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The Glitcher’s Dilemma: Social Dilemmas in Games

Note: This article is also published in my columns on GameSetWatch.com and Gamasutra.com.

Soon after its release, some players of the online first person shooter Modern Warfare 2 discovered what became known as “the javelin glitch.” Someone, somewhere, somehow figured out that through a bizarre sequence of button presses you could glitch the game so that when you died in multiplayer you would self destruct and murder everyone within 30 feet, often resulting in a net gain in points. It wasn’t long, though, before the method for creating this glitch spread through the Internet and servers were filled with exploding nincompoops. In fact, it quickly got bad enough that developer Infinity Ward had to rush out a patch to fix it.

The javelin glitch presented players in the know with an interesting dilemma: they could either abuse the glitch to boost their own rankings and unlock new perks, or they could abstain and preserve the game’s fair play. Of course, the problem is that if they abstain, someone else may abuse the glitch and dominate the match. The middle ground is when everyone glitches, but the resulting pandemonium isn’t as much fun as fair play for most normal people.

Let’s simplify the discussion by assuming a two-player deathmatch game in Modern Warfare 2. Look, I’ve created a table to summarize the dilemma for you! It’s suitable for framing.

The Glitcher's Dilemma

Figure 1: The Glitcher's Dilemma

So what do you do? Psychologists and economists who study this kind of decision-making call it a “social dilemma.” In these situations, intentional griefing notwithstanding, each person has what’s called a “dominating” alternative where they’re most likely to win (in this example, abusing the glitch) but most people REALLY want the “nondominating” alternative produced when everyone chooses to abstain from it. Especially once the novelty factor wears off.

Back in the 1960s research on these kinds of dilemmas exploded and out of it came what’s known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” based on an anecdote about getting confessions from two prisoners held under suspicion for a bank robbery. In his book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World ((1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers.)) Robyn Dawes summarizes the classic scenario thusly:

Two men rob a bank. They are apprehended, but in order to obtain a conviction the district attorney needs confessions. He succeeds by proposing to each robber separately that if he confesses and his accomplice does not, he will go free and his accomplice will be sent to jail for ten years; if both confess, both will be sent to jail for five years, and if neither confesses, both will be sent to jail for one year on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. Further, the district attorney informs each man that he is proposing the same deal to his accomplice.

Here are those choices in table form:

Prisoners Dilemma

Figure 2: The prisoner's dilemma

In this case, both prisoners will probably confess if they’re rational about it. Why? Because each prisoner get a better (or no worse) payoff by confessing no matter what the other guy does. Prisoner A thinks, “I don’t know what B is going to do, so if I confess it’s the best way to keep myself from getting screwed. If he keeps quiet, I go free. If he also confesses, I get 5 years instead of 10.” In other words, confessing is the only way to keep the other guy from being able to screw you over. Notice how this mirrors the javelin glitch dilemma, only with fewer explosions.

Now let’s take another example from the golden years of PC gaming. In the early days of Starcraft, a strategy called “Zerg rushing” emerged where at the beginning of the match players would quickly build lots of cheap Zerg units to overwhelm opponents before defenses could be constructed. Counter strategies developed, ((as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe)) but for a good chunk of the player base Starcraft became a game of seeing who could Zerg rush faster, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as choosing from any other number of play styles or even races. So the dilemma was:

Zerg Rush Dilemma

Figure 3: The ...Zerg dilemma?

Again, the dominating strategy was to Zerg rush, because if you didn’t and the other guy did, you lost, which was worse than any of the alternatives. This despite the fact that what you really both want is a varied, fun game. It’s a design issue that still plagues strategy game developers today.

Prisoner’s dilemmas and social dilemmas in general can similarly be used to illustrate the reasons for “ninja looting” in World of Warcraft where one player exploits the “need/greed” loot distribution system to get a piece of equipment:

Loot Dilemma

Figure 4: Oh, you know what? Forget it.

Or you could apply it to “tick throwing” and “fireball trapping” techniques in fighting games. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. My 2×2 table making machine burnt out, anyway.

What’s really more interesting and useful, though, is to look at what psychology has to show us about when people DON’T choose the purely rational option of abusing a glitch or a winning but boring strategy. Generally, people are more likely to do this when:

  • They know they will be playing against their opponents in the future and face retribution
  • They expect to interact with their opponents outside the game
  • They don’t expect to remain anonymous
  • They don’t know how many games will be played with the same person

Under these conditions, many players will adopt a strategy where they cooperate at first (for example, they don’t glitch or rush), then if the other player abuses that trust they retaliate in kind. This is known as the “tit for tat” strategy. Some researchers with lots of time on their hands even organized tournaments where people were invited to write computer programs to play iterated prisoner dilemma games, and the programs that adhered to the “tit for tat” strategy tended to do the best.

This is why things like playing with people on your friend’s list, Steam community group, guild/clan, or a favorite dedicated server is good. And it’s one reason why random matches between strangers or pickup groups can be infuriating. Making it easy to submit ratings to the profiles of people you just played also helps resolve these dilemmas to everyone’s benefits. It’s also the reason that I love the way that Halo 3 lets you remain in a lobby with the people you just played and go straight into another round with them. ((Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that))

People being the complicated beings they are it’s not a perfect system, though. Some people are just griefers out to disrupt the game no matter what. Some people won’t abuse a glitch out of a sense of honor. Some will value their ranking on a leaderboard more than a sense of fair play for any individual match. But even if none of the suggestions above is a silver bullet, they help across large numbers of games.

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Why Do We Love Genres So Much?

The guys over at Penny Arcade had a great bit where they poked fun at gamers’ obsession with fitting everything into neatly defined genres. The stars of the strip are sitting at a tasting table with Gabe snootily remarking, “This is more of a late eighties platformer, with …Yes, I believe there’s a hint of sim.” To which Tycho replies, “Yes, sim. Quite right. Garcon! More genres!” ((Yeah, I know, I just quoted the Penny Arcade guys just last week, too. I’ll quit for a while.))

Why are we so obsessed with cramming games into genres and slapping labels on them? Most game reviews will remark on what genre a game fits in if not declare it outright, and if a game refuses to fit properly they’ll create a new genre just for it –witness the rise of the ridiculously named “third person, cover-based shooter” genre a la Gears of War. When I worked at GameSpy, we developed successful “genre sites” like 3DACtionPlanet.com ((Yeah, it’s an awkward name, but “ActionPlanet.com” was already taken and the guy wouldn’t sell)), StrategyPlanet.com, and SportPlanet.com that focused only on games in those genres. There was considerable internal debate over whether this made a lick of sense, but our ad sales guys loved it because it let them sell more targeted ads relative to a huge, monolithic site that covered everything.

genres

A typical genre breakdown.

Part of the reason for this genre love is that classifying things is human nature. It’s a habit instilled and rewarded early in life, as most toddlers love arranging objects according to shape, color, size, or function. And for good reason: assigning objects to sets builds the neural pathways necessary to develop basic skills in logic, counting, and mathematics. So when little Billy puts Doom and Modern Warfare 2 together, you reward him with a delicious frozen treat.

But there’s more to it than that: genres are useful for what Amos Tversky and other researchers call “elimination by alternatives” decision making ((Tversky, A. (1972) “Elimination by Aspects: A Theory of Choice.” Psychological Review, 76, 31-48.)) Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein elaborate on this concept in their excellent book, Nudge. ((Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books.)) Imagine a simple decision, like say buying a new keyboard for your desktop computer. You’d probably be able to identify all the relevant factors, like your preference for ergonomic layouts, whether or not you want wireless, and price. You can look at the alternatives, take all that into consideration at once, and make your purchase. Fine. Bam. Done. This is called a “compensatory choice strategy” because for any one alternative a single factor (like low price) can compensate for a deficit in another (like lack of wireless support).

But think about something way more complex like renting an apartment. You’ve got a multitude of factors at play –distance from work, rent, lease terms, proximity to public transportation, safety of the neighborhood, square footage, and defensibility in the event of a zombie outbreak, just to name a few. AND you’ve got hundreds of potential apartments to choose from.

In situations like these, people tend to adopt that “eliminations by alternatives” approach I mentioned earlier. You’ll start picking out factors and setting thresholds for them. So you think “Anyplace with fewer than two bedrooms is out. And it has to be within 30 minutes of work. And it can’t currently be on fire.” And so on. This makes the decision manageable and prevents you from stroking out when you try to combine the weights of so many factors in a compensatory manner and simultaneously compare all the alternatives –of which there could be hundreds. And this usually works. The problem is that options that are outstanding on some important factors can get nuked just because they’re just barely on the wrong side of a cutoff for another. Alas, we are but puny humans.

This is a decision-making process that businesses and marketers are eager to hijack, sometimes in ingenious and even helpful ways. Thaler and Sunstein point to paint stores’ use of a color wheel to help you choose colors, as opposed to figuring out the difference between “Eggshell” and “Off White” based on names alone. Or think about going to a bar that boasts “100 beers on tap.” If you look at the menu, they probably don’t have your options listed in alphabetical order because how is the uninitiated supposed to know the difference between “Boddington’s Pub Ale” and “Dirty Dog Hefeweisen?” What any savvy owner of such a bar would do is facilitate elimination by alternative by grouping the beers by more meaningful factors, like taste, body, or color. That way people who dislike, for example, dark beers can automatically discard those options.

In other words, group them into genres.

This is why I think the habit of sorting genres in video games (and movies and music, for that matter) is so hard to shake. When faced with a huge number of possible games to buy, people use simplifying strategies to make that choice more manageable. One such rule may be “I only like role-playing games,” though I suspect less exclusive rules like “I’ll consider anything that’s not a sports game, a flight sim, or a survival horror game” are more common. It narrows the field and lets you focus on other things. Sure, maybe you’re missing out on some great games through this, but at least you don’t have an aneurysm every time you walk through a Best Buy.

Unfortunately I think this is part of the reason that Brutal Legend didn’t do as well at retail as it could: people couldn’t figure out what genre it belonged to. Action? Adventure? Driving? Real-time strategy? It was its own (totally awesome) creation, but because people couldn’t apply a certain decision simplification strategy on it, they missed out.

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Anonymity and Antisocial Behavior

What makes people be such jerks in online games and messageboards? And why do these kids keep stealing my Halloween candy? Wait, actually I think I remember reading something about this…

Ah yes, a classic experiment done by Edward Diener at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues way back in the 1970s 1 Little did they know it, but Diener and his colleagues laid the foundation for understanding, at least in part, why all those smacktards on Xbox Live keep calling you a “gaytard,” whatever that means. And they did it with candy –delicious, 1970s candy.

Diener et al. were interested in what situational factors lead children to engage in antisocial behavior, specifically stealing and breaking rules. So in a clever little quasi-experimental study they had researchers in Seattle, Washington turn 1,352 Halloween trick-or-treaters into unwitting subjects. They set up several houses’ entryways with two bowls –one with fun-sized candies and another with money. When children came up to the door, the experimenter would greet them and tell them to take ONE candy from the bowl. They would then say they had to attend to something out of sight in another room, but would actually go behind a fake wall and spy on the children through a peep hole ((That feels …strange to write.)) to see how much candy and/or money they took.

Halloween

Under the right conditions, these adorable trick-or-treaters will cuss you out for five minutes on Xbox Live before disconnecting.

That was the general setup, but experimenters at different households also introduced what your Research Methods 101 textbook would call “manipulations” because of how they manipulated or changed one of the factors of interest to the researchers. For the anonymity manipulation, some kids were asked their names and address while others were were not. For the altered responsibility manipulation, the researcher would sometimes single out one kid –the youngest– and state that THAT tyke would be responsible if anyone took too much candy or stole any of the money.

The results were pretty stark. The kids who stole the least were those who came to the door alone (that is, not part of a group) and who were robbed of their anonymity by being asked their name and address. They only engaged in antisocial behavior 7.5% of the time. In contrast, simply being in a group –even when everyone provided identifying information– almost TRIPLED the transgression rate to 20.8%. But behavior was even worse for those costumed kids who believed the researcher didn’t know who they were. Even when alone, 21.4% of those anonymous kids stole, and when in a group that figure more than doubled to 57.7%.

But you guys, wait, that’s not the worst of it. The absolute worst offenders were those groups of kids that were anonymous AND for which the experimenter had singled out one kid and said “I will hold you responsible if any extra candies are missing.” In those groups, the transgression rate was 80% –EIGHTY PERCENT!

Table 1

Number of little monsters stealing under each condition, adapted from Diener et al. (1976)

The researchers hypothesized that the reason for these increases in antisocial behavior had to do with “deindividuation,” which is when a person is made to lose a sense of individual identity. Remaining anonymous does this, as does being in a group and having a scape goat on whom to pin responsibility for your behavior.

What does this have to do with people being asshats in online games, messageboards, and chat? A lot, I think. When you allow people to be a) anonymous, b) part of a group, and c) not responsible for their actions, then you get more antisocial behavior. As the guys at Penny Arcade accurately (if vulgarly) put it:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad.

How can players and game designers counter this? Well, from the player’s perspective, playing only with people on your friends list obviously eliminates the anonymity factor. If you find someone you like playing with, add him/her to your friend’s list. Or organize games in online communities where anonymity is reduced, like social networking sites or message boards. This is one reason why I think a lot of gamers ground their teeth when Infinity Ward limited the use of party chat in Modern Warfare 2.

Developers and the architects of matchmaking systems can help by making it easier to get extra information about a person and follow up with him/her after the game. Or even better, create tools for players to get together and share personally identifiable information (even something as basic as real name and location, which any message board could do now) so that they can more easily find and form their own groups. Heck, at the extreme end I kind of like the idea of making everyone use their real name in their gamer tags or handles, though that way is fraught with issues related to the privacy of children’s information.

Making it as easy as possible to do things like file complaints and player reviews also helps make people feel more accountable for their behavior. 2 Muting and booting systems, if employed by more mature players, also seem like they would lower the likelihood of people modeling the behavior of others and transferring the responsibility of fouling up the group’s behavior.

So there you have it: the missing link between smacktards and Halloween. Just be glad that they can’t reach through Xbox Live and steal your candy.

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Fun is Had When Your Time Flies

Note: A slightly different version of this article ran earlier on Gamasutra.com. I’ll be updating again later this week with a new article here so that you have something to read that hasn’t been previously published. Because I love you, man.

While I generally enjoyed Red Faction: Guerrilla, last year’s third-person action game from Volition and THQ, there was one type of mission on which I was lukewarm: The delivery missions where you were tasked with hopping in a vehicle and blundering over the Martian landscape to reach an arbitrary checkpoint before an equally arbitrary timer ran out. Meh. Pretty boring.

As a gameplay mechanic or goal, lots of games require you to complete challenges within a certain amount of time. Guitar Hero 5 and The Beatles: Rock Band have rewards for playing set lists within 1 hour and 1 day, respectively. And sometimes games inverse the formula and challenge you to keep the clock running by staying alive, such as in Left 4 Dead’s survival mode. But it’s generally the same goal: keep an eye on the timer and play the game, whether the specific task is mundane (driving across featureless plains or repetitive race tracks) or thrilling (fending hoards of zombies).

Turns out that recent research by Aaron Sackett at the University of Chicago and his colleagues ((Sackett, A., Meyvis, T., Nelson, L., Converse, B. & Sackett, A., (2010). You’re Having Fun When Time Flies: The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression. Psychological Science, January)) suggests a way that game designers could manipulate your perceptions of time to make these parts of the game more fun. In one study, the researchers had subjects listen to an annoying sound while they watched a timer tick the seconds off. For half the people, the timer was sped up by 20%; for others it was slowed down by 20%. Afterwords, subjects were asked the (frankly absurd) question of how enjoyable that all was. The result? Those whose clocks were sped up by 20% actually said the annoying sound was more enjoyable. Well, less terrible. Same thing.

But the phenomenon held true when people were doing something enjoyable to begin with. In a follow-up study, Sackett et al. had subjects listen to popular songs where the digital music player showed elapsed time for the track. In one group, the timer was sped up by 20% and in another it was slowed by the same amount. Again, people found this already pleasurable event even more enjoyable when they thought that time was passing more quickly and found it less enjoyable when time seemed to pass more slowly.

The researchers ran several more experiments, but the common theory explaining all their results was that when people experience unexpected distortions of time (i.e., time seemed to pass faster or slower than expected) they seek an explanation by turning to what psychologists call “metacognition,” or “thinking about thinking.” Specifically, Sackett hypothesizes that when faced with apparent time distortions people turned to the axiom that “time flies when you’re having fun” and concluded that because time flew (or dragged) they had fun (or didn’t). So much so that it affected how much fun they reported having and how likely they were to switch to other activities. He even did some additional studies where he manipulated the salience of this explanation in subjects’ minds and thus increased its effect. Time was affecting how much they enjoyed the game, not the other way around!

Left 4 Dead Survival

Congrats, team, you held off the zombie horde for ...TWO MONTHS AND FOURTEEN DAYS! Woo!

This has several interesting implications for game design. One devious thought that comes to mind deals with timed game demos. You could tell players that your demo will allow players to enjoy the game for 20 minutes before ending, then cut them off after 15 minutes. According to the above theory, people should think that those 5 minutes went missing on account of all the fun they were having.

But I can hear you the popping sound of your collective monocles now as you contemplate this base act of fibbing. ((You sound just like the Human Subjects Review Board talking about my dissertation research)). Fine, fine, other applications rely less on such crass deception. Take the driving missions in Red Faction: Guerrilla that I mentioned earlier. Speeding up the clock (after making adjustments to hold difficulty constant) should make that mundane task seem more enjoyable. Same for survival mode in Left 4 Dead or any other game that features a “fend off attackers for X minutes” mission. It would be interesting to see what would happen if you had the game say something like “Hold the enemies off for five minutes,” then NOT show a timer and then declare the challenge complete after just three minutes. If the research described above is to be believed, you should have more fun as long as you’re not aware of the time compression.

Sure, hardcore gamers armed with stopwatches and indignant outbursts will probably eventually figure it out, but I’ll bet a lot of them don’t and never hear about it from others. Heck, you can even add a little sweeping second hand if your User Interface Design person doesn’t have plans for the evening. If a little change in how the concept of time is presented makes for a noticeable change in how much players enjoy those bits of the game, it’s worth it. ((Big thanks to Ed Yong for bringing this research to my attention in his excellent blog, Not Exactly Rocket Science))

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The Endowment Effect and Used Game Sales

A few years ago I decided that I really wanted a fancy new camera so I could properly indulge my budding interest in photography. Problem was, I didn’t have the cash. But what I did have was a closet literally full of old games I hadn’t played in years and would probably never play again. I think you can guess where this is going.

At first, I was extremely disappointed in eBay auctions I set up. When I set minimum reserve prices ((And by the way, trying to sell a low value item like a game with a reserve price should tell you volumes about my eBay naivete right there)) the games didn’t sell and when I didn’t set reserves I got what I considered paltry sums. Why wasn’t anyone willing to pay what this stuff was worth to me? The fools! Many a person trading used games to places like GameStop probably ask the same question: how come it never seems like they offer a fair price?

Games

Some of the games I was so attached to that no reasonable price could make me part with them. You can't have them!

The reason, I eventually remembered, has to do with what’s called “the endowment effect.” Basically this bias in puny human thinking leads us to over value something literally the second we consider it to be ours. Richard Thaler elegantly illustrated this phenomenon in an experiment involving coffee cups.

One group of Thaler’s subjects was shown coffee cups and asked, “Hey, what would you pay for one of these babies?” A second group was actually given the coffee cups and then asked “Hey, how much would it take for me to buy that coffee cup off you?” The average dollar values from each group were WAY different, with the folks who had been given cups saying that their cups were worth a lot more. In other words, they demanded more to relinquish the cups than they would have been willing to spend on procuring them in the first place. Totally irrational.

Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely provides a more elaborate but cooler demonstration of the endowment effect through an experiment involving students and highly coveted tickets to Duke University basketball games. When Duke’s fervor over its basketball team outstrips the supply of tickets, they are often given out according to a random lottery. One season Ariely contacted those who had won the right to tickets from the lottery and asked how much to buy them. Similarly, he contacted those students who had lost the lottery and asked them how much they’d be willing to pay for tickets if he could find a seller.

Those who had won the lottery demanded an amazing average price of $1,400, while those who did not have tickets offered to pay only an average of $170 to get them. Woah. Endowment effect indeed. Which group do you think is playing the part of GameStop in this example?

Hey, look, you can even watch Ariely explain it himself in this little video:



Done? Okay. There’s more to this phenomenon, though, because other research has shown that the endowment effect is rooted in something deeper: that the object has significance. Let’s go back to my rapidly diminishing game collection. After realizing that I had to overcome the endowment effect, I started pricing things to move. There were, however, some games that I simply could not bring myself to reduce my prices on. These were watershed games in my time with the hobby: Baldur’s Gate II, Half-Life, Quake III, NOLF, Planescape: Torment, and other stuff that I had a real history with. Why couldn’t I part with them the same way I’d parted with the others? I’d still probably never play them again.

It turns out that the endowment effect really gets ramped up the more personally significant the item are to you. This shouldn’t be shocking because we’re all familiar with the concept of “sentimental value.” But what’s really amazing is that not only can that meaning be invoked by your ownership, bit can also be elicited simply be knowing that an item has a history –even if you’re not a part of that history. This is the principle upon which the philanthropic project Significant Objects is founded. (((Which, not coincidentally, features a common coffee cup in its logo)))

The team at Significant Objects buys junk then has professional writers make up elaborate and interesting faux histories for those objects to be incorporated into eBay auctions. Even though the team makes it perfectly clear that the stories paired with these objects are fictional, the results are amazing: an empty chocolate tin sells for $36. A jar of marbles goes for $53. A simple ash tray rakes in $107. Just because framing the objects in terms of its elaborate, personal history makes the buyers perceive it as having more significance and meaning. (And lest you become indignant about such manipulation, allow me to point out that the Significant Objects project donates some of its earnings to charity.)

So next time you try to hawk some of your old games, you should first consider how the endowment effect is inflating your irrational expectations about how much they’re worth. Then try telling a story about your experiences with the game and why it’s important. Maybe you’ll win that glassy-eyed Assistant Manager over with you tale.

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Et Cetera, February 2010

And now for some things that aren’t worth a post by themselves, but which I can dump together.

ONE: Hey, did you know that some of the content here is being syndicated by Gamasutra.com and GameSetWatch? You can see my article on loss aversion here, and new stuff will appear bi-weekly. They actually want me to be more verbose there than I normally am here, so the columns posted there may have bonus material.

TWO: You may have noticed that the Google Adsense ads are gone. This is because Google booted me out of the program, denied my appeal, and refused to pay me the $115 that was in my account at the time. Presumably the reason being my article on reciprocity where I half-jokingly asked readers to click on the Google Adsense ads. Apparently they view asking people to click on ads as a “threat to their affiliates,” so let me apologize and do what I can to rectify my past mistake by asking, with the same amount of sincerity, that you to NEVER click on ANY Google Adsense ads AGAIN.

THREE: I come across a lot of stuff on the Internet that I file away for possible future use on this site. Usually what I do is use the Delicious Firefox plugin to tag the post and add it to my bookmarks on that site, along with a note to myself about how it might be used. It occurs to me that people might be interested in seeing these bookmarks, and so you can see my Delicious Bookmarks here. Or, if you prefer, you can abstain by clicking almost anywhere on the Internet except for that link.

FOUR: Speaking of which, I’ve gotten in the habit of posting on Twitter about the more interesting of these articles as well.

FIVE: I have articles currently drafted on the following topics: WoW pricing and the decoy effect, regression to the mean and owning some chumps, The effects of external time cues on perceived fun, MW2 javelin glitch abuse as a prisoner’s dilemma, and the endowment effect on used game sales. Look for them at some point in the future.

SIX: Big thanks to Nicholas, Andy, Hugo, David, and Andrew for donating via the PayPal link. You guys are awesome and I’ve ordered Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion from Amazon. I’ve actually read this book before, but lost it and have been wanting another copy to use as a reference since starting this site. So thanks again, guys!

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Psychological Flow and Fake Plastic Rock

I think most of us have been in “the zone” at one point or another while playing a game. You know what I mean: that trance-like state where things just click and you just can’t do wrong, be it headshot after headshot in a shooter, making jump after perfectly timed jump in a platformer, or pumping out just the right units at just the right rates in a real-time strategy game. Things are challenging enough to keep you engaged, but not too challenging so that you’re able to lose yourself in the game. It’s a great feeling.

Psychologists call this state of mind “flow” and some of them even do it without then adding “…man” in their best hippy imitation. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi ((whose last name sounds like the bad guys in some Wing Commander game but totally isn’t)) is one of them, and he identified nine characteristics of psychological flow ((Fullagar, C. & Kelloway, K. (2009). Flow at work: An experience sampling approach. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 82. 595-615.)):

  1. There must be a fine balance between the task’s difficulty and the person’s skill
  2. One’s performance of the task must become automatic, with little if any conscious effort ((What psychologists call “low action identification” because they like making up terms for things))
  3. The goals of the task must be very clear
  4. The activity must provide completely clear, unambiguous feedback about how well the person is doing
  5. There must be intense concentration on the task
  6. The person must feel a sense of fragile, finely balanced control
  7. Ego drops away and the person loses all sense of self-consciousness about what they’re doing
  8. The person loses track of time
  9. The activity becomes enjoyable enough to be a reason for its own being

Half of you are probably thinking “Hey, that reminds me of Rock Band!” Right down the the point of losing all sense of self-consciousness and flailing around with your little plastic guitar like a complete moron! The other half of you are probably thinking “No, it’s more like Guitar Hero!” You guys! You’re both right! And indeed, two researchers at Kansas State University had the same thought when they studied flow by having subjects play Rock Band songs and adjusting the difficulty of the game for each person until they hit that sweet spot associated with flow.

Rock Band 2

Too bad I couldn't find a screen cap of someone playing Pearl Jam's "Evenflow." How awesome would that have been?

Flow is generally seen as a good thing by people experiencing it, and people who experience flow in a work activity are generally much happier with their work and do it better than those who don’t experience flow. The same holds true for games. So to the extent that game designers wish to engender a sense of flow in their games, they can use that list above as a checklist of targets to aim for.

This also seems to present an argument for either adaptive difficulty that scales to the player’s skill or for many more grades of difficulty than the typical easy, medium, and hard. The racing game Forza 3 seems to take this concept to heart, offering a variety of “assists” that allow players to fine tune how much help they need with things like steering, traction, and even breaking around turns. This kind of thing suggests to me that paired with the right kind of feedback and clear goals, Forza 3 can bring a state of flow to more people than another game lacking such features.

Interestingly ((Well, interesting to me. Hey, shut up, you guys. Leave me alone!)) there is also research ((e.g., Fullagar and Kelloway (2009) again)) suggesting that flow is both a state and a trait. That is, it may be a state of mind and an experience, but there are also some people who are, by dint of their very special makeup, more susceptible to falling into that delicious state of flow. My guess would be that if you took the top 10% of the fake plastic rock maniacs at Score Hero and gave them something like the Dispositional Flow Scale ((Jackson, S., & Eklund, R (2002). Assessing Flow in Physical Activity: The flow state scale and dispositional flow scale. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology. 24. 133-150.)) (a tool designed to measure one’s propensity towards flow states) they’d blow the lid off that thing.

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DJ Jazzy Contrast – The Contrast Effect and DJ Hero Renegade

Why did Activision take an already expensive game and release an even MORE expensive version without adding a whole lot to it? And what does it have to do with “Ozark wild mushrooms served with a brandy demi glaze?” I’ve got an idea. Let me share it with you.

As you may know, DJ Hero, a relatively new rhythm game from Activision and FreeStyleGames, includes its own controller in the form of a fake plastic turntable. Many gamers thought that the initial price tag of $120 was high, but were outright boggled by the $200 –TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR!– list price on the special “Renegade” collector’s edition that only had a few paltry perks relative to the base model. Why would Activision take an already expensive game and put out an even MORE expensive version? ((DJ Hero Renegade photo credit: j.reed on Flickr.com))

dj_hero_renegade

$200? Ehh....

They’re stupid? Nope. According to one recent press release, DJ Hero was 2009′s highest grossing new video game IP. So something worked. ((But as Joystiq points out, that’s not the same as “most profitable”)) At the very least, the Renegade Edition pricing is an example of what economists call “price targeting” and what author Tim Harford likens to getting turkeys to vote in favor of thanksgiving. ((Harford, T. (2006). The Undercover Economist. Oxford: University Press.)) In essence, Activision is putting the Renegade Edition out there so that people who are cavalier about price self-identify themselves and allow themselves to be sold basically the same product for more money. It’s the same trick restaurants use to find patrons willing to pay more for food when they charge an extra $.80 for a slice of cheese on your burger when it really only costs them a few cents.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. I think there’s something called “the contrast effect” at work, and I think Eminim and Jay-Z would be appalled.

You may remember the contrast effect from my discussion how the cover art for Borderlands might have gotten approved. Basically it’s a cognitive bias that kicks in when focusing on the magnitude of one bit of information affects your perception of another piece of information. Like a colored tie appearing brighter when it’s contrasted against a white shirt. Here’s an extremely simple example where the same color of gray looks lighter or darker depending on the background it’s contrasted against:

Simple contrast effect

Which circle is lighter? Trick question! They're the same.

This is why I think the Renegade Edition of DJ Hero was put out there: to activate the contrast effect and to make the regular, $120 edition look cheaper in comparison. Man, $200 for a video game? Forget that. I’m gonna be a the smart shopper and only buy the $120 version. What restraint I have! Quick! Somebody congratulate me!

This kind of thing is done to you EVERYWHERE around you, as the following quote from a New York Times story on the science of restaurant menu writing illustrates:

Some restaurants use what researchers call decoys. For example, they may place a really expensive item at the top of the menu, so that other dishes look more reasonably priced; research shows that diners tend to order neither the most nor least expensive items, drifting toward the middle. Or restaurants might play up a profitable dish by using more appetizing adjectives and placing it next to a less profitable dish with less description so the contrast entices the diner to order the profitable dish.”

Those “Ozark wild mushrooms served with a brandy demi glaze” may be the most expensive side dish listed, but the restaurant only listed them first so that the cheaper mashed potatoes, which have a higher profit margin, look more appealing.

If you’re like me, you see attempts at the anchoring effect everywhere once you know about it. Now that you know about it, think back on the last time you saw a regular version of a game advertised next to the collector’s edition. Does the regular one seem so cheap now?

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Conan the Loss Averse Barbarian

I wrote just the other day about how loss aversion could be used to increase conversion rates on trial games. You can read that article for more details and a neat experiment illustrating the effect, but the gist of it is that people hate to lose things more than they like to gain them. Losing $10 is more painful than gaining $10 is pleasurable because “losses loom larger than gains.”

I kind of hate to dip back into the loss aversion well so soon, but Funcom recently provided such a textbook example that I couldn’t resist. Many players who had unsubscribed from the Age of Conan massively multiplayer game got an e-mail from the publisher stating, in part:

Dear customer,

Thank you for playing Age of Conan.

As part of our maintenance your account is now flagged to have your characters below level 20 deleted as part of maintenance. Please re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.

In other words, “come back or your low level alt ((not to mention your bank and your mule characters)) gets taken out back and shot.”

conan

A Funcom database administrator gets ready to subject your character to "maintenance."

I’d be fascinated to see what this did to Age of Conan’s resubscription rate. If I were in charge of these things at Funcom, I would have randomly separated that mailing list into two groups and sent the above e-mail to the first half. The second half would have gotten something along the lines of:

Dear customer,

Thank you for playing Age of Conan.

As part of our maintenance your account is now flagged to have your characters below level 20 saved as part of maintenance if you resubscribe. Please re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.

And then I would have looked at the differences in resubscription rates between those whose message was phrased in terms of losing their character and those whose message talked about saving it. Which of those two messages would you, as a MMO player, respond to more strongly? My guess would be the former, especially if you weren’t the handsome and well educated person you are on account of reading about loss aversion here.

Note: A combination of this and my previous post on loss aversion appeared on GameSetWatch. Look for more of my writing to appear there in the future!

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How Reciprocity Yields Bumper Crops in Farmville

One day when going to check on my friends’ status updates on Facebook, this jumped out at me:

Attention Facebook friends: Please for the love of God stop sending me gifts and invites for Farmville, Mafia Wars, Vampires, and whatever other crappy THING you’ve been playing. DO NOT WANT. Just …STOP. GOD.

Those of you on Facebook or MySpace can probably sympathize. How many times have you checked your notifications and thought “Gee, you sent me a …virtual goat. THANKS. I guess. Guess I should click on your link.” Indeed, developers of these social games have gone to great lengths to make “gifting” of imaginary stuff a core element to the gameplay, and they’re even starting to offer pixilated gifts for real money. Why is that? Why do people do that?

The answer has to do with one of the most powerful habits in social psychology: the reciprocity effect. When people give you something, you feel the need to give something back; it’s that simple. Or possibly if you’re like my friend quoted above, you yell at them. But usually you want to reciprocate. Some evolutionary psychologists think that this is an evolutionary advantage in that it encourages societies to form –and enforce– mutually beneficial norms. Adhering to the norm is seen as a good deed, and others want to return that deed; breaking the norm is an attack, and will earn you a misdeed in return, like shunning or a punch to the neck.

Sheep

Thank you for the sheep, Guy I Knew in High School.

The reciprocity effect is put to use by marketers and savvy businesspeople all the time. Every year the March of Dimes charity sends me a lovely set of return address labels for use with my Christmas cards ((Tip: if you try to use them with e-mail greeting cards, it gets your monitor all sticky)). The labels are a free gift, but not coincidentally, they come in the same envelope as a plea to donate. The message is clear: “Dude, we totally just gave you some free stuff. You should return the favor with a donation.” Psychologist Robert Cialdini explained in a 2001 article in Scientific American how the Disabled American Veterans organization used this same trick to increase the success rate of their appeals for donations from 18% to 35%. ((Cialdini, R. (2001). The Science of Persuasion. Scientific American. February 2001))

The same technique is used by supermarkets giving you free samples of new cheese crackers, or the video game developer who gives out free tee shirts to the press or buyers during a trade show. I’m not saying that you’ll be mind controlled and compelled to return the favor by buying the crackers or giving a favorable writeup, but you’ll at least think about it more than you would have otherwise. Many organizations even invoke “no gifts” codes of conduct to guard against things like the reciprocity effect.

But what about Farmville? That’s a free game, right? And most of the gifts are free, too, right? For the most part, but Zynga, the makers of Farmville and other social games like Mafia Wars, nevertheless want new players to come in and existing players to stick around. The gifts in these games are useful to their recipients within the game, so seeing a notification that you’ve gotten one encourages you to log into the game and put it to use. And actually just clicking on the link will start you down the path to installing and playing the game, which increases Zynga’s numbers. Then the reciprocity effect then encourages you to return the favor by sending a gift back, which creates a cycle of reciprocating fruit plants, livestock, and penguin statues flying back and forth. Even worse is when you realize that if you DON’T perpetuate the gifting loop, you’ll hurt your friends by making them waste in-game money for things they were hoping to get from you as gifts, you heartless bastard.

This is an effective mechanism for getting people to perpetually log back in to Farmville, for example, instead of moving on to other games. There’s the notification telling you that you need to log in to reciprocate the gift, and while you’re there you might as well play for a while. You can even send gifts to people who don’t play the game yet, encouraging them to pay you back by starting up a game as your neighbor or teammate. Farms everywhere in an unholy amalgamation of psychology and agriculture!

But wait, there’s more. The real money for companies like Zynga comes when you feel compelled to spend REAL money to reciprocate a “premium” gift. In fact, let’s see what Mark Pinkus, CEO of Zynga, had to say in a recent interview with Charlie Rose ((And if there’s one thing I know it’s that the kids, they can’t get enough Charlie Rose)):

We are excited about the future of social games and virtual goods as a revenue model within social games. What I mean by that is …these are free games, and one to two percent of the users will spend money in the games. And they can spend it on virtual goods, virtual gifts we just started selling, and that has been a revenue model that has enabled our company to be profitable for eight straight quarters.

So, enjoy your free sample. But don’t underestimate its effect on you.