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Anonymity and Blizzard Forums

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Loss Aversion and the Crackdown 2 Demo

One of the first articles I wrote for this site was about how to use loss aversion to get people to buy Xbox Live Arcade or Playstation Network games. The idea was that during the demo for the game you award people achievements or trophies, then threaten to take them away unless they buy the full game. I speculated that this would result in increased sales because of how people hate to lose something once they have it and simply owning something can inflate how much we value it.

Well, the folks at Microsoft and/or Ruffian games seem to be thinking along the same lines ((If not reading this site –HI GUYS! SEND ME CRACKDOWN 2 SCHWAG, PLZ!)) because upon downloading and firing up last week’s Crackdown 2 demo I saw this screen:

Crackdown 2

For the vision impaired among you, the message conveyed is that the demo allows you to earn achievements that will automagically transfer over when you buy and play the full game. Sure enough, I futzed around with the demo and earned an achievement. Upon exiting, I got this message:

Crackdown 2

I’d be fascinated to see what this does to Crackdown 2’s sales numbers and how many people actually end up shuffling achievements over from the demo. It’s a great idea regardless, but it’s worth noting that it’s not quite what I had in mind in my earlier article. What I thought would be most effective was actually giving the person the achievement and associated gamer points so that they show up everywhere you normally see them, then taking them away if the person exited the demo without buying. What Ruffian did was just say “you earned these in the demo, we’ll give them to you in the game, too.” It’s not quite the same thing, because it doesn’t trigger the idea that you’re going to lose something unless you act.

Maybe there are logistical reasons why this can’t be done in a demo or maybe it would be in violation of some “Don’t be too awesome” rule in Microsoft’s certification process. I don’t know. But I do think that Ruffian could have gotten almost there if they had simply changed the wording they used on the screen above to something like this:

Well done! You have unlocked the following achievements and earned the gamerscore points that go with them. They are waiting to be added to your account once you purchase the full version of Crackdown 2. If you don’t, these achievements will be lost forever. Don’t let that happen, Agent!

I bet that would have worked out a lot better, given how it casts the achievements as a potential loss rather than a gain, and we react much more strongly to losses than gains. What about you? Are you more likely to buy the game because you’ll get to keep your achievements?

It’s also worth noting that the one thing I really hated about the demo was the timer that forced you to restart (with a fresh game and a wimpy Agent) after just 30 minutes of play. Again, I wrote before about how people –especially Westerners– hate the idea of being on a meter and experiencing their service or product as a series of little losses. Of course, the Crackdown 2 demo doesn’t perfectly fit the bill here since you’re not paying for it, but the human brain isn’t always rational and I bet that my distaste for the timer is partially due to the flat rate bias.

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The Psychology of Games Reading List

If I were to compile a list of frequently asked questions people send me, the first would be, “Hey, I have this awesome idea. WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT!” The answer to this question is, “Uh, okay. I’ll put it on the list. Stop yelling.”

Another common question is “I love this topic. What kinds of books would you recommend?” This one takes a little more time to answer, but since I keep getting it I thought I’d recommend some of my favorite popular books in psychology. None of these deals with video games, but if you’re interested in the psychology behind this stuff, you can’t go wrong with any of these recommendations.

Best Social Psychology Book: Influence: The Art and Science of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

The central thrust of Cialdini’s book is on psychological mechanisms that elicit what he calls the “Click, Whirrr” phenomenon. That is, things that cause us to react automatically and without thinking about it. As you might guess from the title, most of these Click, Whirrr mechanisms have to do with how people influence us –to like them, to give them things, to do what they ask us to, and most often to buy things from them. Each chapter focuses on a particular psychological lever, like reciprocity, liking, scarcity, consistency bias, and so forth. Cialdini wraps up each segment of the book with advice about how to recognize these manipulations and how to defend against them.

What I love about this book is how every topic is made imminently practical and relevant to my every day life. There’s lots of discussion about science and studies, but everything is in the context of things that matter to us from buying groceries to volunteering to making friends. It’s very easy to read and quite likely to contain a lesson or two that will stick with you for the rest of your life.

Some of my articles drawn from what I learned in Influence:

Best Neuroscience Book: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

Strictly speaking, I’m not sure Jonah Lehrer is actually a neuroscientist, but he is an astute student of the field and he does a good job writing about it. Like other books near it on the bookstore shelf, How We Decide tackles a lot of the same “how does psychology affects what we decide?” questions, but it looks less at things like cognitive biases, decision-making heuristics, and social identities and more at the world of neurons, brain chemistry, and bits of gray matter with names ending in “-alamus.” I liked his chapters on reward seeking behavior particularly well.

Most of the conclusions that Lehrer comes to are similar to those arrived at by psychologists, but it’s really interesting to see how he does it with a largely different set of tools. And like all of the books in this list, it’s very readable.

Some of my articles drawn from what I learned in How We Decide and Lehrer’s blog:

Best Behavioral Economics Book: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

If you want to get a feel for where the field of behavioral economics (basically, judgment and decision making in the real world) you could do a lot worse than Predictably Irrational and probably not any better. In it, Ariely examines what economics and human decision making in general look like when you stop pretending that people are completely rational. What’s great about this book is how the author draws from his own, deep well of experimental research to deal with practical issues related to every-day decision making. He covers things like the difference between economic and social rules in exchanges, the power of “free,” what makes people steal, what makes us think irrationally, and what makes us honest. There are also chapters that make the bulwark concepts of behavioral economics easy to understand –things like anchoring, the endowment effect, conformation bias, and more.

The best part of Ariely’s writing is how he seamlessly weaves descriptions of experimental procedures and results into those practical issues. You’ll see very clearly why the studies he and his colleagues conduct matter to you and everyone around you. There’s hardly any inferential leaps to be made; it’s all very practical stuff that will change the way you think about a lot of things that you do. Really, if you were to only read one book on this list, I’d say Predictably Irrational would be your best bet.

Some of my articles drawn from what I learned in Predictably Irrational:

Second Best Behavioral Economics Book: Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

I almost left this book off the list because I think Ariely did the behavioral economics a little better, but ultimately I think I have to recommend it because Nudge is good enough and covers enough different ground to stand on its own. This is in large part because of how the authors widen their scope to encompass not just personal decision-making, but also law, public policy, and politics that are born from those individual decisions. So topics range from how we can improve people’s decisions about what to eat to how to support socially progressive issues.

The book gets a little meandering in the back quarter, but generally it’s very tight and the authors have a slightly cheeky tone that makes it easy to read and easy to relate to. And again, many of the topics, like the status quo bias, compensatory decision-making, and anchoring are made relevant to bigger issues like saving the environment, social progress, organ donation, charitable giving, saving for retirement, and choosing a prescription drug plan. It’s some of the same stuff as in Predictably Irrational, but writ large.

Some of my articles drawn from what I learned in Nudge:

So, that should get you started. But what about you all? Have you read any other books that you think are worth recommending?

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The Psychology of Sony’s Playstation Move Announcement

Last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or “E3” if you’re in a hurry) the two big stories for console makers were 3D1 and new motion controllers. As I watched Sony’s press conference where they pitched the Playstation Move2 something struck me about the way that they presented the pricing for the product.

Peter Dille, a Senior Vice President at Sony, started the announcement by throwing up a $49.99 price up on the screen behind him. The crowd, which had been worried that the Move and its competitor Kinect on the Xbox 360 would come out in the $150 range, seemed really pleased by this. There was even cheering! That mood tanked, though, when Dille plunged ahead and noted that, uh, actually that was just for ONE part of the thingie. To get the quasi-optional “navigation controller” you’d have to drop another $29.99. You could FEEL the wave of “WTF?” that swept through the theater. Then Dille went on to point out that you’d need to buy a Playstation Eye camera accessories to get the full effect, but that they were bundling it, some sports game, and the Move controller (but not the navigation controller) for $99.99. Here, you can see it in the first 30 seconds of this video:

Those adept at the maths quickly figured out that if you wanted to buy all four things –the Move, the navigation controller, the game, and the Eye camera– you’d be out about $130 give or take a penny or two even with the bundles.

I myself quickly started thinking through Sony’s announcement from a psychology angle, and my first thought was that they had screwed up. I wrote last week about how our preference for all-you-can-eat/play pricing is rooted in the fact that we experience diminishing sensitivity to increases in losses as they go up –we experience a bigger jump in aversion between a loss of $5 and a loss of $10 than we experience between losses of $1,005 and $1,010. The thing is, prospect theory3 holds that we have similarly diminishing sensitivity to gains. Look at the graph!

Gain Curve

Figure 1: Diminishing Sensitivity to Gains. Uh, sorry about recycling an earlier graph, but I kind of ran out of time.

What this means is that we more enjoy getting lots of little things that add up more than we like getting one big lump of thing, even if their objective values are the same. Finding a series of four $5 bills is going to make us more giddy than finding one $20. Or, to put it another way, according to our mental accounting:

$5 + $5 +5 +$5 > $20

That’s just how our emotional brains work.

And it hasn’t gone unnoticed by advertisers and marketers, who have followed its lead to create what I call the famous “But wait! There’s more!” style of pitching your wares. Just look at any late night infomercial for an example. “Order now and you not only get the juicer for $99.99, but you get the a chopper attachment, a recipe book, five pounds of mangoes, and this adorable kitten –all for free!” True masters of this pitch will stretch out the “free” bonus gifts, parceling them out like a trail of candy so that you perceive them as a series of separate additions to the offer instead of one big bundle. This is a more effective sales technique than just saying “You get all this stuff for $99.99″ because it side steps that diminishing sensitivity to gains.

This is, in fact, the boat I thought Sony was missing with the way they did their Move price announcement. It seemed to me that it would have made more sense to come out at a price of $129.99 for the Move, but then systematically and not too quickly note that for that price in addition to the Move controller they’re also going to throw in a navigation controller –valued at $29.99! And a Playstation Eye accessory that currently goes for $39.99! Does that sound like a good deal? But wait! What if we threw in a free game valued at $59.99? OMFG! Dude! All for $129.99? That’s CRAZY! That’s like getting the Move controller FOR FREE!

Playstation Moves

But wait! Buy now and we'll throw in 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 Move controllers for the price of 4! What a deal!

I got to thinking, though, and eventually came to the conclusion that Sony probably beat me to: despite the power of what I describe above, the way they did it was probably smarter but because of a different psychological phenomenon: anchoring.

You may remember anchoring as our tendency to give undue weight to the first figure4 we hear when determining the value of something, even if the number is completely unrelated. As I mentioned in my article about the efficacy of those Steam bundle sales, behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his colleagues did a nifty experiment5 where they effected auction prices just by having bidders write the last two digits of their social security number on the top of their bid sheets. Those with high numbers (like 85) bid way more on items than those with low numbers (like 18). Anchoring!

Sony’s presenter capitalized on anchoring, quite deliberately I bet, when he threw up the $49.99 price for just the Move controller. There will be plenty of chances for Sony to advertise the value of bundles using diminishing sensitivity and the “But wait! There’s more!” tropes. Its job at E3 was to come out ahead of Microsoft in terms of how expensive people see its motion controller as when THAT was an important question on everyone’s mind. By throwing out the $49.99 number instead of the $129.99 number, Sony accomplished that. Sure, anybody can do the math, and judging by the audible groans from the audience plenty of people did. But that’s not the point. The point is that you6 are going to anchor on the lower number and think of the Move as relatively cheap.

And just imagine how much more effective that $49.99 anchor would have been if Microsoft really had announced the $149.99 price everyone expected for its motion controller, Kinect. I bet some folks at Sony were pretty annoyed that things didn’t break that way.

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APB: All Points Bulletin or Aggregated Payment Bias? Both.

Back in April of this year, Realtime Worlds announced the pricing model for its soon to be released MMO, All Points Bulletin, or “APB” as the cool kids say. A lot of people were looking forward to the futuristic cops vs. robbers game, but the announcement about the pricing elicited jeers from a lot of players. Here’s how the press release at the time broke it down: 1

  • Buy the game for the MSRP of $50
  • Play 50 hours for “free.”
  • Buy additional game time using one of two options:
    • $6.99 for 20 hours OR
    • $9.99 for unlimited hours during the next 30 days 2

Upon hearing this, the nerd rage was palpable on some forums. For sure, this was partially over the fact that APB was to have any monthly fee AT ALL, despite that being par for the MMO course. But there seemed to be two other targets of the virtual hand wringing. First, the play time included with the retail product was doled out in hours (50 of them, to be precise) rather than the traditional 30 days of unlimited play. Second, the $6.99 for 20 hours of game time seemed a bitter pill to swallow, apparently because people didn’t want to pay by the hour. People seemed to willfully ignore the fact that the game DOES include traditional 30 days of unlimited play for one flat rate option, though. 3

APB Screen

A typical fan reaction to APB's metered payment plan.

Now, I’m actually not 100% sure as of the time of this writing what APB’s pricing models will look like when the game launches. I can’t find anything on the official site, and Realtime World’s designer Dave Jones recently told GamePro magazine said that “gamers won’t have to commit to any kind of monthly subscription fee or utilize a traditional microtransaction system.” I’m not sure what that means, but regardless I think it’s still interesting to focus on people’s reaction to that initial press release in May. Why were they so turned off by the pay by the hour options?

As it sometimes turns out, psychology holds the answer. But let’s get there by way of a discussion about cell phones.

Phones and MMOs

Earlier this year I needed a new cell phone but my wife forced me to admit that I didn’t really need anything fancy. So I went shopping and, being a completely rational decision maker, I selected one of those cheap, pay-as-you-go phones where you buy prepaid minutes. The plan I selected essentially worked out like this:

  1. Buy the phone for the MSRP of $50
  2. Get $35 worth of air time included for “free.”
  3. Pay $0.10 per minute for all calls, $0.20 per text message
  4. Buy additional air time as needed

Does that look familiar? It’s not too far off from APB’s “$6.99 per 20 hours” option, but more on that in a minute.

I could have easily gone for a $60 a month plan that let me spend unlimited hours on the phone, only taking breaks to send unlimited text messages. Or I could have sought out a plan that gave me hundreds of minutes per month, which equates practically unlimited minutes for my purposes. And not only would I have had plenty of company, many of us would probably have been overpaying. A 2009 article in the LA Times 4 reported on a study showing that the average user was paying over $3.00 a minute when you considered how much they paid and how many of their plan’s minutes they actually used. But not me! Bravo! Hooray my precious rationality!

Only it still doesn’t feel right. Because I know that every time I flip that thing open to make a call I have to pay $.10 a minute I’m actually loathe to use the phone. I keep calls as short as possible, I groan when people ask me to text them, and when I’m traveling I’ll actually stalk my wife on Facebook until she comes online so I can ask her to call me on her phone.

A Bias for Flat Rates

The reason for my discomfort is something called “the flat rate bias.” Generally, people like flat rates and don’t like being on a meter. 5 But why does the flat rate bias exist? Well, as is often the case with psychology, it’s turtles all the way down 6 because that’s just how people are.

A bit of work by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky known as “prospect theory” does a pretty good job of taking us down ONE turtle, though. One thing that Kahneman and Tversky found was a “law of diminishing sensitivity.” Basically, this means that the amount we wince at any one reasonable losses eventually flattens out. If you graphed it for a random person, it may look something like this:

Diminishing Sensitivity

Figure 1: Artist's rendition of diminishing sensitivity to losses. Actual curves may vary by person and situation.

The idea is that our comparative displeasure at different losses ramps up quickly but then levels off. This is known as “diminishing sensitivity” 7 So, for example, we experience a bigger jump in aversion between a loss of $5 and a loss of $10 than we experience between losses of $1,005 and $1,010. It’s related to the reason why we’ll feel great about saving $.30 on a tube of toothpaste, but probably won’t bother to drive across the street in order to save $3 –ten times as much!– on a flat screen TV. 8

One implication of diminishing sensitivity is that we experience greater subjective pain from multiple losses than we do to one big loss of equal value. Answer honestly: implications for your insurance aside, would you be more pissed about three $30 parking tickets over three days or one $90 ticket? Researchers have posed exactly that kind of question, and found that people generally prefer the one big loss over multiple little ones. Why? Because of diminishing sensitivity to losses:

  • Pain of $30 loss = 100 “pain points”
  • Pain of $90 loss = 250 “pain points”
  • 100 X 3 = 300
  • 300 > 250

This is the same reason people buy unlimited or excessive minutes on their cell phone plans. We’d rather have one big cut that seems less painful overall than endure a thousand (or 900 + unlimited mobile to mobile) cuts as the minutes fall away one by one. As a side note, it’s also the reason that rent-by-mail services like GameFly are so appealing relative to renting games one at a time. It’s preferable to sweep all our losses into one big, monthly pile and feel like we have “unlimited” rentals for that price than it would be to rent one game at a time by the day or even by the week. Ditto for Netflix and DVDs. Yet how many of us have let games or DVDs sit around for days or weeks before getting to them? Personally, I know that by my calculations renting “The Hangover” from Netflix just cost me over $11 because I held on to it for 5 weeks before finally watching it last night. Not exactly a great deal.

Flat Rate Bias and APB Revisited

So, armed now with this information about the flat rate bias and diminishing sensitivity, let’s circle back to one of the APB pricing described in that April press release, particularly that “$6.99 for 20 hours” option. My guess is that most people won’t go that route because of the flat rate bias. It’ll just be too painful to feel every individual hour pass away and think that it’s another one your prepaid hours gone forever. In contrast, people who paid just a little more can feel comparatively less pain because they experience just one loss instead of a parade of many smaller losses that feel like they add up to more.

The funny thing is, though, that like those people paying over $3.00 a minute for their cell phone calls and me with my rented copy of “The Hangover,” there will be some number of APB players who OVER pay by selecting the $9.99/month, unlimited hours plan. Because they play fewer than 20 hours in a month but think it’s worth it not to have to feel like they’re “wasting” limited minutes all the time.

In actuality, Realtime World should probably be commended for giving its players the option to save money with a metered plan, especially since it’s in their financial interest to take advantage of the flat rate bias and encourage those people to over pay. Yet they’re not. I asked MMO game designer Nik Davidson of The Amazing Society what he thought, since he had presented a pretty great talk at this year’s Login conference, in part about this very topic. ” I think what they’re doing is brilliant,” Nik said. “People love having options. Being able to choose between two ways of paying and feeling good about the choice they made makes it much more likely that they’ll make a choice at all. I think a relatively small minority of their users will choose the rated plan, but simply having the rated plan will encourage more people overall to play and pay.”

I couldn’t agree more. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go psych myself up to add $20 to my prepaid cell phone balance.

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Deindividuation + Character Creator = Stab Them in the Face

While doing research for an article on the effects of anonymity on player behavior, I came across a fascinating study that I couldn’t find a place for in that piece, but which I wanted to share somewhere.

In an article appearing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology ((Watson, R.J. (1973) Investigation into Deindividuation Using a Cross-Cultural Survey Technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 25, 342-345.)) cultural anthropologist R. J. Watson considered the question of what makes it easier for young men to kill enemies ((Or anyone, really)) while at war. Deindividuation theory holds that people who lose their sense of self-identity are more likely to lay aside internally held morals and look to the situation or the dominant morality of a crowd for guidance. You see this kind of thing most starkly in people who become anonymous and blend into groups.

Think about it: soldiers and warriors throughout history have changed their appearance when they go into service, especially when they prepare for active battle. At a minimum, they change their clothes, hair style, and mannerisms. Obviously, there are various benefits to such standardization, including making it easier to outfit an army, build group cohesion, and tell friend from foe. But at the more extreme ends, warriors apply war paint, piercings, masks, or make other drastic changes to their appearances. Watson wondered if soldiers and warriors who most radically change their appearance were more likely to not only get on with the killing, but be more willing to engage in more brutal acts like mutilation and torture. To test this hypothesis, he looked at archival data about world cultures compiled by anthropologists, missionaries, and other first-hand observers.

The results were pretty stark and pretty clear: in 90 percent of the cultures where wartime opponents were mutilated or tortured ((And killed; don’t forget killed)) the acts were done by warriors who radically changed their appearance before going into battle. One could see this as support for the supposition that when you make a person feel less like an individual and more like a faceless part of a group, they’re more likely to go whole hog when you sic them on the enemy in a combat situation. Then, when peace time comes, they can step out of that identity by reverting their appearance. ((And, of course, nobody means disrespect to our (or your) men and women in uniform; this study looked at acts far beyond donning simple Army fatigues))

Dragon Age Character Creator

As you can see, the addition of ...well, actually this one does kind of look like me, so maybe it's a bad example.

This got me thinking about character creators in video games. A lot of games allow extensive control over the appearance of your in-game identity, letting you adjust eye size, nose position, cheek height, chin prominence, and many frankly ridiculous other factors. Some of these are so extensive that you might be able to create, if you wanted to, someone that looks quite a bit like YOU instead of applying all kinds of fierce tatoos, face paint, piercings, or bowler hats. (If you actually do have fierce facial tattoos, then, well, that’s cool. That’s cool.) Other games even let you use photographs of yourself to virtually put yourself in the game.

So, given Watson’s findings above, would you expect people who made in-game avatars to look like them act differently, on average, from those who make savage looking avatars that look nothing like them? I think so. This is one of those times when I wish I had an awesome research lab complete with computers and a popcorn machine, because I’d love to do this study. Deindividuation theory suggests that playing as someone who looks like you would lead you to pay more attention to your internal moral compass (whatever that may be) in the same way that losing your identity behind a costume would make you more likely to adopt the morals of those around you or the ones implied by your environment or even the costume itself. Heck, one study ((Froming, W. J., Walker, G. R. & Lopyan, K. J (1982). Public and private self-awareness: When personal attitudes conflict with societal expectations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychoogy, 18, 476-487.)) even showed that simply placing a mirror in front of subjects led to this kind of effect, so it make sense. Maybe you’d have a harder time playing that “evil” character in the latest Bioware RPG.

So, anyway, somebody get out there and do this research. Then when you publish it I’ll settle for being listed as the second author.

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Three Reasons Why We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles

Steam, the digital game distribution platform owned by Valve, often has these weird bundles for sale where they cram together, for example, every id Software or every Rockstar game or every game featuring squirrels into one package. One message board I frequent has a mega thread dedicated to gaming bargains, and doing a search for “Damn you, Steam” produces results like these:

“Damn… maybe I want Colonization. Have CIV IV & BTS on Disc. Should I just get Colonization @ $10.19 or just get them all and have on Steam for a wee bit more. Damn you Steam.”

“Damn you Steam! More games to buy that I’ll probably never get to play.”

“Damn you Steam. I had just successfully resisted the urge to buy games at both the holiday sale from GoGamer (Heroes of M&M 5 Complete and EU:Rome at $10 each were tempting, and Company of Heores Opposing Front for $5 is a steal) and the last round of Steam Deals (King Arthur especially was calling my name), and now you put Civ IV complete (I own none of the Civ IV stuff) out there for $14. My game backlog can’t take much more of this!!”

“This is madness. I am buying games for a theoretical PC that I will build someday (maybe) so I can play them. Damn you, Steam.”

“Got $170 sitting my cart. Staring at it trying to figure out how to cut it down some. Damn you, Steam.”

People are talking like Steam is forcing them to pounce on such deals when they happen even though they already have a huge backlog and may actually already own physical versions of half the games included.

What makes these plainly ridiculous bundles so attractive? I’m glad you asked, because I can think of at least three psychological principles at play here.

Scarcity

First, In marketing there’s a well worn principal called “the scarcity effect.” When something is scarce, it automatically becomes more desirable to us than it would be if it were available everywhere we looked. This “available in limited number” trick shows up everywhere from collectable trading cards to special “limited” editions of new game releases.1 Ever noticed a store front that had a “going out of business!” sign in the window for months on end? That’s the owners trying to capitalize on the scarcity effect. Buy now, sucker, or it’ll be gone!

Consider a simple 1975 experiment by psychologist Stephen Worchel to provide an illustration of this concept involving baked goods.2 Posing as a consumer products survey, the experimenters offered subjects a chocolate chip cookie from one of two jars. One of the jars had many cookies in it. The other had only a few. Of course, people reported the cookies from the mostly empty jars as more delicious, more desirable, and more expensive. This despite that the cookies in both jars WERE THE SAME COOKIES.

But Steam and similar download services like Direct to Drive sells digital games, right? They’re not cookies that are about to disappear, there is literally an UNLIMITED SUPPLY of the 1s and 0s that comprise these digitally distributed games. True, but the scarcity effect still applies, because it’s not so much the scarcity of the physical product that we react to, but the opportunity to buy it. Often these bundles are put up a limited time sales and people HATE losing opportunities to do things once they think they’re within reach.

Notice the WEEKEND ONLY! verbiage. Act now or you'll lose!

Obscuring True Value

The second psychological principle at play here is the fact that it’s hard for shoppers to look at a bundle like that and understand what its true value is. William Poundstone, author of Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It) calls this the “value meal” strategy when describing the psychology of restaurant menu design. How much cheaper is it to get the bundle? What about if I super size it? With curly fries? Oh forget it, just give me the #3.

Likewise, we look at a massive bundle of digitally distributed games and think about how much could I get those older games for elsewhere? Could I find them for sale used, and for how much? Could I rent or borrow any of them? For the games I already own, how much is it worth to me to have them available through Steam so that I don’t have to dig out my old boxes and CD keys? It’s a psychological truism that we have limited cognitive processing power at any one time, and when our brains are tied up considering these questions, we’ve got fewer cycles to devote to thinking about other stuff, like how much we want to actually PLAY the games and to avoid other irrational pitfalls.

Not that this keeps the folks who run Steam from telling us exactly how much the bundle is worth, though, which brings me to the third psychological factor in play: anchoring.

Anchoring

In the context of the psychology of prices, anchoring refers to presenting shoppers with a number in order to get them to “anchor” their perceptions of value on either a high or low absolute. The “low ball” offer is the classic example –open a negotiation over price with a really low number and you’ll set the stage so that what you’re actually willing to pay looks higher in comparison.

As a simple but elegant example, consider an experiment done by psychological wizards Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.3 The researchers asked one group of subjects to estimate the product of these numbers:

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

And then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8.

Those of you with a grade school education may know that because of how multiplication works these products are equal.4 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.

Similarly, behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his collegues conducted a study5 where he 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. CRAZY.

Not one, but two anchors here

How does this relate to those Steam bundles? Well, look closely at one of those promotions and you’ll see that the marketing gurus for the service readily list the retail value of the bundle if you paid full price for all games individually. That’s your anchor; seeing that number will cause many people to set their perceptions of the bundle’s value much higher than if they had seen the sale price alone. In addition, the difference between the “unbundled” and sale prices can trigger the contrast effect, which could be considered a fourth psychological principle at play.

So there you have it: you’re broke and have way too many games to play because you don’t want to lose opportunities to buy something, you’re befuddled by pricing, and your perceptions are anchored by arbitrary “normally sells for…” prices. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go play Commander Keen, Doom, Final Doom, Doom II, Doom 3, Hexen, Hexen II, Heretic, Quake, Quake II, Quake III Arena, Wolfenstein 3D, Spear of Destiny, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and more mission packs than I care to think about.

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Login 2010 Lecture Slides

Last Thursday I did a talk at 2010 Login Conference in super nifty downtown Seattle. The title of the talk was “The Psychology of Games: Why We Do What We Do When Playing With Friends (And Screw That Other Guy).” I was pretty proud of myself for getting a talk accepted when it included a mild vulgarity in the title and had promised to make the slides and my notes available on the site after the conference. BEHOLD:

Login 2010 talk

Perform clicking motions above to download a .pdf version of the presentation, including my stupid little personal notes.

Anyone who is a regular reader of this site may be a little disappointed, though, because it may appear that most of the talk was based on articles I’ve already posted here. Not true! It’s actually the case that the articles posted here were based on the lecture. I had to submit a detailed outline with my proposal several months ago, and after it was accepted I decided to create blog posts out of the stuff I was pulling together for the talk. In academia, we call this technical process “squeezing blood out of a stone.” Or a turnip. Your choice.

Anyway, I think the talk went fairly well, and I was pleased to see a handful of regular readers/commenters there. ((HI GUYS! THANKS FOR COMING!)) One of them (“Psychochild” I think) even did some impromptu group participation by shouting out “Line B!” in the part of the lecture illustrating the social proof concept. When I get up in front of a crowd I actually don’t see it when I look at it, but I was told later that the room was mostly full and people were taking notes. Because the computer that I was using chewed up some of my notes formatting I got a little lost and missed making a few points, but I think I got the main points and came in just about 30 seconds under the 60 minute time limit. Look, here’s even a picture of me gesturing in a semi-academic way:

Login Talk

"Rest assured, ladies and gentlemen, that the quality of this presentation is such that several of the slides within contain extreme vulgarities."

And so, with that I’m going to shut up about this whole Login talk thing for a while. All the talks were video taped, however, so I’ll break that silence once the conference folks post them online for you to view. Not just for mine, but also because there were several other really good talks with psychological angles on things like addiction, motivation, and mental accounting that I think anyone visiting this site ((Besides those of you who are web search engine spiders)) would be interested in. So I’ll highlight those once they’re available.

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Irrational Games on The Psychology of Fear

Irrational Behavior Podcast
You may have heard about a little outfit called “Irrational Games” whose members can claim varying degrees of responsibility for scary and suspenseful titles like System Shock, Bioshock, and the Thief games. They do a semi-regular podcast about their games called “Irrational Behavior” that is a bit like a cross between “This American Life” and Grand Ballroom C at a tourettes syndrome convention. It’s great.

A recent episode is of particular interest to me, as it deals with the psychology of fear and what people are afraid of. Podcast producer Shawn Elliot had actually approached me to appear on the episode to talk about the psychology of fear, but while I would have loved to I had to admit that I didn’t really know anything about the topic and should probably pass. That was probably a good call, as Shawn got some nifty information by talking to an actual expert, Indiana university Telecommunications Professor Andrew Weaver who has studied fear in different kinds of media:

Fear is arousing. Arousal in and of itself can be enjoyable or attractive if we’re bored or if we’re the type of person who likes to be more physiologically aroused. And fear certainly can do that. Experiencing mediated fear gives us the opportunity to experience fear in a controlled way. Where we have the potential, at least, to master our fears, to control threats, in a way that we can’t in real life.

And he goes on. In addition to that, there are interviews with some of the artists at Irrational Games about how they create a sense of fear, and it seems that these folks have as good a grasp on the subject as any psychologist. It’s a good listen. Click here.

Shawn also goes around the Irrational Games offices quizzing people on what they’re afraid of, and some of the answers are pretty funny. By the way, if he had asked me, I would have said “Jupiter.” As in the planet. For some reason the thought of something that big, that far away, and that alien scared me as a kid. I still tense up just a little bit if I see a picture of that particular planet.

What about you? What are you afraid of? Has it ever showed up in a game?

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Closed Betas and Group Culture

A while back I wrote an article about the Attraction-Selection-Attrition model that I thought could explain why gamers choose what guild, clan, or message board community that they do. You can read the article for the details, but the gist of it is that people…

  • Are attracted to organizations that share their values
  • Are selected by organizational membership gatekeepers based on how well their values match the organizational culture
  • Leave organizations over time as their values become (or are revealed to be) out of synch with the organizational culture

Founders, early members, and leaders have a disproportionate impact on defining values, which we call the “organizational culture.”

Recently we’ve been hearing an awful lot about two high profile closed game betas: StarCraft II and Halo Reach. It occurred to me that the ASA model of organizational choice could actually be applied to explain what kinds of people are attracted to closed betas and what lasting effects they have on player bases.

Halo Reach

You have failed the secret group handshake!

First, people who like the game series and the subculture around it are attracted to the beta. These are probably going to be your most hardcore fans –people who gush enthusiasm for the game and everything that goes with it. Casual fans or non-fans are not likely to even be interested at this point without coaxing.

Second, those fans are willing to go through some pretty crazy hurdles to get selected for membership into that beta testing group. They’ll preorder your nutso collector’s edition. They’ll subscribe to services they don’t want just to get into the beta, or they’ll buy Halo ODST as much for the Reach beta code as the game. And we all heard those stories about early StarCraft II beta keys going for hundreds of dollars or more on places like eBay.

All along the way, the beta testers are defining the culture for the group by forming explicit or unstated but understood agreements about what kind of behavior is allowed, encouraged, or unwanted. If everyone in the Halo Reach beta is foul-mouthed and hyper-competitive how much of that do you think is due to those shared expectations formed by early adopters eager to get selected into those ranks? ((Answer: quite a bit, though it’s worth noting that it’s also a carry-over from the previous games.))

The third piece of the model is admittedly a little sketchy, as the beta group doesn’t really experience attrition of these fans in the same way that employers have employee turnover. If a beta opens up to the public or a game goes retail the hardcore beta tester groups aren’t likely to leave ((Unless they think the game isn’t worth paying for, but that’s another issue)) but there MAY very well be tension between the old beta testers and the new “scrubs” that flood the game. And beta testers may try to create their own sub-groups and isolate themselves in their own sub-culture.

Anyone have personal experience with this kind of thing?