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The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 1: Anchoring the Auction House

Oh man, you all, I’ve been playing a LOT of Diablo III lately. ((click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click)) I’m sure that many of you who have played have been through the same scenario I have time after time. After running around avoiding AOE attacks, dashing in to rez fallen teammates, and swatting aside trash mobs, you and your co-players finally deplete some end boss’s health and immediately gather around the newly created digital corpse to answer that all-important question: did anything good drop?

In some of the most important ways, Diablo III is a game about hitting monsters with weapons until other, hopefully better, weapons pop out of them. That is, it’s a game where you try to maximize the outputs of a system through optimal combinations of your character’s skills and equipment. This puts acquiring new gear first and foremost ((Especially once you hit the level cap of 60 and start running Hell or Inferno difficulties)) but unlike previous games in the franchise this one complicates that process by having auction houses where you can buy and sell equipment so that killing stuff isn’t the only way to deck yourself out with phat lewts.

As is my habit I’ve been thinking about how different psychological theories explain our willingness to buy things in the auction house and grind for new equipment from in-game drops. The game’s developer, Blizzard, probably has two goals among others: one, to get people to spend their in-game gold to keep the game’s economy moving (or real money in the real money auction house), and two to keep us playing the game over and over again in order to find stuff the old fashioned way. In pursuit of these goals, I have three suggestions for Blizzard (or anyone else developing a similar system) based on well established psychological phenomena. Instead of dumping everything at once, I’ve split things into a series of three articles, the first of which follows.

Let’s look first at how Blizzard can inflate prices in the auction house to keep money moving through that part of the conomy.

To start, consider these two questions:

1. Is the height of the tallest redwood more or less than 1,200 feet?
2. What is your best guess about the height of the tallest redwood?

What do you think? These are questions that researchers ((Jacowitz, K. and Kahneman, D. (1995). Measures of Anchoring in Estimation Tasks. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1038-1052.)) asked of some visitors to the San Francisco Exploratorium. Other visitors were asked a similar pair of questions, except that the first one asked whether the tallest redwood was more than 180 feet instead of 1,200.

Both limits are pretty extreme, in that 180 feet is obviously way too short for the tallest redwood and 1,200 feet is crazy tall. Nonetheless, the answers to the second question, which was consistent across both groups, were pretty amazing. On average, those who had been primed by the 1,200 feet figure said the tallest tree in the forest had to be 844 feet, while those who heard 180 feet off the bat thought the tallest had to be only 282 feet. These were all random visitors looking at the same trees; the only difference between the two groups was the figure in that first question.

This is a clear cut example of what psychologists call “anchoring,” one example of which is presenting us with a number to change our estimates of an other, possibly unrelated number. Simply seeing the numbers 1,200 or 180 caused people to anchor on that number and to then adjust their estimates of the tallest tree instead of picking a more sensible starting point. This kind of effect shows up everywhere once you know to look for it. It’s the basis of lowball sales pitches that get you to anchor on a low price and then negotiate up. It’s the reason why many fast food restaurants list bigger, more expensive drink prices first on their menu. It’s why the “But wait! There’s more!” brand of infomercials list absurdly high prices for their wares first before slashing them down for a limited time if you act now.

2 bajillion gold for a rare two-hander? Pffft. I won’t pay over …half a bajillion.

And anchors can still have an effect if they’re nonsensical or random. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his colleagues conducted a study ((Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). Coherent arbitrariness: Stable demand curves without stable preferences. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118, 73-105.)) where they used anchoring in an auction simply by having bidders write down the last two digits of their social security number at the top of their bid sheets. Those whose numbers ended in the 80s and above actually were willing to pay up to 346% more for things like wine and chocolates than were those whose social security numbers ended in the 20s or below.

This is why I think that if Blizzard wants more money spent in the auction houses, one way to effect this is to pre-sort the buyout prices so that we see the big fat numbers first in our search results. Even absurd ones like where that one numbskull obviously just held down the “9″ key for 30 seconds. Seeing larger numbers will prime us to inflate our estimates of what that item is worth to us. If Blizzard wanted to get really sly about it, the company could show you the most that an item ((Or similar item, given that attributes vary a bit across items with the same name.)) has sold for over the last 7 days.

Of course, savvy auction house shoppers can use this information to avoid the anchoring effect. Setting price limits in the auction house filters would mitigate it, for example. Me, what I typically do is set some price limits with the filtering tools, then sort by ascending price rather than descending. That way, I anchor on the low prices instead.

But what about getting loot the old fashioned way –by grinding for it? Read about that in part 2, or skip ahead to a discussion of what effects the auction houses have on dopamine rushes and loot hunting in part 3. Finally, there’s a bonus part 4 about the effect of item history on auction house prices.

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The Psychology of Genres in Edge Magazine #241


My latest article on the psychology of video games for Edge Magazine has been published in issue #241. It’s the one with the Crysis 3 cover. In it, I explore a bit about some theories of decision making and genre usage that may clue us in on why we like the genres we like. Why do we have genres, and are the ways that we think about game classifications doing us a disservice?

I sent Bobo The Quote Monkey out and he came back with this tidbit:

What factors make us more or less likely to depend on these mental shortcuts and compensatory strategies? It varies with expertise. Novices tend to substitute knowledge of a genre for knowledge about the specifics of a game. This is a widely studied phenomenon within the field of consumer psychology, especially in the context of brands. It’s been found to be especially true the less expertise we have with a product. In one study, C. Wahn Park and Parker Lessig found that people with limited experience buying microwave ovens tended to get overwhelmed with all the different options. Too many popcorn buttons and auto defrost settings were apparently too much for the novice buyer at the time to handle. What people who were unfamiliar with the product tended to do was collapse all the differences between options and consider them equivalent. So a microwave with seven power settings was lumped in with those only having five, because buyers were unable to put their fingers on why seven was that much better than five and how to weigh those factors when making a decision.

Instead, the subjects tended to look at things like brand and other aspects that the researchers termed “non functional dimensions” in order to make their price. Good experiences with a particular brand in another context was substituted for (or at least overshadowed) all the confusing technical differences, because that was easier and required less mental effort.

…It’s not difficult to see how this applies to video games and genres –or brands and series for that matter. Those who are less familiar with the huge variety of video games won’t understand all the technical aspects of the games. Asynchronous multiplayer? DirectX 11 support? Dedicated servers? Hours of gameplay? For inexperienced buyers who don’t make it a habit of reading magazines like the one you have in your hands right now, all those detailed, technical aspects of the game are going to get squished down to a few broad but shallow categories to make the mental strain of the decision easier.

The magazine is on store shelves now, if you’d like to pick it up. Up next month: The Psychology of Nostalgia explains (in part) why we have so many reboots, sequels, and retro games.

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Draw Something Uncertain

Imagine that some wealthy lunatic comes to you with an offer to choose between the following gambles in order to win five bucks:

Option 1: A stock is selected at random from the Wall Street Journal. You guess whether it will go up or down tomorrow. If you’re right, you win $5.

Option 2: A stock is selected at random from the Wall Street Journal. You guess whether it went up or down yesterday. No peeking! If you’re right, you win $5.

Would you have a preference? You know they both offer equal chances of winning, right?

Well, if you were like 67% of subjects described in a 1991 paper by Chip Heath and Amos Tversky published in the Journal of Risk And Uncertainty ((Heath, C. and Tversky, A. (1991). Preference and Belief: Ambiguity and Competence in Choice Under Uncertainty. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 4, 5-28.)) you would pick Option 1. The reason has to do with what the authors call “the competence hypothesis.” In short, they say “people prefer to bet in a context where they consider themselves knowledgeable or competent than a in a context where they feel ignorant or uninformed.”

If you know nothing about a situation, the outcome of any predictions you make –right or wrong– can be attributed to dumb luck. But if you’re supposedly an expert, you stand not to gain $5, but also self-esteem and bragging rights. Sure, if you’re wrong your ego suffers, but that’s only if you’re wrong. Ignorance, on the other hand, is always a liability –blind guesses are just lucky if they turn out to be right and only serve to highlight your ignorance if you’re wrong. So people prefer to make bets on something they think they know about and hesitate to make them on something they’re ignorant about.

Right, I know: You’re out there saying “Well, duh!” so loud I can hear you all the way up here in my ivory tower. Of course people prefer to make bets about things they know more about. But that’s not quite the point of this article and not quite what was happening in the stock betting scenario described above. It turns out that this bias towards betting in line with our expertise can result in some irrational behavior when we realize that something is knowable even though we don’t know it.

Toad, master psychologist and kind of a jerk.

In other words if something is knowable, like whether or not a stock went up yesterday, but not known to us at the moment, we automatically shy away from that bet. It’s habit and a bias. Just not knowing something that we feel we could know triggers feelings of lowered competence, which our brains use as a mental shortcut for identifying bad risks. In another experiment ((Rothbart, M. and Snyder, M. (1970). Confidence in the Prediction and Postdiction of an Uncertain Outcome. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science 2(1), 38-43.)) half the subjects bet on the outcome of a simple die roll before it was cast, and half bet on the outcome after it was cast (but before they could see it). Those who were making bets prior to the roll were more confident of their predictions than those who were betting on an unknown roll that had already taken place. They were also more willing to bet money on the outcome ((Wait, were these psychologists running a craps game under the guise of scientific research? Man, I bet they totally were.)) Same thing. As Heath and Tversky say, “In prediction, only the future can prove you wrong; in postdiction, you could be wrong right now.”

I was going to guess something else, but no I see it now.

So, what does this mean for video games? For one, I’ve been playing the iPad game Draw Something a lot lately. It’s a drawing game where you’re given a choice of words in ascending difficulty (e.g., box, airport, Mad Men) and then you have to pick one to draw on the iPad using your finger or a stylus. The other player, through the magic of the Internet, sees your drawing but not the word it’s based on –that they have to guess from your work. The thing is, though, that they don’t just see the completed drawing. They see a recording of you going through the process of drawing it. Sometimes this is hilarious and embarrassing such as I screw up something simple like “pancakes” but generally it gives the game a much more “live” feeling and lets you guess at something before it’s done. Also, thanks to our bias towards betting on future events as opposed to past ones, I suspect that the “live replay” feature in Draw Something makes us more confident in our ability to guess a work in progress. Even though it’s technically already happened in the past.

What’s more, I think this bias informs ways that developers can design rewards or the sale of items in games. Imagine a player opening a treasure chest to get either an awesome or lousy piece of loot as a reward for clearing a dungeon. Alternatively, imagine a smarmy NPC saying “I put a piece of loot in each of these two chests. One is awesome, one sucks. Pick a chest.” Which would most players prefer, even though their chances of getting the good stuff are equal? The first, because it offers the illusion of betting on an outcome that hasn’t happened yet, and thus doesn’t trigger the bias described above.

Wait, I got it! Let's use a psychological hack to sell more Veteran Packs!

As a final (slightly evil) example of how to hack this bias into a game system, consider the supply crates in multiplayer Mass Effect 3. These are crates of essential goodies that players can purchase for either in-game funds or Microsoft Points. Opening a crate is like spinning a slot machine in that the contents are random within certain parameters –sometimes they’re just ammo packs and an upgrade for a gun you never use, and sometimes they unlock new character classes and outfit you with ridiculously powerful weapons.

Think about if, when you select a crate for purchase, the confirmation button read something like “Load this crate with a random X, Y, and Z and purchase.” Would giving players the illusion of betting on the contents of that crate before they are determined result in more purchases? I think it probably would.

Thanks a lot, brain.

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The Psychology of Avatars in Edge Magazine

I have a new article about the psychology of video game avatars in issue #240 of Edge Magazine. It’s this one:

Look for this issue with the subtle, easy to overlook green color. It blends right in.

This article was a lot of fun to write. My standard operating procedure is to look at some body of psychological research or theory that has nothing to do with video games, and then figure out how to apply it to games. Sometimes it’s a short hop in logic, sometimes it’s an inferential leap that requires a running start. For the psychology of avatars piece, though, I actually got to read up on research that was being done about video games, using video games and similar experiences (e.g., Second Life and virtual reality). There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in this part of the field right now, and I enjoyed trying to sum up some of it.

Here’s a bit that our friend Bobo the Quote Monkey thought you might be interested in:

Researcher Nick Yee started his career by taking the precepts of social identity theory and using them to understand how people behave depending on the virtual avatars they assume. In one of his earliest experiments, Yee had experimental subjects don a wicked head-mounted display that let them perceive and move around in a simple virtual environment. There was just a virtual room, another virtual person controlled by someone else, and a virtual mirror. The mirror was important, because it obviously wasn’t a real mirror and the researcher could use it to show whatever “reflection” of the subjects’ avatars they wanted. In fact, Yee randomly showed subjects one of three types of reflections of their avatar: ugly, normal, and attractive.

What Yee was interested in was how this would affect how subjects interacted with the other person in the virtual room. After following directions to inspect their avatars in the mirror, subjects were asked to approach the room’s other occupant and chat with him or her. This other person was controlled by a research assistant and followed a simple script to get the conversation going, saying something like: “Tell me a bit about yourself.”

What the study revealed was how attractive a subject’s avatar was affected how he or she behaved. Relative to those with ugly avatars, people assigned attractive avatars both stood closer to the other person and disclosed more personal details about themselves to this stranger. Then, in a follow-up study using the same setup, Yee found that people using taller avatars were more assertive and confident when they engaged in a simple negotiation exercise. …Like in the real world, we first make an observation about our avatar, infer something about our character, and then continue to act according to our perceived expectations. We needn’t make a conscious decision to do it.

As usual, I demand that you possibly consider thinking about buying the magazine if you’re so inclined. I think it’s an interesting piece and I’m glad that Edge is willing to publish something relatively unusual for the world of games journalism. Also, my favorite thing about writing for Edge, which is a UK based magazine, is seeing that my editor for this article replaced the word “soda” with “fizzy drinks.” That’s absurdly charming for some reason.

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Needs and Gratification Theory and Game Genres

Hey, do you guys watch Extra Credits? If not, you should. Each week the team there shares insightful, animated essays on topics related to video game design, culture, and business. They’re often pretty amusing, too. A few weeks ago they did a series on the difference between Western and Japanese RPGs that reminded me of a theory from the field of media psychology that aims to explain why we gravitate towards certain genres of entertainment.

In part 1 of the Extra Credits series the authors argue that the whole way we look at genres and sub-genres is inherantly flawed:

Most of the time when we talk about what makes a game belong to a certain genre we only talk about surface elements. The visible mechanics or dynamics of a game. This game is an RPG because it has a leveling system. That game is a first-person shooter because it has guns and a first-person camera. That other game is survival horror because there are zombies in it. But what we really outght to be looking for are the underlying reasons why we play a genre.

…Genres in all things are actually defined by what the audience desires to get out of interacting with them. We go to a romance for different reasons than we go to a comedy or a drama. We can identify a romance by the emotions it tries to invoke in us, not by its editing styles. And the same is true of games.

Let me ask you: Why is it we thnk of Mass Effect as an RPG even though its combat is built around third person shooting? Why are we so confident around labeling Call of Duty a first person shooter even though it has a leveling system? It’s because we’re assigning those labels not because of their surface mechanics or camera perspectives or techniques. But because of the fundamental human desires, emotions, and interests those genres deliver on; the underlying reasons we play which are radically different in these two cases.

…There are various different ways that games can engage us, which some designers refer to as “core play aesthetics.” Narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery. And that’s just to name a few.

What James ((Mostly James Portinow, I think, who pens each episode’s script)), Daniel, and Alison are explaining here is called “needs and gratification theory” even though they don’t label it as such. It’s actually been kicking around the media psychology circles for decades, starting back in the 1940s when social scientists were interested in why men in fedoras chose to listen to radios dramas or read the newspaper over other activities. ((Ruggiero, T. (2000). Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century. Mass Communication & Society, 3(1), 3-37.)) Though the methodology and theory building improved, the core concept of needs and gratification theory has largely stayed consistent: We are attracted to media based on how well we expect it to satisfy internal needs.

In the case of television, consider Sally, who has a high need for intellectual stimulation and validation of her intelligence. Sally might prefer quiz shows like Jeopardy! because of how it meshes with these internal needs. Her friend Dick, on the other hand, is high in emotional intelligence and thus likes to ponder and understand interpersonal relationships. He would be more drawn to character driven dramas like Breaking Bad or even relationship driven reality television like Survivor.

The important point here to understand is that each person isn’t drawn to a show because the program guide labels it “Game Show” or “Drama.” Those are just convenient genre labels that Sally and Dick might use in the absence of other information. The point is that shows in each of those genres tend to satisfy different needs and we’re pretty good at noticing this kind of thing.

Mordin and Shepard have an existential crisis over whether they are in an RPG or third person shooter. Also genophage.


Due to the interactive nature of video games I think the needs and usage theory makes even more sense, though it hasn’t been empirically tested much. We are attracted to games because of the internal needs they help us fulfill. The Extra Credits examples of narrative, challenge, fellowship, and discovery make a pretty good list, though I would suggest additions like expression (for games that let you build, customize, and share), competition (for those games that facilitate comparing yourselves against others), and brain teasing (for puzzle games and word games).

For every one of those needs, you can probably think of a game that does an exceptional job of fulfilling it through its “core play aesthetics” to use the Extra Credits terminology. The main point of Skyrim, for example, is exploration. The main point of Minecraft is expression. The main point of SSX is challenge. Each of these games has a core play aesthetic that meets one basic psychological need that varies in intensity from person to person.

What’s interesting about this perspective is that it suggests that our current genre conventions are lackluster at best and flat our wrong at worst. Typical genre names like action, role-playing, adventure, and puzzle are widely used because games we’ve put in those genres tend to possess similar core play aesthetics –tend to but don’t always. Do you think if when you walked in to a big box retailer or browsed for games on Amazon you would have a better experience if the shelves and menus used words like Challenge and Narrative and Fellowship instead of “Action” and “Strategy” and “Role-Playing?” Do you think you’d be better able to find a game that you’d end up loving?

Needs and gratification theory suggests that you would.

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The Psychology of Free-to-Play Games in Edge Magazine

Good news, everyone! Well, good for me and possibly good for you if you’re inclined to read Edge Magazine. Because my mutterings on the psychology of games are now appearing there. Specifically, I have an article about the psychology of free-to-play games in the latest issue (April, #239) with the cover below. The article is also available to read online here.

Look for this cover at your local bookseller, news stand, and fishmonger.

The article looks at how two lines of research illustrate ways that free-to-play games may take advantages of human psychology to get us to cough up real money more than we may prefer. One way is by sapping our mental reserves and then appropriately timing sales pitches when our self restraint is taxed. The other line of research is how the different kinds of jealousy are better or worse and making us want to close the gap between us and other players who are showing off their new goods.

I flung the magazine and a highlighter to the ever faithful Bobo the Quote Monkey and here’s what he came back with:

Dr. Roy Baumeister and his colleagues pioneered this concept of “ego depletion” in a series of experiments at Case Western University. They had subjects exert self control by requesting they eat raw radishes instead of delicious chocolate chip cookies that had been left out on a table, and observed them through a one-way mirror. Some people looked longingly at the cookies or even picked them up to slyly sniff at them when they thought they were alone, but nobody bit into them. With these subjects’ mental reserves sapped by self restraint, the researchers had them engage in a series of problem-solving games. Relative to a comparison group that was allowed to eat the cookies, those who had to exhibit self control lost patience with the game and called it quits in less than half the time. In a follow-up experiment the researchers depleted their subjects’ self-control by having them suppress smiles while watching a stand-up comedy routine, and their findings in terms of how long this group would persist in a word puzzle game were similar.

What these experiments showed was that self-restraint takes something out of you, and with it gone you’re more likely to give up on boring or difficult games. It’s not difficult to see how the same could be true of game-based tasks that we’re all more familiar with, such as grinding out reputation points or taking the long way back to town instead of simply buying reputation ranks or fast travel spells from an in-game store. In fact, there’s evidence that this kind of ego depletion brought about by exerting self control can make us more susceptible to making impulse purchases.

It’s a neat article, and if you see the copy of Edge magazine in the store please pick it up and see if you think it’s worth buying. I’ve got more articles coming in future issues, and one of the neat things about writing for Edge is that they’re providing me with a lot higher word count to work with than GamePro did.1 This lets me flesh out the ideas a lot more and work in illustrative examples and quotes. The end result is longer, but it’s also more complete and I think more fun to read.

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Multiplayer Games

Let me describe a scenario that I think we’ve all been in. You pick up a game like Gears of War 3 or Starcraft II or the deck-building iOS game Ascension. You jam through the single-player campaign or do a little comp stomping in skirmish mode –maybe even on the second-to-hardest difficulty ‘cause you’re totally hardcore like that. And you’re better at the game than anyone on your friends list, judging by the local leaderboards and the way nobody will play with you anymore. You’ve got this game figured out, man, and you think you’re pretty good.

So you decide to venture online and try your hand at ranked ladder matches, a tournament, or maybe even just some pickup games via online matchmaking. You get creamed. Murdered. Owned. At the end of the match your competition has left you with a kill/death ratio in a realm of negative numbers so low that mathematicians hadn’t even bothered to really think about it yet because they figured nobody would ever use them. This baffles you, because by all previous accounts you’re totally awesome at this game.

Congratulations, you’ve encountered what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Named after the authors of a 1999 paper by Cornell University professor of psychology David Dunning and his then graduate student Justin Kruger ((Kruger, J. and Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Leads to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77 1121-1134.)) the effect describes how those who really aren’t very good at something overestimate their skill while those who are experts tend to sell themselves short. The reason is that the more skilled you are in some complicated task ((Interestingly the Dunning-Kruger effect is more prominent for difficult, complex tasks and less so for simple, easy ones.)) the more you understand …that there’s stuff you don’t understand. Or that you haven’t mastered. Really good guitar players, for example, understand everything the instrument is capable of better than someone who has only now figured out how to bang out the beginning of that one Blink-182 song. Similarly, those of us who are really bad and inexperienced at a game often lack true understanding of what’s even possible. You can’t accurately reflect about your own opinion of yourself because you’re not good enough. And you’re not good enough because you can’t accurately reflect on your own opinion of yourself.

In their initial research, Kruger and Dunning gave students tests of logic, grammar, and humor (really, he had them evaluate the LOL potential of jokes from the likes of Woody Allen and Al Franken). When the researchers asked the subjects to guess at their performance on these tests, they consistently found that poorest performers overestimated themselves. Someone in the 12th percentile, for example, would guess that they were in the 62nd percentile. Further investigation showed that the poorer performing subjects overestimated their ability simply because they weren’t good enough to know how difficult the tasks were. And they didn’t know it.

I think I see this come up in video games a lot, especially ones with competitive multiplayer or even just those with challenges that let you compare your performance against others via leaderboards. It’s exacerbated by the fact that the single player versions of games often allow you to be incompetent in the pursuit of fun. You can soak up bullets in Gears 3 instead of using cover effectively or choosing the right weapon for the situation. You can brute force your way through a campaign scenario in Starcraft II using just Marines instead of appropriately countering the enemy’s army build. You can kite mobs around in World of Warcraft instead of using teamwork and assembling a set of equipment or list of perks with the optimal resistances. In each case, you’re frankly quite incompetent, but the limited feedback you’re getting doesn’t allow you to know it because you’re simply not that good at the game.

"LOL! Okay guys I played this level in the campaign! Just tell Liara to use Singularity until they're all dead."

Think of it in terms of known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I may not know the the melting point of Beryllium or the cooldown on an enemy mage’s frost bolt spell, but I know I don’t know that. But there’s also stuff I don’t know that I don’t even know exists or is a factor. Like what implications that enemy Sniper’s loadout has on my ability to sneak up and backstab him in TF2. The latter is the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. The great player sees every misstep and every missed opportunity for perfect play, and beats himself up over it. The novice bumbles along missing all that but getting the occasional headshot and thinks he’s doing all right for himself.

Some games are learning to address this fact by forcing novice players to learn the true scope of the game. Starcraft II, despite the fact that I’ve been using it to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect, actually tries to address it by inviting players to complete multiplayer-oriented challenges where they learn things like unit counters, defending against rushes, and other advanced tactics.This kind of thing helps, as well as curating of community guides and videos illustrating everything a game has to offer.

So next time you find your ladder rankings of your K/D ratio not living up to your expectations, take a second to reflect about all the things you don’t know and how your experiences so far may have been designed to make you feel more competent than you really are. Then go pick up some tips from those totally awesome hardcore players who know how totally awesome they really aren’t.

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Two Lessons From Team Fortress 2

I’ve gotten sucked back in to Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately and taking notes of the changes that have happened since I last played. In the course of poking around the Mann Co Shop I’ve been reminded that they have some pretty smart cookies over there at Valve and I for one welcome our new cookie overlords. Specifically, I’ve noticed two things in the store that capitalize on concepts I’ve written about here before.

For those of you who don’t remember, Team Fortress 2 is a class-based shooter that has gone free-to-play and supports itself through purchases in the Mann Co Store. You can buy different weapons and cosmetic items there, for prices ranging from just a few cents to …well, I’ll get to that in a second.

The first thing I noticed is that the store is now making an interesting use out of something called “the endowment effect.” I’ve written about it before, and the quick version is that once we feel we own something, we value it more. The classic experimental example was when researcher Richard Thaler gave subjects a coffee cup, then shortly afterwords asked how much they would be willing to sell it for. Relative to those who were not given a cup but instead asked how much they would pay for it to own it, those who already owned it placed a higher dollar value on the thing.

Now it's YOUR Backburner. Is it worth two bits to you NOW?

TF2 gets you to endow certain items from its store by letting you try them out, in game, for free. After seven days, the item goes away, but you’re given a chance to buy it. According to the endowment effect, people might value their new Backburner (level 10 flame thrower) more than they did before, and be willing to pay more for it. But Valve is nice enough and/or smart enough to know that they could probably really drive the bargain home by giving you a 25% discount on the newly tested item. So double whammy. You’re likely to value the item more, plus you don’t want to lose your chance at a discount.

Unfortunately Valve seems to only be doing this test drive system for items that are already pretty cheap –in the 50-cent range. I think they could get more use out of it if they let you try it with a few more expensive items. Maybe even put some kind of one-per-week limit on it to prevent doing too crazy, or reduce the test drive period for newer items. ((Or you know what? I’ve got pallates full of these ManCo Supply Crates that I’m never going to use because I’m not gonna pay $2 to play a TF2 lottery. I’d trade them for a test run of a new item.)) They could even capitalize on envious reactions from other players who see you using the new item.

And on the topic of “more expensive items,” we have our next psychology lesson from TF2. Here, look at this:

I know, right? Right?

Yeah, you’re reading that right. You can now buy a virtual diamond ring in Team Fortress 2 that you can rename and then gift to another player. For $100. ONE. HUNDRED. REAL. DOLLARS. This boggled my mind when I first saw it, but then I realized that they besides cashing in on a few big spenders, the developers may be aiming to capitalize on an age-old sales trick: the contrast effect. Again, this was one of the first topics I wrote about for this blog, but the quickie version is that our perceptions of price (or more to the point, value) can be changed if we see a super high price ((Or a very cheap price, for that matter.)) off the bat. Retail sales people use this trick all the time by showing you a more expensive suit first, which makes the cheaper items two racks over seem a lot more affordable, let alone accessories like socks or belts. Ever poked your nose into an upscale clothing store and seen some absurd, $2,000 handbag on display up front? Who would pay that? Well, that’s not the point. The point is that it’s there to make the $200 handbags on the table next to it seem a heck of a lot more affordable –more so than if the super expensive item weren’t there.

Some people are witty AND rich! Too bad they're apparently already engaged...

This is what I think Valve is doing with the diamond ring item. Sure, letting you rename the item, give it to someone, and then broadcast that transaction to the entire Team Fortress 2 community –the whole community that’s online at the time, not just people on your server– will lead some people with more money than sense to have some fun like in the screenshot above. ((That’s a real screenshot I captured myself during a match, by the way.)) But I think the real benefit is that next to a $100 ring, that $13 hat for your Demoman looks a lot more affordable.

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Self-Perception Theory and Marketing through Avatars

I recently found out, via this article on Mindhacks.com, about an interesting paper by researcher Jeremy Bailenson in The Psychologist. ((Balenson, J. (2012). Doppelgangers — A New Form of Self? The Psychologist, 25, 36-38.)) In it, he reviews recent research on how viewing online representations of ourselves –like our avatars on the Xbox 360 or our Miis on the Nintendo Wii– can affect our behavior. He talks some about modeling healthy behavior and implanting false memories, but to me the most interesting and possibly the most grim part of the article was where he discussed how to advertise products through avatars and by doing so affecting consumer behavior. Even if we know perfectly well that it’s happening.

Citing research presented at a professional conference, ((Ahn, S. and Balenson, J. (2011). Embodied Experiences in Imersive Virtual Environments. Paper presented at the 97th Annual Conference of the National Communication Association, New Orleans, LA.)) Balenson describes how he and a colleague blatantly Photoshopped subjects’ heads onto the bodies of actors in advertisements. One participant in the study, for example, might have viewed an image of himself holding up a particular brand of soda and smiling like a idiot as if to endorse it. After the study, subjects tended not only to remember the (fictitious) brands better, but actually indicated greater preference to them relative to other options. This despite the fact that they were pretty sure they had never drank “Blorf brand soda” or sat in a professional photography studio and posed for the advertisements in question. ((Interestingly, social/professional networking site LinkedIn is apparently taking this concept to heart and running an ad campaign where they insert users’ profile pictures directly into representations of a client companies’ recruitment literature in an attempt at getting people to apply for jobs there.))

Okay, I fixed the eyebrows. NOW how much would you pay for this stupid bird?

And this sort of thing may be thanks to what some psychologists call “self-perception theory.” In a nutshell, this theory refers to how we tend to look at our own actions to infer our own attitudes and beliefs. It’s kind of a “I’m doing X, so I must be the kind of person who likes X.” In one study ((Frank, M., & Gilovich, T. (1988). The Dark Side of Self and Social Perception: Black Uniforms and Agression in Professional Sports. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 74-85.)) researchers dressed subjects in either black or white uniforms. Those in the black uniforms were observed to act with more aggression and toughness, keeping in line with their stereotypically villainous wardrobe. The researchers also argued (and showed with data) that this is why referees in professional sports are biased against teams that wear dark colors and are more likely to call penalties against them. Think of your avatar as a kind of uniform you wear (a notion supported by research, by the way), and you see the connection.

So, given all this I’m going to once again give out some evil ideas to those people in marketing. This kind of marketing-via-avatar thing could so easily be incorporated into video game avatars like those used by the Xbox. It’s not unusual for games to give out “avatar awards” for completing in-game actions. My little dude has a Locust mask from Gears 3, a sombrero from Red Dead Redemption, and a little Guilty Spark toy from Halo 3. Fun! But what if instead of watching my avatar play with a miniature RC Warthog I saw him chugging a can of Mountain Dew? Or perusing the latest issue of Wired magazine? Or gobbling fries from Burger King? According to the research described above, I’d be more likely to remember or even favor those brands over traditional advertising because there’s something psychologically important about seeing a representation of me interacting with them. Another study reported in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior ((Bailey, R. Wise, K., and Bolls, P. (2009). How Avatar Customizability Affects Children’s Arousal and Subjective Presence During Junk Food-Sponsored Online Video Games. CyberPsychology and Behavior, 12(3), 277-283).)) found that “advergames” designed to advertise junk like Pop Tarts and Fruit-By-The-Foot snacks to children were rated as more enjoyable when they let the player customize his or her avatar.

Heck, we don’t even have to bury this kind of thing in the Xbox dashboard. I imagine games could easily pull our likeness in the form of our avatar ((Assuming, of course, you’re not one of those people who make ridiculous looking avatars that look nothing like you.)) and display them to us holding up boxes of Stay-Free feminine hygiene products or Kibbles ‘n Bits dog food while we wait for levels to load or matchmaking to happen.

Well, maybe those are extreme examples. But you’d think that game companies would at least start using this kind of thing to cross-promote games. If I were EA, I wouldn’t include a snowboard with a SSX logo as an avatar reward in that game. I mean, the customer has already bought that game, right? I’d include a N7 jumper from Mass Effect 3. That’s what you want your customers envisioning themselves playing at that point and that’s what you want them associating with themselves when that game hits the shelves. Or you can show them holding up a box of dog food. Your choice.

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Ideal Self Image and Game Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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