Thoughts on Immersion in Skyrim
Like most Earthlings, I’ve been playing a LOT of Skyrim lately. I hated Oblivion and Morrowind, but this particular role-playing dragon murder simulator has really gotten under my skin, thanks in part to how immersive it is. It’s not uncommon for me to hunch in front of my keyboard for hours, forgetting time and space while I ford fjords and cram my inventory full of Falmer ears (I might NEED them!). I wrote a while back about immersion in video games and Skyrim seems like a textbook case of jamming on all the right buttons:
- A cognitively demanding environment –you’re constantly scanning for threats, items, and pathways
- Multiple, coordinated sources of sensory information –sight and sound work really well together here
- Extensive interactivity –you can pick up, mess with, or kill a heck of a lot of stuff
One thing that Skyrim really goes all in on, though, is limiting the incongruous elements on your screen. The idea here is that presenting players with things that remind them that they’re playing a video game undermines a sense of spatial presence and immersion. Skyrim conspicuously omits or minimizes things like damage indicators, cooldown timers on abilities, level indicators on enemies, icons indicating effects, and HUD elements to activate powers or items. It’s super minimalistic and a far cry from something like World of Warcraft where you’ve got numbers bubbling off enemies like fireworks and half your screen is taken up with icons, minimaps, and hotkeys. The result is that it’s easier to lose yourself in the world, as many of us are finding out.
Just a compass, a crosshair, and that Lydia chick who keeps getting herself killed.
That said, I wonder if Bethesda’s pursuit of immersion has actually gone too far. Skyrim’s anemic UI actually often fails to give you information that you really need and want. Say you’ve just gotten a new Fear spell that affects creatures up to level 10. Soooo… What level is that wolf? Or that bandit? No way to know, really. And how much longer until my protection from frost potion wears off? Is my weapon still poisoned? And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve blithely trooped around the landscape while diseased or cursed because I failed to dive into a UI two levels deep to find out. And don’t get me started on favorites and hotkeys.
One universal complaint of the game seems to be that the UI is awful, and I have to wonder how much of that was exacerbated by an iron clad design goal to shove everything possible off the main screen in order to increase immersion. Despite how much I’m enjoying it, it kind of strikes me as an example of swinging too far to the other extreme.
Burnout, Crunch, and the Games You Play
The need for “crunch time” in the game development business has been a perennial drum that gets pulled out and beat upon from time to time. The biggest kerfuffle in recent memory was caused by “EA Spouse” who composed a magnum opus on Livejournal in which she recounted the cringe-inducing conditions under which her husband1 had to work as a game developer at Electronic Arts. The story blew up big, resulting in lawsuits and widespread, solemn vows to really do something about all this. Despite that, crunch time remained endemic to the industry,2 with complaints from Team Bondi about working on L.A. Noire being a recent and highly visible example.
About the only time you'll see "Burnout" "Game" and "Paradise" in the same place.
A couple of weeks ago, though, games business analyst3 Michael Pachter caused widespread spit-takes by asserting that crunch time without additional compensation was not only necessary, but totally okay and the kind of thing that you just gotta put up with if you want to work in the industry. “If your complaint is you worked overtime and didn’t get paid for it,” said Pachter, “find another profession.” His reasoning appears to be that hard work is rewarded financially (through bonuses for hit games) and by the satisfaction of working in the games industry in the first place. Pachter’s comments riled a lot of …whatever it is that gets riled, and inspired many responses like this one by my close personal Internet friend and game industry veteran Charles Randall.4 The consensus of these objectors seems to be that excessive crunch time leads to burnout, and burnout leads to bad games, studio failures, avoidable expenses, and possibly hepatitis C.
But does it? Industrial-organizational psychologists have extensively studied the concept of work overload and the burnout that comes it, and I thought it would be interesting to see what they’ve found. Researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter recently published a review of the predictors of burnout5 and noted the consensus that there are three facets of burnout in the workplace:
- Exhaustion
- Cynicism
- Inefficiency
Exhaustion is just as it sounds: physical, mental, and/or emotional overtaxation. Cynicism covers a range of social reactions, including withdrawal from work or generally bitter or callous attitudes. It often follows from exhaustion as a defense mechanism. Inefficiency means being ineffective, unproductive, and feelings (correct or not) of incompetence.
What causes burnout? In a marvelous case of discovering the obvious, various researchers have determined that the most reliable recipe is too much work and not enough resources. Additional factors that can drive burnout are feeling a lack of control over one’s work, inadequate rewards for effort, the absence of supportive co-workers/friends/family, and unfair treatment. So getting no overtime pay, not getting to spend time with your family, and being lied to about how long crunch time will last make it a lot worse.
Now, some stress appears to be okay. Maslach and Leiter write:
Acute fatigue resulting form an especially demanding event at work –meeting a deadline or addressing a crisis– need not lead to burnout if people have an opportunity to recover during restful periods at work or at home. …When this kind of overload is a chronic job condition, not an occasional emergency, there is little opportunity to rest, recover, and restore balance. A sustainable workload, in contrast, provides opportunities to use and refine existing skills as well as to become effective in new areas of activity.6
But, you may be asking, so what? Why do I care? Well, research has linked burnout to a number of unwelcome outcomes in the workplace. Generally, it’s detrimental to job satisfaction, attendance, and employee tenure7 which cost game developers money and productivity. The relationship between performance and burnout has almost always relied on questionable self-report data, but just about every expert agrees that it’s there and a few studies have shown it directly. For example, one8 that found burnout made cops more likely to unnecessarily beat the daylights out of civilians. Another9 found that nurses experiencing burnout were rated by their patients as being awful, awful human beings.
Interestingly, Pachter seemed to be right about one thing: rewards in proportion to stress can offset burnout to some degree. If you’re recognized for your hard work, get opportunities to develop professionally, and receive what you see to be fair remuneration, then burnout may be delayed or avoided.10 Likewise, tight alignment between personal and organizational values can soften stress and reduce burnout –think working long hours to provide charity or develop new technology. This isn’t a panacea, however, as prolonged, crunch-induced stress will eventually overpower any rewards. And gaming industry insiders are quick to assert that offer meaningful profit sharing programs are rare.
So, to the extent that you’re working in the games industry, burnout is pretty clearly a bad thing. As far as the rest of us go, well, I’m no economist but I suspect that burnout affects us to the extent that it raises the cost of making games (through diminished productivity, higher cost of attracting and training employees, employee sickness, etc.) delays games, or results in shoddy, bug-ridden games. All else being equal, the link between crunch, burnout, and the end product seems pretty clear.
- Technically, fiance at the time, but whatever [↩]
- c.f, Remo, C. (2010). Study: Developers Claim 13 Weeks Of Crunch Per Year. Gamasutra. Retrieved August 7, 2011 from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/28669/Study_Developers_Claim_13_Weeks_Of_Crunch_Per_Year.php [↩]
- 1. whatever that is. [↩]
- Sup, Charles? [↩]
- Maslach, C., and Leiter, M. (2008). Early Predictors of Job Burnout and Engagement. Journal of Applied Psychology 93(3). 498-512. [↩]
- ibid, pg 500 [↩]
- Lee, R. & Ashforth, B. (1996). A Meta-Analytic Examination of the Correlates of the Three Dimensions of Burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(2), 123-133. [↩]
- Kop, N., Euwema, M., & Schaufeli, W. (1999). Burnout, Job Stress, and Violent Behavior Among Dutch Police Officers. Work & Stress, 13, 326-340. [↩]
- Leiter, M., Harvie, P., and Frizzell, C. (1998). The Correspondence of Patient Satisfaction and Nurse Burnout. Social Science & Medicine, 47, 1611-1617. [↩]
- Maslach, C. and Jackson, S. (1998). Prevention of Burnout: New Perspectives. Applied and Preventative Psychology, 7, 63-74. [↩]
Benign Envy and The Psychology of Tiny Tower
I’ve been messing around lately with Tiny Tower on the iPad1. If you haven’t played it, the gist is that you build up a tower full of “bitizens” who live in your tower’s apartments and work in its shops. Employed bitizens make money over time, which you can spend to build ever more floors to get more shops to employ more bitizens to make more money. You can speed this process up by spending “tower bux” which you can either earn in-game or buy with real money. It’s very much a “wait to play” game where you check in on it, stock your shops, then check back in a few hours later to restock again and see if you’ve accrued enough money to build a new floor. I’ve currently got 48 floors.2
You can speed things up by spending tower bux, and you can hasten your accrual of tower bux by exchanging a few real bucks –$30 will net you 1,000 tower bux. Apparently this is doing well for the developers, as Tiny Tower has shown up on the iTunes list of highest grossing apps and it has millions of players. I think they’ve missed an opportunity to make even more money, though, by not taking advantage of something called “benign envy.”3
The idea is that there are two kinds of envy: benign and malicious. As explained in series of papers by Niels van de Ven and his colleagues4 the latter is the kind we may be more familiar with –it’s the “They’ve got something I want, I wish they didn’t have it” variety. It especially happens when we don’t think someone deserves some nice new shiny thing that they’ve got. Benign envy, on the other hand, occurs when someone else has something we want, but we think that they deserve to have it. They worked for it, or it’s a just reward for their good character, or whatever.
When we experience benign envy, we don’t want to tear the other person down as much as we want to build ourselves up to get what they have. If doing so seems relatively easy, research has shown that such feelings of benign envy will motivate us to do what we can to close the gap. This may include spending more money to acquire a product that the other person has. In one study, van de Vern made subjects feel envious of a friend who got a desirable internship, and the result was that subjects, who were college students, studied harder to better their chances. In a follow-up study, they inspired envy for a friend who got a new iPhone, to the point where they subjects they’d be willing to pay 64% more for the gadget than would a control group.5
Where I think Tiny Tower is missing out on some extra revenue is that it doesn’t allow you to purchase
specific shops. The game is largely capricious about what specific shops appear –flag a floor for food and you may get either a Sky Burger or a Fancy Cuisine. This is important because some shops are WAY better than others because of how deep their stocks are, which lets them generate more money while you’re away from the game.
And while Tiny Tower allows you to peek in on your GameCenter friends’ towers and see what shops they have, it doesn’t allow you to do much about it if they have, say, a Tutoring Center that stocks an awesome 5,400 units of “Trig Help” at three coins a pop while the best service shop you have only sells a fraction of that before you have to manually restock. If Tiny Tower let you buy a Tutoring Center with real money, I’d bet they’d make a lot more, especially after people visited their friends and got a little dose of benign envy.
Of course, that’s not to say that people would always see this mechanic as fair or feel annoyed over the fact that their friends are cheapening their luck and persistence by breaking out the credit card. It’s a delicate balancing act. I’m just saying, I really want a Private Investigator before I hit 50 floors.
- It is also on the iPhone/Touch [↩]
- Wait, now 49. [↩]
- Yes, this is another one my evil posts about how they could get more money out of you. They’re fun! [↩]
- e.g., van de Ven, N. (2011). Why Envy Outperforms Admiration. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6) 784-795. [↩]
- van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M. Pieters, R. (2011). The Envy Premium in Product Evaluation. Journal of Consumer Research, 37. 984-998. [↩]
Netflix, GameFly, and Predicting the Future
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has a great article in the current issue of Wired Magazine (also available to read here) where he discusses how online companies use psychology to squeeze more money out of us. (Incidentally, I have an article in the current issue of GamePro magazine about the same things in the context of video games, and even got professor Ariely to provide input.) One of his more interesting points was about Netflix’s queue and the type of movies people tend to add to it:
There’s a beautiful paper by Daniel Read and two coauthors showing the gap between what people want to do in principle and what they want to do right now. They asked subjects to choose several films from a list containing a mix of highbrow titles (e.g., Schindler’s List) and lowbrow titles (e.g., My Cousin Vinny). When asked which film they wanted to watch a few days later, most picked a highbrow one. But when asked which they wanted to watch right now, most went lowbrow. In principle, we want to be the kind of people who watch serious movies, maybe even French ones—just not tonight! And so our queue becomes aspirational, filled with titles that are more ambitious than the ones we really want to watch.
Now that Netflix offers streaming, I’ve dropped the DVDs altogether. With streaming, we no longer get stuck with movies we only want to watch in theory. Instead, we feel like we’re paying for the right to watch any movie at any time—even if we don’t wind up watching many.
I started to wonder if the same thing may happen with game rental services like GameFly. Are you likely to add avant-garde games like No More Heroes to your queue1 with intentions of experiencing something unique yet move yet another military themed shooter to the top of the list? Would you consider adding a Japanese RPG for the sake of branching out into genres you haven’t traditionally played but groan in disappointment when it actually arrives int he mail?
Oh yay, the Citizen Kane of video games has arrived in my mailbox. How did that thing get in my queue, anyway?
I bet so, and the question might get more complicated if games-on-demand products like OnLive ever take off. Imagine if GameFly offered a streaming service where you could stream games or download rental copies. Would you think it’s a better value because it lets you avoid having to face up to your aspirational games when they arrive in the mail?
- Or should I say “Game Flap?” HI WEEKEND CONFIRMED GUYS! [↩]
The Psychology of Fair Play
GamePro.com recently put up my article on the psychology of fairness as it applies to video games. You can read it here once you’ve managed the art mouse clicking. Again, it’s in the form of a nicely formatted pdf file so you can see the nifty layout work they did.
The irony is that both the hammer and bomb were pre-order DLC bonuses. Click to read the whole article.
This article also has one of my favorite openers so far, which Bobo the Quote Monkey has retrieved for us:
Here’s an Old Testament story that many gamers may identify with more than they realize: Jacob had 12 sons, but he liked little Joseph the best. So one day he gave Joseph an awesome coat of many colors. It may have given damage reduction against all elemental attacks, but we don’t know for sure; the scripture is kind of vague on the stats. What is clear is that Joseph’s brothers, who had been pretty happy with things before, thought this was unfair, and when Joseph rather blithely told them that he was having dreams of them bowing down to him and his snazzy coat, they decided to throw him down a well.
In gaming parlance, Joseph’s coat represents a clear case of “twinking,” which is when players get extravagant gifts that would otherwise be out of their reach. This may come from generous guildmates or players buying in-game money—or even whole accounts—from third parties. Most of us won’t throw someone down a well, but retaliations to these activities range from message-board mutterings to throwing up our hands and canceling subscriptions.
The idea was to examine what “fairness” means to people, and to do so with a psychological slant. Is it fair to play on special servers in Team Fortress 2 or other shooters designed to let you farm achievements and unlock new weapons? Is buying gold from a World of Warcraft gold farmer fair? Is it fair to get a bucket full of unlocks off the bat in Dead Space 2 just because you played the previous games in that series? Is it fair to use a FAQ to solve Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood while others figure it out on their own yet get the same achievement?
I thought these were interesting questions, and psychology does have some things to say about them. Fairness is a judgment, and we know that judgments can be radically different depending on how the situation is framed or presented. Unfortunately while the question is interesting (I think) I didn’t have a chance in this article to really reach out game designers, academics, or other experts on the topic, so I think the article suffers a bit because of it. But still, I love the artwork and layout that goes along with this one. It’s a nice example of what print magazines still do that web usually doesn’t.
The Psychology of Microsoft Points Part 2: Conversion Factors
Note: This is Part 2 of a two-part article on the psychological effects of using point-based currencies like Microsoft Points or Nintendo Points. Part 1, which you can read by executing precision clicking acts here, dealt with the psychology of waste. Below, I’ll look at how research on anchoring and consumer behavior using foreign currency suggests other psychological factors at play..
In a way, buying things with Microsoft or Nintendo points feels like spending money in a foreign currency. Tourists have long noticed this “Monopoly money” effect where the unfamiliar bills and coins with funny little holes in them don’t seem as real as the currency back home. This has to do with the fact that they don’t usually put the mental effort into doing the conversion every time they buy something.
“Though travelers know the exchange rate, it’s too much trouble to do the math for every little purchase,” says William Poundstone, who writes about the psychology of spending in the book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value.1 “There is thus a zone of uncertainly about how much you’re ‘really’ spending, and this makes it a little harder to feel so bad about splurging. By setting 80 points to the dollar, Microsoft intentionally makes it hard to do the mental conversion! They could just as well have made it 100 points to a dollar, or 1 point = $1.”2
That Modern Warfare map pack is going to cost you three eggs, a goat, and five lengths of knotted string.
This mental error also happens because people often pay more attention to the face value of the foreign currency (i.e., the number of Microsoft Points in this case) when estimating how much they spend. This is called “anchoring” in psychological parlance, and while I’ve discussed it before in the context of Steam sales I’ll repeat a quick illustration from one classic study by Kahneman and Tversky.3 In the experiment, the researchers asked some subjects to estimate this product:
8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1
Then they asked another group to estimate this product:
1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8
Look closely at both of those. Those of you who understand how multiplication works know that these products are equal –40,320 to be exact. Yet the average estimate for the group that was given the problem starting with “8″ was 2,250 while those who saw a “1″ at the beginning of the problem had an average estimate of just 512. Why? Because one group anchored on a high number and the other anchored on a low number. It turns out that anchoring can really screw with our estimations of everything from crime statistics to hardware failure rates to how much things cost in a foreign currency.
But you guys! Wait! At an exchange rate of about 80 points per 1 dollar, that means that anchoring on the number of Microsoft Points should lead us to feel that we’re spending more than we really are. Because while 1,200 points may equal $15, the 1,200 number is more salient and through the magic of anchoring its magnitude systematically nudges our estimations of cost upwards. Indeed, studies comparing spending where the exchange rate for foreign currency is a multiple of the dollar (e.g., 1 US dollar = 4 Malaysian ringgits) to exchanges where the currency is worth a fraction of the dollar (e.g., 1 US dollar = 0.4 Bahraini dinar) have shown underspending in the former and overspending in the latter.4 And if spending MS Points is like spending Malaysian ringgits in that 1 dollar gets you 80 points, Microsoft could actually be letting us off easier than they could if they gave you just .8 points for a dollar and charged 12 points for a new game. But shhhh! Don’t tell them!
So there you have it. Maybe you’ll be a little better informed next time you plunk down money for MS Points, Playstation Network funds, or Nintendo Points. Hey, if you really do want something and think it’s a good price by all means do what you need to do to buy it! Just consider everything above first.
But wait, there’s more! There’s actually a sooooper sekrit third part of this article that deals with MS Points and what’s called “mental accounting.” To read it, though, you’ll have to pick up a future issue of GamePro magazine that contains my article on 5 psychological phenomena that affect how you buy games. I’ll update when that issue is available on new stands and again if they put it online.
- Poundstone, W., personal communication with author, April 21, 2011. [↩]
- Which is pretty much what Nintendo and Sony do. [↩]
- Tversky, A. and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185, 1124-1131. [↩]
- Raghubir, P. & Srivastava, J. (2002). Effect of Face Value on Product Valuation in Foreign Currencies. Journal of Consumer Research, 29 335-347. [↩]
The Psychology of Microsoft Points Part 1: Waste Aversion
Note: This article got a little out of hand, so I’m breaking it up into two related posts. Enjoy Part 1 below, then come back next week for Part 2. Doesn’t that feel like you’re getting more for your money? Woo psychology!
Ever bought something from Xbox Live Arcade? The first time you may have been a bit bamboozled by the process because Microsoft doesn’t just let you put $15 on your credit card to buy a new game; purchases are done in “Microsoft Points” that you deposit into a virtual wallet. Then you spend the points on stuff.1
Gamers possessed of equal parts suspicion and curiosity may wonder why our gaming overlords adopted such a strange system instead of just letting us pay real money for our purchases. Sure, it lets parents put finite funds in kids’ accounts and lets you buy points on gift cards, but are there psychological factors at play with these kinds of point-based systems that affect how we spend our money? I’m glad you asked, because yes there are. Let’s take a closer look.
Wait, I think I'm going to have some points left over in my account...
Leaving money on the table or in our Xbox Live account2 makes most of us a bit uncomfortable because it feels wasteful. Hal Arkes, who pioneered the study of the psychology of waste, theorized that this is a holdover from what’s called “the sunk cost effect.”3 This is when not losing unrecoverable money you’ve already sunk into a losing proposition becomes the main justification for throwing new money in.
But at this point the more clever among you may be thinking “But that doesn’t really apply to unspent Microsoft Points and their ilk because they can be spent whenever you want. They’re not sunk; they’re still fungible.”4 True. But ingrained habits (or in this case, decision-making biases) die hard, and we are averse to, as Arkes says, “insufficiently utilize the item that has been purchased.”
For example, in one unpublished study5 researchers Lisa Bolton and Joseph Alba presented subjects with a scenario where a business traveler laid over in a city decided to buy a one-month gym membership for $75 and enjoy a workout, even though he was only able to use it one night. Relative to the man in another scenario who paid $75 to get an equal amount of enjoyment out of a baseball game, people saw this traveler as “less intelligent,” “foolish” and “less sensible.” This despite the fact that the two people enjoyed their evening equally for the same cost.
So, following this logic, we see that gamers may dislike leaving money sitting in an account because it represents waste, especially if you’re considering spending real money on a disk based game. So you’re a little more likely to get rid of those 400 Microsoft Points by buying something on sale that you normally wouldn’t, or even by buying an additional 800 points so you can pick up another full digital game that you might not have been interested in otherwise. It’s similar to overeating at a buffet or doubling your paper towel use after buying the 124 roll jumbo pack. Even though you could just let those paper towels or Nintendo Points sit there until you have a good reason to use them, spending real money on something else seems wasteful.
So there’s waste aversion. But there’s one other psychological phenomenon at play with Microsoft Points (and their ilk) that I’d like to point out, and curiously enough it may actually be leading us to spend less instead of more. For more on that, come back next week for Part 2. BAHM-BAM-BAAAAA!
- And Microsoft isn’t the only one –Sony and Nintendo have similar systems, and Valve has even rolled out a “Steam Wallet” for in-game microtransactions. [↩]
- Or our Playstation Network account or our Nintendo Points account for that matter. [↩]
- Arkes, H. (1996). The Psychology of Waste. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 9 213-224. [↩]
- Fungible: dictionary.com Word of the Day April 14th, 2008. [↩]
- Bolton, L. & Alba, J. When Less is More: Consumer Aversion to Waste. Unpublished Manuscript Submitted for Publication. [↩]
Situational Judgment Tests as RPGs
As is my habit, I recently attended the annual conference for the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology (SIOP), which is the professional organization for people who apply psychology to understanding human behavior in the workplace. Trust me, we I/O psychologists actually do know how to party.1 Apparently some of us also know how to play video games, because I happened upon one panel discussion called “Serious Games and Virtual Worlds: The Next I/O Frontier.” The purpose of the panel was to explore how video games, virtual realities, and other immersive technologies can help us measure and predict worker behaviors.
One concept that particularly clicked with me was the idea of making games out of what are called “situational judgment tests,” or “SJTs.” These are tests used to screen job applicants and help decide if a person likely has abilities needed for success on the job. They typically present test-takers with a situation, give them relevant facts, and then ask them how they would react or solve a problem requiring some kind of application of rules and a judgment call. For example, a SJT for first line supervisors might describe (or show via video) an employee coming in to work late and giving an explanation of his tardiness. Using this scenario, a copy of the fictional company’s attendance policy, and access to the offending employee’s past time sheets, applicants are asked to indicate what they would say in response to the employee’s request to make up the time later. This can help prospective employers decide if an applicant should be able to appropriately handle similar situations on the job.
Think about that. If you’ve ever played a Western role-playing game, especially something by Bioware, you’ve taken a situational judgment test. I was recently playing The Witcher, for example, and during the tutorial you’re tasked with having to decide how to deal with an attack on your stronghold –do you want to chase down the powerful mage who’s trying to steal your stuff or do you want to deal with the monster rampaging through your courtyard? Your choice may say something about your preferences and your priorities, not to mention your tactical skills. Or take the conversation in Mass Effect 2 that has you guide Commander Sheppard through a conversation with Mordin about the alien doctor’s involvement with the bioengineered, near-destruction of an entire species. That’s a delicate exchange, and true to the character of a good role-playing game, Bioware lets you proceed through it in a number of different ways, each of which could reflect something different about you.
Ahhh, Mordin, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday to wrap up that whole genophage thing, 'kay?
I think the idea of using these kinds of games to test job applicants on their ability to make various real-life judgments is a fascinating one. One could easily imagine a game where applicants are told to interact with an in-game character and solve problems as they would in real life –sort of a role-playing game where the point is not to role-play.
What’s more, we know other things about human psychology in video games that could improve our measures of work-related abilities. We know, for example, that people who are deeply immersed in a technology or engaged in psychological flow are more likely to forget about their surroundings and forget (or at least downplay) the fact that they’re playing a video game. One of the biggest problems in using tests or interviews to assess job applicants is that they may behave differently relative to a normal day on the job. But if casting an assessment in the mold of a game helps them forget that they’re taking a test or disregard it, then we’ve got a much more accurate measurement of their ability. Game designers could be brought in to make the assessment more like a game, and while you’re at it you could take the opportunity to convey important information about the company and its values in order to make the assessment informative to the applicants, too.
As I’m so fond of saying, somebody get on that. And remember: I’m available for consulting work.
- Seriously. Ask any I/O psychologist to tell you the one about the priest and the Likert scale. It’s hilarious. [↩]
The Psychology of Loot
GamePro.com has posted my article from a recent print issue on The Psychology of Loot. Like last time, it’s in a pdf file, which you can download by performing clicking motions on this carefully highlighted link. The article aims to look at what psychology has to say about why gamers love loot and loot drops so much. Turns out it’s not so much the loot, or even the loot drop. What really gets us is the anticipation of the loot drop.
Nobody every thinks of the donkey in these situations.
I asked the ever faithful Bobo the Quote Monkey to surprise me with an unexpected quote. Here’s what he brought back:
German born neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz was conducting research at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland on the relationship between the chemical dopamine and Parkinson’s disease when he almost accidentally started a line of research that can be used to explain gamers’ love of loot. Dopamine is a collection of just twenty two atoms that plays a huge role in regulating human decision making, particularly goal oriented behavior and the pursuit of pleasure. When we encounter something we like –say a patch of berries or a goretusk liver– our brain releases dopamine. Brain cells that are sensitive to that chemical go bananas when it’s present, which makes us feel good –maybe even euphoric.
Dopamine neurons in the brain also help us predict good things in life. Schultz and his colleagues discovered that presenting a lab monkey with a bit of fruit caused the creature’s dopamine neurons to light up. They also discovered that when they repeatedly preceded the treat with a light or a sound, the neurons would start to fire when the monkey saw the light or heard the sound, but then remain relatively inactive when the fruit showed up. The system they had discovered was, at its core, about anticipation and trying to predict rewards based on what was happening in the environment.
I have to say that not only do I like how this article turned out, it’s actually my favorite thing that I’ve written on the topic of the psychology of games in a while, even though it’s essentially an expansion of one of the first articles I wrote for this site. There are a few reasons for this. First, the GamePro article features the phrase “saucy pictures of lady monkeys.” Really, that’s enough right there. But second, it features some quotes from one of my favorite science writers: Jonah Lehrer. I just e-mailed him out of the blue asking if he’d like to give some comments on the subject for the article, and he was kind enough to oblige. Since I started doing this stuff I’ve been repeatedly and pleasantly surprised by how willing authors, academics, and game developers can be to write me back and help out. In fact, just recently I had a nice phone conversation with another one of my favorite science writers, Dan Ariely, who helped me formulate some of my thoughts on my latest article in progress, which deals with the psychological trickery behind Xbox Live Arcade’s Microsoft Points system. It’s weird, but I’m much more glad to have had the chances to talk to Lehrer, Ariely, and the various game developers than I would have ever been talking to some movie star or musician.
At any rate, here’s the link to the article on the psychology of loot in case you missed it the first time. Enjoy and let me know in the comments what you think of it.
Just World Hypothesis and Homefront
Years ago I watched a friend1 play through some of the later levels in the original Deus Ex and commented on how he was repeatedly subjecting Majestic 12 security personnel to death by natural causes, in so much as shooting them in the face with a shotgun would naturally cause their death. I noted that there were nonlethal ways to deal with the security on this level, such as stealth or knocking them unconscious with stun batons.
“Nah,” he said, murdering another security guard who I personally thought might have doing his job and was glum over missing his kid’s soccer game. “These guys are pretty high up in MJ-12,” my friend continued. “They have to know the kind of stuff their employer is up to. They deserve it.”2 Apparently feeling that the victims of his progress through the game deserved their virtual fate was important to this player, and I can understand why.
In fact, psychologists have studied this phenomenon and dubbed it the “Just World Hypothesis.” When people witness someone subjected to some misfortune, they’re susceptible to suggestions that the person deserved it and thus see the misfortune as evidence of karma or justice –hence the “Just” in “Just World Hypothesis”.
I'm sure this guy had a wife and kids ...UNTIL HE MURDERED AND ATE THEM!
A few years ago one researcher showed this effect by presenting two groups of people two versions of an interaction between a “Barbara and Jack,” a man and a woman in a relationship.3 The stories presented to each group were identical except for the endings: in one group Jack proposed marriage to Barbara, and in the second he sexually assaulted her. Participants later filled out a survey asking them to recall the situation and those who read the story ending in sexual assault tended to remember (or rather misremember) things from the scenario and thought it more likely that Barbara engaged in risky behaviors like flirting, dressing provocatively, getting drunk, and agreeing to go back to Jack’s apartment. The author argued that people were more subject to remember things in hindsight in such a way that they matched their expectations.
On the flipside, social psychologist Marvin Lerner, who pioneered the concept of the just world hypothesis showed that people are more likely to view lottery winners as harder working students.4 So it goes both ways.
I think I see something similar in my friend who was assuming that the MJ-12 security guards he was murdering deserved it, because they “must have known.” Note that the game didn’t really provide any evidence that these fellows knew ANYTHING about their employer’s crimes; my friend just filled that part in because presumably he just wanted to shoot dudes without wrestling with any moral quandaries5
Go on, murder some dudes. No, no, it's cool. Don't worry about it. They're total jerks.
Now consider the recently released first person shooter Homefront, which has you play as an freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower. The introduction to the game goes to great lengths to relieve you of any moral misgivings you might have about plugging away at the enemies it’s getting ready to throw at you. You see enemy soldiers not only brutalizing American civilians, but outright murdering a mother in front of her children and callously tossing corpses around. The message is clear: Hey, these guys are evil. When we give you a gun, SHOOT THEM and FEEL GOOD ABOUT IT. Doing so is just increasing the amount of justice in the world, which is something your human psyche is naturally all on board with.
Of course, the interesting thing (or, more to the point, the uninteresting thing) about Homefront is that it’s not leaving any blanks to be filled in by the just world bias. By turning it up to 11, the THQ is is making entirely sure that your natural proclivity for blaming people (i.e., the parade’s worth of North Korean soldiers you meet between each level’s start and finish) for their own misfortune (i.e., being at the wrong end of your various guns and explosives) is indulged. And while I appreciate the easy out, I think it kind of robs the game of some narrative depth. Some of my favorite gaming moments over the years have been born of difficult decisions about who to let live and who to gun down. Let me decide, act, and ruminate on those actions once the smoke clears; that will keep the game with me for longer.6
- Hi Chris! [↩]
- For those of you who have forgotten, MJ-12 hijinks included creating a global pandemic in order to sell the cure. Not too nice. [↩]
- Carli, L. (1999). Cognitive Reconstruction, Hindsight, and Reactions to Victims and Perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979. [↩]
- Lerner, M. The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion, (New York: Plenum Press, 1980. [↩]
- And honestly, in the context of a video game that’s hardly unusual, much less a war crime. [↩]
- Though in full disclosure, I haven’t played Homefront; maybe it becomes subtle, but the intro video I watched sure wasn’t. [↩]
