I had thought it explained Bioware’s romance choices back when I first read it.

My wife and I have a Father’s Day tradition where I get to celebrate the joy of parenthood by kicking everyone out of the house and playing video games for 12 hours straight.¹ This year I decided to take a chunk out of my backlog by unwrapping Bioshock 2 and popping it in. Normally it would take me weeks of playing a game like this in one or two hour chunks when I could find the time, and I’d often look forward to these bite-sized gaming sessions. But this time I wanted to use my annual alone time to burn straight through as much as I could without stopping.

I loved the game at first and I envisioned myself playing until biology forced me to stop. A few hours later I was slinging plasmids and stomping splicers, but I was enjoying the game less and less. This made me think of something called “hedonic adaptation” that Dan Ariely had written about in his new book, The Upside of Irrationality. Had my playing Bioshock 2 for hours and hours straight diminished my enjoyment of the game?

Probably so, according to the research Ariely reports on. The theory is that people become less sensitive to pains or pleasures over time². Ever notice that a bad smell fades the longer you’re exposed to it? Or how people who move from the Midwest to Southern California³ appreciate the weather a lot when they first get there but take it for granted a couple of years later? Same concept. It’s a good thing for unpleasant stimuli, but somewhat unfortunate when it diminishes our enjoyment of nice things like playing a good game.

The thing is, though, that researchers have found that this kind of adaptation can be short circuited simply by taking a little break. In one 2008 study by Leif Nelson and Tom Meyvis⁴ the subjects were all lucky enough to get a nice massage as part of the experiment. One group got a three-minute massage. A second group got a 80 second massage, took a twenty second break, then got another 80 seconds for a total of two minutes 40 seconds –less time with the magic fingers than the first group. So, given hedonic adaptation, which group do you think reported higher satisfaction with the massage and said they would be willing to pay more for it? Yep, the one that took a 20-second break. Because that short break stymied their adaptation to the pleasurable event and kind of “reset” their appreciation for it. Nelson and Meyvis also did the same trick with an unpleasant experience –listening to an annoying vacuum cleaner sound at high volume.⁵ Same thing: those who took a break listening to the sound found it sucked more.⁶

So think about the implications this has for video game reviewers. When a popular AAA game comes out, it’s not uncommon at all for reviewers to sit down and burn through it as fast as they can in order to satisfy readers’ expectations of a timely review. Sometimes game publishers even invite reviewers on-site to sequester themselves with the game just ahead of release and do literally nothing but sit in a room and play the game until they’re either done or start recreating the last third of “The Shining.”

Given hedonic adaptation, does a reviewer risk becoming numb to a game’s good points if he/she plays it for long stretches without a break? Do they amplify their perceptions of a game’s negative traits in the same way? Given that most of us, rare exceptions like my Bioshock 2 marathon aside, play games in smaller chunks and take long breaks between sessions, does this mean that we’re experiencing the game is a significantly different way than reviewers?

The science seems to suggest so. But I also wanted the opinion of a veteran game reviewer on whether or not it was a legitimate concern or so much poppycock so I asked Tom Chick, who has written bajillions of game reviews for a wide variety of outlets, including 1Up, GameSpy, Yahoo! Games, Gamespot, and others. He also currently serves as editor-in-chief for Fidgit.com and runs the Quarter To Three website. “I do think it’s a legitimate concern in the reviewing process.” Chick said. “I’ve only once done one of those review events where you go somewhere to play through a game before it’s released. It was for Half-Life 2. I was in a room at Valve over the course of two days and one night. I felt it negatively impacted my opinion of the game. I had to be careful to be analytical about the game rather than responding to the fact that I couldn’t take breaks to do other things.”

When asked about reviewers could counteract such demands on those occasions when Gabe Newell isn’t standing over them and poking them with a stick so that they keep playing, Chick said “When I’m charging through something for a review on a deadline, I’ll routine take breaks to either play another game, watch a movie, do some writing, or somehow break up the experience. Whereas I had previously put this down to having a short attention span, I’m now going to say that it’s to avoid acclimation.”

Indeed. Apparently those who say video games and YouTube are stunting our attention spans just aren’t seeing the upside.

Footnotes:

1. And ladies, before you cry foul, she gets to do something similar on Mother’s Day involving scrapbooking and a nice bottle of Chardonnay
2. Don’t confuse this with diminishing sensitivity to gains/losses a la prospect theory; hedonic adaptation refers to changes in sensitivity to the same thing over time
3. Sorry for the USA-centric reference, Rest of the World; just think bad weather to nice weather
4. Nelson, L. and Meyvis, T. (2008). Interrupted Consumption: Adaptation and the Disruption of Hedonic Experience,” Journal of Marketing Research, 45 654-664.
5. To recreate this effect, turn on your vacuum cleaner, lie down on the floor next to it, and stick your face right up in there. Go on, I’ll wait. Done? Okay.
6. Pun intended.

Earlier this week Blizzard dropped a big AoE by announcing that it was greatly reducing user anonymity on its Starcraft II and World of Warcraft forums. Everybody who posts on those boards will soon have their real first and last names displayed. So Trolly McTrollpants will no longer be able to post under that name …unless that’s what it says on his credit card. Which seems doubtful.

(Update: A few days after making the announcement, Blizzard recanted due to rather loud and displeased reactions from players. They have noted, though, that they still have other plans for changing the behavior of their forum posters.)

Aside from wanting to make Battlenet (the system that handles matchmaking and other socially oriented tasks for players of Blizzard games) more of a social networking tool, the intent of this change seems to be to bail out some pretty nasty bathwater from the forums, even if that means a few smiling babies get tossed, too. Trolls, flames, and vitriol in 48 flavors seem to be a big problem in the official forums. Given WoW’s stupefyingly large player base, the company has too big a community, which is a weird but apparently real problem. I imagine its forum moderators and community managers are overwhelmed and this nuclear option of sharing real names is meant to do two things: 1) reduce the number of people using the forums, and 2) make people be nicer to each other by robbing them of their anonymity. I think it will succeed at both, though it’ll be a bumpy ride.

As I’ve written about before, anonymity has some well known psychological effects. People who feel like less of an individual because they’re an anonymous part of a group may be more likely to look to social cues and the behavior of other group members to determine their own behavior, and this often results in their being antisocial jerks. Reducing anonymity can in turn reduce this kind of behavior and make people a little more likely to be courteous and hold their tongue if that’s how they’d behave in face to face interactions. So I think Blizzard is likely to see results from this. It’ll also be magnified by the number of thoroughly anti-social jerks who withdraw from the forums entirely because they don’t want to risk reprisal for their actions.

(Personally I think they’re making the right move, though it’ll cost them. Also among those leaving will be those who value their anonymity for other reasons –because they’re women who don’t want to deal with other players’ knowing it, because they don’t want others to know about their hobby from a Google search, or because of any other plausible reasons. But I guess that Blizzard has done the social arithmetic and decided that those are acceptable losses in the face of making their forums usable.)

What’s fascinating to me, though, it to wonder how Blizzard might be trying to measure the impact of this decision internally. I mean, technically Blizzard isn’t really doing anything to increase accountability for your posts; they’re just changing the social and psychological context. If I were working there and put in charge of this task, I’d first identify some metrics that would be of interest. Some of them are no brainers, like the number of new posts/replies and new account registrations. But you could get creative, too. You could look at random posts and get measures of how frequently certain words are used, ranging from rude phrases (“stupid” “shut up” “noob” and the like) to curse words and euphemisms for curse words. Maybe you’d want to look at average word count per post, too, since derogatory and pithy one-line replies might be less frequent than more thoughtful replies. There are probably already lots of existing models of verbal aggression out there in the psychology literature that you could draw from to make your predictions.

Once I had those metrics figured out, I’d ideally do a phased rollout of different forums or different regions that would allow me to have a control group under the status quo and an experimental group that gets the Real ID treatment. You could then collect data for a week or a month, then compare the two groups on those metrics. Or, if you just had to do a simultaneous rollout of the changes across the board (pardon the pun) then you could use archival data to do before/after comparisons.

So there you go, Blizzard, if you’re not already doing something along those lines, you should and you should even look to publish it in one of the new academic journals addressing video games and electronic media. People have been hypothesizing about this stuff before, but nobody has ever had a chance to actually test it on this scale. My consulting fee can be paid in purples and epic mounts.