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The Power of You. No, Wait, Others. I Meant The Power of Others

Note: This article originally appeared in my column for Gamasutra.

Okay folks, I’m going to nerd out a bit but bear with me. There was this show that my wife used to like watching called Star Trek: The Next Generation. In one episode Captain Picard is being held captive by the Evil Alien of the Week. Said Evil Alien twirls his space mustache, gestures to a bank of four lights, and asks Picard how many lights he sees. When Picard says “Four” Evil Alien is all like “No way, dude, there are FIVE lights,” but Picard is like “F you, buddy. There are only four lights.” Also there are painful electric shocks involved, but Picard refuses to see five lights.

Turns out that most of us is no Jean Luc Picard ((Thank God, because that guy is SUCH a nerd.)) because we’re apt to disbelieve evidence obvious to our own eyes when the conditions are right. And we don’t even need a big scary alien dude looming over us; all we need are a few strangers in the room with us saying that they totally see five lights.

In the 1950s psychologist Soloman Asch conducted a series of experiments ((Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity: A minority of one against a unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs, 70.)) where he gave members of a group an index card with a line drawn on it. Asch then projected a set of three different lines onto a screen and asked subjects to identify which one matched the one on the cards. All three lines on the screen were different, so it was a task so simple that anyone with two eyes and a brain behind them could get it right every time. Heck, in a pinch one eye would do. It looked kind of like this:

conformity experiment

Which of the lines on the right matches the one on the left?

And so subjects performed admirably for the first three rounds or so. But eventually one or two subjects in the group started to immediately give answers that were obviously wrong. Like saying Line A was the longest when it was clearly the shortest. Very quickly, more and more subjects started repeating the obvious mistake, saying things that would clearly look wrong to any starship Captain.

WTF? What was going on? Well, what was going on was that only one of the subjects in the experiments was actually a subject. The rest were actors in the employ of the experimenter ((What we call “confederates” in the biz)) and were purposely jumping in with obviously wrong answers just to see what the real subject would do. Turns out that in three quarters of the subjects in these experiments let their choice be influenced by the others, even when it should have been obvious that this was bananas.What’s more, in post-experiment debriefing interviews, subjects rationalized their choices by saying that their initial observations must have been wrong if everyone else was saying the opposite. They weren’t just PRETENDING to see things differently, they REALLY DID.

Turns out that when the tasks become more difficult or have less clearly defined “correct” answers, the phenomenon becomes even more accute. Asch did some follow up studies where he asked subjects questions about politics (such as what were the most critical political issues of the day) and found that he could influence people’s answers by inserting confederates into the group who asserted certain answers. Other studies have shown that bartenders or barristas can get you to tip more if they prime their tip jars with their own cash, simply because it makes you think that everyone else is tipping generously ((Cialdini, R. (2009). Influence: Science and Practice. Boston, MA: Pearson.)) These studies ties in with a lot of other things we know about human nature when it comes to conformity, submission to authority, and peer pressure. We’re often very willing to look to our peers –or even complete strangers– to define reality for us.

So what does this have to do with video games? Glad you asked. I’m sure you’ve noticed that you can’t shop on many online stores these days without being shown the ratings given to each product by other shoppers. Go shop for a new release on Amazon.com or GameStop.com and you’ll see user ratings quite prominently. Most websites that feature game reviews also have user reviews alongside their “official” ones, and file download sites like FilePlanet.com list not only download counts, but star ratings as well. See where I’m going with this? Well, keep reading anyway.

In their book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness ((Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New York, NY: Penguin Books.)) authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein describe a study by sociologist Matthew Salganik and his colleagues at Princeton ((Salganik, M., Dodds, P., & Watts, D. (2006). Experimental study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural market. Science, 311, 854-856.)) where the researchers had over 14,000 people visit a faux music download site and browse through music by previously unknown bands before deciding which songs to download. Half the subjects were asked to pick songs based just on song name, band name, and a sample. ((This would be the “control group” that your Psychology 101 professor is always talking about.)) The other half had all that info, but could also see how many times the song had been downloaded. Psychologists are always pulling crap like this.

What do you think happened based on what I’ve written so far above? Well, turns out that subjects exposed to the download counts were WAY more likely to download songs that they thought others had downloaded lots, and were WAY LESS likely to try music that they thought nobody else was choosing. The quality of the song still mattered, but so did how often subjects thought the song had been downloaded by their peers. Songs that did so-so in the control group were turned into smash hits among those in the experimental group simply by displaying their download counts.

Now, I’m not accusing Amazon.com of inflating its ratings to sell more books ((Though others do in fact accuse them of exactly that)). And one could argue that in the absence of such malfeasance that download counts and star ratings are real, useful pieces of information that shed some light on the true quality of a product. But nonetheless this is something to be aware of, especially with new files/games/books that haven’t yet amassed ratings or download counts. It’s also worth noting that advertisers can indirectly purchase this kind of influence by buying front-page placement or using ads to drive consumers to that content and thus increasing its popularity –or at least the number of times it was bought or downloaded. And it can work in reverse. Remember a while back when the backlash against Spore’s digital rights management measures caused a bunch of people to flood Amazon with one-star ratings? It’s still barely got one star out of 5 as of the time of this writing. The point to remember is that what you see other people doing shouldn’t always unduly influence your own actions.

That point made, though, it’s interesting to think about how game designers could use this kind of bias for the player’s benefit –at least potentially. I’m certainly not advocating that they inflate star ratings or player counts, but less sacrosanct data could be used to nudge players in certain directions that they might enjoy. For example, what if in a few months’ time you were sitting down to play through some more of the single-player campaign for Halo Reach when at the main menu there appears the message “Nine people on your friends list have tried the Halo Reach multiplayer modes within the last week. Select ‘Multiplayer’ From the main menu to join them.” Or maybe “1,943 people checked out the leaderboards in the last 5 minutes; press ‘Y’ to do the same.”

I know that the administrators of technologies like Steam, Xbox Live, and GameSpy Technology are awash in data like this and to my uneducated monkey brain it seems like it should be relatively easy to do this kind of stuff on the fly with real data. So somebody go do that and get back to me. In the meantime, I’m gonna go out and start telling strangers that it looks like rain, even though there’s not a cloud in the sky. You know, just to see what they do.

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Come See Me Lecture at the Login 2010 Conference

Have you ever wanted to hear me go on about the psychology of video games without that annoying Internet between us? You HAVE? Are you going to be in Seattle, Washington, USA on May 14th at 2pm? You ARE? Well, you’re in luck, because I’m teaming up with some of the folks at GameSpy Technology to lecture at the 2010 Login Conference in beautiful ((well, I assume; I’ve only heard nice things)) Seattle Washington.

Login

The lecture is entitled The Psychology of Video Games: Why We Do What We Do With Friends (And Screw That Other Guy). ((It sounds catchier in my head than in yours))

Nifty title, you say, but you need more info? Fine. Here’s an official sounding summary:

What can decades of research by psychologists tell us about how gamers behave differently when playing video games with strangers versus with friends or alone? Under what conditions will grown men and women in multiplayer games do things like cheat, abuse glitches, hurl vulgarities, form allegiances, return favors, play fair, welcome newcomers, and form communities that persist outside of your game?

Hey, this stuff is human nature, and psychologists and behavioral economists have been looking at these kinds of things in other contexts for a long time. They just use their own jargon –stuff like prospect theory, deindividuation, reciprocity, game theory, social identity building, decision-making heuristics, person-organization-fit, distributive justice, and other fancy terms. Sometimes they even draw diagrams.

In this session, a Ph.D. in psychology who also happens to be an avid gamer will bridge the gap between these two worlds by looking at what the science of psychology has to tell us about why gamers do what they do when they’re in groups and how game designers might leverage these kinks in the human mind to design better experiences for everyone involved. Each topic will be accompanied by a review of relevant scientific research from the fields of psychology and behavioral economics, as well as real-world data from actual gamers to back up the claims and test the hypotheses.

That’s STILL not enough information for you? Okay, okay. Here’s an outline of the actual lecture:

  • Introduction
    • Who we are
    • The psychology of video games
    • GameSpy Tech
    • How the two are working together
      • I provide expertise on psychology and research methodology
      • They provide expertise on community building and hard data
    • What we hope to accomplish in this lecture
      • Some education
      • Some entertainment
      • Some solid ideas for things you can experiment with yourself
  • The Glitcher’s Dilemma – To cheat, abuse glitches, or play fair?
    • Game theory and the prisoner’s dilemma
      • Concept overview
      • Examples from video games
    • Review of theory and experimental data
      • Classical experiments
      • Effects of knowing the other person
      • Effects of anonymity
      • Effects of replaying games with same person
    • Things you can do
      • Reducing anonymity
      • Facilitating “tit for tat” strategies
      • Increasing the public nature of play
  • How to Build an Antisocial Jerk for Fun and Profit
    • Deindividuation – How to make people lie, steal, and cheat (or not)
      • Concept overview
      • Examples from video games
    • Review of theory and experimental data
      • Classical experiments
      • Effects of anonymity on antisocial behavior
      • Effects of being in a group
      • Effects of transferred responsibility
      • Effects of leaders and role models on group behavior
    • Things you can do
      • Reducing (or enhancing) anonymity
      • Facilitate communication and information sharing among groups
      • Provide queues for desired behavior
      • Designate group leaders and reward proper behavior
  • Fanboys and Witch Hunts
    • Social Identity Theory – “Us” vs. “Them”
      • Concept overview
      • Examples from video games
    • Review of theory and experimental data
      • Classical experiments
      • How groups form
      • How groups unform
    • Things you can do
      • Providing queues to help groups form
      • Helping groups NOT form
      • Facilitating the sharing of group identities
  • Back Scratches All Around – The Power of Reciprocity
    • Reciprocity – Returning favors and building social debt
      • Concept overview
      • Examples from video games
    • Review of theory and experimental data
      • Classical experiments
      • The evolutionary psychology angle
    • Things you can do
      • Build “favors” into your game
      • Allow people to track each other down outside of game
      • Facilitate and frame information about favors
      • Make it about the individual, not the team
  • The People (and Orcs) make the place – How Guilds Form
    • The Attraction-Selection-Attrition model of organization development
      • Concept overview
      • Examples from video games
      • Applicability to guilds, clans, fan sites, messageboards, etc.
    • Review of theory and experimental data
      • Classical experiments and theory
      • The importance of leaders
      • The importance culture
    • Things you can do
      • Build tools organizations can use to communicate culture
      • Build tools for leaders to use
      • Build tools for organizations to evaluate new members
  • Q&A to Fill Remaining Time

Act now and I’ll throw in this Speaker Biography:

Jamie Madigan has a Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in Industrial-Organizational psychology and works for the federal government as a personnel psychologist. He is a life-long gamer and spent several years in the gaming business at GameSpy Industries where he assisted in the development of many web properties, including FilePlanet.com, arguably the Internet’s largest distributor of game-related files. He currently runs www.psychologyofgames.com, a weblog dedicated to using psychology to understand why game players and developers do what they do.

So, if you’re going to Login by any chance, please come and see me! And bring a friend. Or an enemy. I honestly don’t care which.

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Et Cetera April 2010

Time for the monthly post where I lump a bunch of stuff together.

ONE: Hey! Have you heard about this Facebook thing? Yeah, me too. In fact, for some reason I created a Facebook page for Psychology of Games which you can access by performing clicking motions here. So far I’m really just using it to announce new posts, but it gives me a little more freedom to comment on them than Twitter does. If you use Facebook, you should “Like” the page so that you become a fan. Because I like it when numbers get bigger. I’m sorry, but I really can’t give you a better reason than that. ((Don’t let that stop you, though.))

TWO: Big thanks to Kyle, Alex, and Emerson for sending donations my way via that Paypal button. I’ve used it to buy a few books, including A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It, and Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between Who We Are and What We Buy. I’m catching up on my reading lately thanks to some travel. I’m particularly looking forward to getting to the latter two, as I’ve been wondering about a few things along the lines of pricing, sales, and the like. In particular I want to figure out why digital distribution systems like Steam can throw up collections like “Every id game ever made, ever” and we’ll all go bananas buying it even though we’ll never play most of them and we already own the rest.

THREE: As a reminder, I’m going to be giving a lecture ((ooh, look at ME, I’m a lecturer! La tee dah!)) at the Login Conference next month. I’m putting the finishing touches on the presentation this week, and by “finishing touches” I mean “starting to write it.” The theme of the talk revolves around what psychology has to say about how gamers behave differently when they’re in groups versus alone, and how the composition of those groups matters. I’m going to be posting a more detailed outline of the lecture this week. If you’re going to be at Login, please come and see me! My talk is entitled “The Psychology of Games: Why We Do What We Do With Friends (and Screw That Other Guy)” and it’s going to be on Thrusday May 13 at 2:00 pm. In the “Harbor” room, apparently, which sounds tres classy. Come shout disruptive things from the back row of seats so that people will mention the session later.

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To Sleep, Perchance to Pwn

I’ve looked at a few kids, like at the store, and one thing I’ve noticed is that they sleep a LOT. Why is that? And while we’re at it, why is it that I spent an entire controller-crushing hour trying to figure out that one level in the puzzle game Braid before giving up and then nailing it on the first try after a good night’s sleep?

Actually, both these questions have a related answer. Sleep, it turns out, is integral to learning. Some psychologists and neurologists believe that sleepy time –especially deep REM sleep– is the time when your brain releases key chemicals to throw up the “under construction” signs and rearrange your neural connections based on what you’ve been exposed to. ((Maquet, P. (2001). The role of sleep in learning and memory. a one-year delay. Science 294, 1048–1052.)) This is one possible reason why babies sleep so much: they literally have to shut down to assimilate what they’ve taken in.

sleep

I used this picture of a sleeping kitty because it was in the public domain. Also, he's so cute!

And in addition to generally refreshing you and resharpening your reflexes, sleep seems to have a similar effect on learning tasks that involve precise, manual finger movements. In one study of this phenomenon ((Robertson, E.M., Pascual-Leone, A. and Press, D.Z. (2004). Awareness modifies the skill-learning benefits of sleep. Current Biology 14, 208-212.)) researchers had subjects complete an exercise where they tapped buttons based on what they saw on a computer screen, and if that’s not a dead on description of a video game I’m not sure what is. There was an underlying pattern to the stimulus, and subjects were either told to try and uncover the pattern or they were left to their own insights. When the subjects were invited back to repeat the task, the researchers found that those who had gotten a full night of rest saw dramatic improvements in their performance while those who had just taken a 15 minute break saw no such increase. Other research ((Walker, M.P., Brakefield, T., Morgan, A., Hobson, J.A., and Stickgold, R. (2002). Practice with sleep makes perfect: sleepdependent motor skill learning. Neuron 35, 205–211.)) found that a full night of sleep yields a 20% improvement in similar tasks.

But that’s not where the benefits of sleep on task performance end. Other research has shown that sleep also increases creativity and problem solving. So the next time you’re enraged your inability to time a series of jumps or figure out how to make a mustache out of a piece of tape and a cat ((Name that reference in the comments section for bonus points)), try sleeping on it. Let your brain take what it’s gotten and make some sense out of it without your standing there over its shoulder and making demands.

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The Status Quo Effect (Or, Pay Without Play)

Many of us have been surprised in spite of ourselves when one day we looked up and realized that we’ve been paying for a MMO like World of Warcraft when we haven’t logged on for months. Or maybe we’re reading our e-mail and we get a cheerful note from Microsoft saying that our Xbox Live Gold account has automatically renewed and the charge applied to our credit card. And still we don’t do anything about it. Why not?

Before I explain, consider this graph, showing the participation rates of two groups of employees at an actual Fortune 500 company in a 401(k) savings plan. (For those who don’t know, a 401(k) savings plan lets employees automatically sock away part of each paycheck for retirement. They offer lots of benefits and participating in them is generally a smart thing to do if you don’t want to die of old age on the job.)

401k Rates

Today's kids love hearing about 401(k) savings plans, right?

Can you guess as to why only 49% of people in Group A decided to save for retirement while a comparatively larger 86% of Group B members decided to save? Maybe Group B is full of MBAs, economists, or self-aware computers who are more rational than the drunken chimps in Group A? Nope. Maybe Group A is full of young whippersnappers unconcerned with retirement while Group B is comprised of old geezers? A better guess, but still incorrect.

These groups were actual subjects in a 2001 study by Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea, two economists interested in what happened when a tiny but important change was made to the paperwork related to the 401(k) plan. 1 The only difference between the groups was that the paperwork for Group A required new hires to actively sign up for the savings plan, while the paperwork for Group B automatically enrolled new hires into the savings plan unless they overrode that decision. In other words, people tended to go with the default choice –”Don’t Participate” for Group A and “Participate” for Group B– and the suckers in Group A saved less because they couldn’t be bothered to check one box on one form. 2

Psychologists have a term for this reluctance to change from our previous or default decisions: “the status quo effect.” 3 Most television programmers use it to glide you from one show to the next, using an established hit with a strong viewership to build an audience for whatever comes after it. It’s even gotten to the point where you move seamlessly from the end of one show to a quick intro to the next without even pausing for a commercial break. Because once they start, most people will continue to watch even though switching to something else is trivially easy.

This is, of course, the same reason why gaming companies prefer that you sign up for an automatically renewing service instead of using prepaid subscription or point cards. It’s also the reason that rental services like Netflix or GameFly offer “Free Trials” that will roll into paid subscriptions if you don’t actively cancel. They even spin it as a benefit: “If you are enjoying Netflix, do nothing and your membership will automatically continue…”

But it’s also important to be aware of the fact that the default choices you’re presented with when signing up for a new service 4 have much the same effect as the status quo bias. Let’s stick with GameFly and consider this screenshot from the sign-up process:

Gamefly Signup

Oh, which to click?

Notice which option is checked by default: the most expensive one. That’s not by accident. HTML technology is sufficiently advanced so that they could easily have had NO plan chosen by default and could instead require you to make your choice in order to proceed. Instead, they’re taking advantage of the status quo effect and probably getting more people for the $12.95 plan.

Hey, look, Netflix does the same thing!

Netflix Signup

Hey, cut that out!

Similarly, “Opt out” options are popular among marketers because many people don’t bother with the almost effortless task of unchecking some boxes so that they don’t receive spam or avoid installing some obnoxious toolbar in their web browser.

But you guys, wait! The status quo effect only gets more potent when the task you’re faced with is more difficult or cognitively demanding. In a recent article for Psychology Today, psychologist Kelly McGonicgal discusses some research 5 that addresses the neuroscience of how this all works. Subjects in this study were asked to make difficult calls about whether a tennis ball was in or out of bounds, but for each trial one of the two possible calls was randomly made the de facto default choice. You can probably head me off at the pass and figure out that people tended to stick with the randomly assigned default choice, even more so when the call was difficult. And according to McGonigal, even considering going against a default choice seemed to increase the activity in the prefrontal cortex (an area associated with decision-making) and increased exchanges between that area and the subthalamic nucleus, a chunk of gray matter associated with motivated behavior. In other words, evaluating something besides a default options literally requires more mental energy.

The status quo effect can work to our benefit, though, as we saw in the 401(k) savings example above. Many games feature built-in tutorials, tooltips, or other pointers for novice players. Often these assists can be turned off, but they are almost always “on” by default because even if you ,make players aware of them, most would probably not bother turning them on if they were off by default and frustration would ensue. For example, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games don’t present tutorials to new players by default. This always seemed weird to me, and I swear I made it through most of the first Guitar Hero without ever knowing about hammer-ons and pull-offs because I had skipped the tutorial.

So beneficial situations aside, how do you guard against the status quo effect when you don’t want it unduly influencing your behavior? For starters you can use prepaid subscription cards instead of automatically renewing subscriptions. I renew my Xbox Live Gold membership each year by using such a card, which has the added benefit of letting me buy the cards when they’re on sale and hold on to them until needed. Heck, even Zynga of Farmville fame is selling prepaid game cards now.

Beyond prepaid cards and canceling free trials before they morph into a paid subscription like a Zerg larvae, just make sure you take the time to look carefully at default options the next time you’re filling something out or agreeing to a terms of service. Especially when it’s a cognitively demanding or confusing task, as that’s when you’re most likely to succumb to the status quo effect. Consider: are those default choices what’s best for you? SPOILER ALERT: no, probably not.

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Zerg Rushed by a Tiger? Just give up.

Neuroscientist and avid blogger Jonah Lehrer recently published a great article in the Wall Street Journal about what he and others call “the superstar effect.” The piece is well timed, seeing as it deals largely with the effect that someone like Tiger Woods has on his competition and Mr. Woods has in fact just returned to harass his competitors for the title of “Most Badass Dude Ever at Golf.” Lehrer describes the work of economist Jennifer Brown, who meticulously studied not just Tiger’s performance in high stakes golf games, but the performance of his peers:

Ms. Brown discovered the superstar effect by analyzing data from every player in every PGA Tour event from 1999 to 2006. She chose golf for several reasons, from the lack of “confounding team dynamics” to the immaculate statistics kept by the PGA. Most important, however, was the presence of Mr. Woods, who has dominated his sport in a way few others have.

…

Such domination appears to be deeply intimidating. Whenever Mr. Woods entered a tournament, every other golfer took, on average, 0.8 more strokes. This effect was even observable in the first round, with the presence of Mr. Woods leading to an additional 0.3 strokes among all golfers over the initial 18 holes. While this might sound like an insignificant difference, the average margin between first and second place in PGA Tour events is frequently just a single stroke. Interestingly, the superstar effect also varied depending on the player’s position on the leaderboard, with players closer to the lead showing a greater drop-off in performance. Based on this data, Ms. Brown calculated that the “superstar effect” boosted Mr. Woods’s PGA earnings by nearly $5 million.

The reason, Lehrer goes on to explain, is that when faced with such an overwhelming favorite in the odds, people tend to short sell themselves and not give their best performance, as if the outcome is predetermined. And what’s worse is that this need not even take place in our conscious thought to have an effect. And what’s worse than that is the fact that the phenomenon seems to be most potent with more experienced players. Veteran golfers play a good chunk of their game on autopilot, not wasting mental energy over analyzing every tiny movement, angle, or twitch. But when Tiger Woods is on the fairway, they may begin to overthink their strokes, their choices, and their plan –to engage in too much of what psychologists call “action identification.” The result is that they change the way they play and play worse as a result because they’re wasting their finite concentration on things that didn’t need it yesterday. Writer Malcom Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink fame also has a nifty article about this phenomenon, which you can read here.

When we talk about someone “psyching out” the competition, this is what we mean, and it appears to jive with actual scientific research. The WSJ article goes on to discuss how this same phenomenon happens in other competitive environments outside of golf, such as law firms or the executive boardrooms of General Electric, and how it’s especially potent in “winner take all” situations.

…Like, say a game of StarCraft! In the realm of video games, what this all made me think of is the importance of proper matchmaking based on skills and how some games seem to do it a lot better than others. Whenever I jump in to competitive game of Modern Warfare 2, for example, I can’t seem to take four steps without getting owned because everyone else in that game seems to be SO MUCH BETTER than I am. I think many of us have been in a poorly mached game where we round a corner to face the person dominating the top spot on a scoreboard and we just sort of sigh and wait to get headshot rather than try and fight back, especially if we’re squatting at the bottom of the rankings. Halo 3, on the other hand, always seems to group me with people closer to my skill level, and I have a lot more fun and win a lot more matches as a result.

A list of the people who would crush me in any given game of StarCraft II.

The superstar phenomenon is something that Blizzard seems to be actively trying to avoid in its ranking system for StarCraft II with its bronze, silver, and whatever levels of play and the ability to see the ranking of your opponent. Though not perfect and obviously still being tweaked, the system seems to go to great lengths to match players with opponents of similar skill. So I can be relatively sure that I’m not going to waste time second guessing my build order or metagame because I was matched against Tiger Woods, who in the context of this game would be some Korean dude who has been playing StarCraft for 12 hours a day for the last 10 years.

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Regression to the Mean and Owning Some Chumps

Let’s say that you’ve hired a coach to help you improve your Slayer game in Halo 3. I’ve heard of stranger things. Let’s say this coach looks like Mr. Miyagi but he curses WAY more. He uses a variety of training and motivational techniques, ranging from grenade throwing drills to trigger finger sprints, doing everything he can to drive you towards perfection. You notice, though, that he eventually stops praising you whenever you rank at the top of a match. He did at first, but now when you earn more than your usual number of kills your coach stands stoically by, straight faced and not giving you a single word of praise for those outstanding rounds.

Eventually, you ask him why he never praises you when you do a really good job.

“Because,” he says, “I’ve noticed that praise doesn’t work. Every time I praised you for a really good round, your next round is always mediocre. And what’s more, when I yell at you for playing poorly, next round you always do better. Praising not only doesn’t make you better, it makes you worse.”

You pause for a second, then cry “You’re not my real dad!” and run out of the room, bawling like a child. Yes, you do. That emotional outburst aside, though, is your coach’s logic sound, given that you DO in fact perform worse every time he praises you for doing well and perform better whenever he rebukes you for doing poorly? Praise makes you do worse and berating makes you better, right?

Nope. Your performance following stellar rounds of Halo or Starcraft II any other game involving skill can be best explained not by the effects of praise or punishment, but by something called “regression to the mean.”

Let’s assume that if we looked at your performance over a bunch of matches and plotted them out with ending scores along the X axis and how often you end a match with that particular score on the Y axis. They’d probably form something close to a normal, bell-shaped distribution like this:

Normal Curve

Figure 1: Your sick skilz, plotted

If we were to pick any single match at random, it’s more likely that your performance would be about in the middle somewhere –somewhere near the “mean,” which is basically another word for “average.” ((Actually, in statistical parlance “average” is a vague term, but most normal people use it in the same sense that statisticians use the word “mean.” So let’s not make a big deal about it, okay?)) In this example, that’s 10 frags. It’s rare that you’re at the very top (17 frags) or bottom (3 frags). In fact, if your performance follows a normal distribution like the one above, then the following will be true:

  • 68% of your matches will end with scores between 8 and 12
  • 95% will be between 6 and 14
  • Only 0.6% will be under 4 or over 16 ((For the advanced students in the audience, these numbers refer to one, two, and three standard deviations above/below the mean))

And even if your distribution is a little skewed because you do well more often than you do poorly, the numbers won’t change much until things get REALLY skewed. At which point no amount of coaching is going to change your game in either direction.

This is the reason that you seem to do worse after good matches and better after bad ones. The particularly good or bad matches are rare, and because they’re rare it’s improbable that you’d have two in a row no matter what your coach does.

So don’t get discouraged when you can’t consistently come out on top multiple times in a row in any game of skill. You may be able to move your distribution up the right-hand side of the scale and/or squish it together so that there’s less variation, but you’re always going to regress to the mean somewhat because every round can’t be your best (or worst) round.

Now go give your dad a hug.

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Xbox Game Room’s Dummy Pricing (Not for Dummies)

[Note: A version of this article appeared as my column in Gamasutra and GameSetWatch.]

Microsoft recently augmented their Xbox Live and Games for Windows services with something called “Game Room,” which allows you to buy and/or play classic arcade games like Centipede, Space Invaders, and the like. Basically, it’s just like when we used to hang out at the neighborhood arcade, only with fewer cigarette burns on the machines and no attendants selling weed out of the back office ((Or maybe not; I’ve never been to your place)).

What I thought was interesting, though, was the price structure for the games, which breaks down like this:

  • 40 points – Play a game once on either Xbox Live or Games for Windows
  • 240 points – Own the game on one platform but not the other
  • 400 points – Own the game on both platforms

So if we rate those three options from 1 to 100 on an “Accessibility” metric and plot them out, they look something like this:

Game Room Graph 1

Figure 1

I don’t think it takes much insight to guess that Microsoft would rather you not take the first option (about $0.50), since won’t take long to figure out that playing like ONE game of Frogger is quite enough for you. They’d rather you spend the 240 points (about $3) to buy the game on one platform, or even better 400 points (about $5) to buy it on both. But I don’t think these prices are optimal for that. I think there’s a way for Microsoft to actually get more money out of people by raising their prices.

How? Well, I’ll get to that. But first let’s talk about magazine subscriptions. In his book, Predictably Irrational ((Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins.)) behavioral economist Dan Ariely describes seeing an ad for the periodical The Economist with the following annual subscription options:

  • Economist.com website only: $59
  • Print edition only: $125
  • Print edition PLUS website access: $125

Bluh? Why would they try and charge $125 for just the print edition and then at the same time offer that PLUS the website access for exactly the same price? It make no sense.

Or does it? These people know economics. It’s RIGHT THERE in the name of their publication! To test things out, Ariely showed The Economist ad to 100 MBA students and asked them which they’d choose. He got the following results:

  • 16% chose the Economist.com website access for $59
  • 0% chose the print edition only for $125
  • 84% chose print edition PLUS website access for $125

Okay, no surprises there. But then he removed the “print edition only for $125″ option and asked the SAME students again. Same people, same choices –the results should have been identical, right? Nope.

  • 68% chose the Economist.com website access for $59
  • 32% chose print edition PLUS website access for $125

What? They flipped their preference even though the two remaining choices were the same as before! Why? (Click here to read about all this in an excerpt from Ariely’s excellent book, or better yet go buy it –it’s a great read.)

The reason, as usual, is because of how our brains are wired. We simply aren’t very good at evaluating things in absolute terms, like the value of having a subscription to a Web site versus a print magazine. Instead, we tend to compare things to other similar things, especially when trying to quantify something abstract like value or fun. How good is this apartment for rent? Well, it’s better than the last one you saw but worse than the first. How much fun is Game A? Well, it’s more fun than Game B, but not as much as Game C. If you want to see this kind of thing in action, just ask ANY group of nerds to rank the Star Wars movies and then STAND BACK.

Decision making requires more deliberation and data when our evaluation of the options are spread out, as in the graph of Game Room purchase options above. But when some of the options cluster together, our decision-making process tends to exclude or downplay the options outside the cluster because including them in our evaluations makes things pretty complicated. For example, imagine you’re trying to decide between three downtown restaurants for dinner after a movie. Two of them are nearby and one requires a bit of a walk. Let’s assume your feet hurt and you’re on a tight budget, so both distance and price are equally important. Most people will end up making their decision by going to the cheaper of the nearby places, despite the fact that the restaurant farther away may not only be cheaper than either, but enough so to warrant the walk.

Why? Because just using price to decide between the two otherwise most similar options is an easier decision to make than trying to figure out the relative value of proximity and price and combine those values in a precise weighted combination so as to come to a completely rational decision. People’s brains tend to slide into the path of least resistance when making anything beyond the simplest of decisions. ((c.f., “Why We Love Genres So Much”)) So savvy companies like The Economist try to frame and simplify their sales pitches so that you glide right to where they want you.

This is why I think Microsoft could alter their Game Room pricing to something like this:

  • 40 points – Play a game just once on one platform
  • 360 points – Own the game on one platform but not the other
  • 360 points – Own the game on both platforms

Which we could graph like this:

Figure 2

Figure 2. Saying things like "Figure 2" makes it sound all legit, right?

Do those two options on the right jump out at you more so than before? They do me. And I’d bet that a lot fewer people would be interested in just dropping two 40 points for a one-time play. Or maybe you could bring the price of both the “own on one platform” and “own on both platforms” option down to 240 points. Your choice! And you could take this concept even further –how do you think a fledgling MMO could benefit from pitching prospective players on monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription packages? Do you think you’re any better equipped to avoid this kind of manipulation after reading about it?

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Framing and World of Warcraft’s Rest System

One of my favorite things about human psychology is how a punishment can be turned into a reward just by changing the way it’s framed. A few years ago a friend of mine was serving on the board for a large conference and negotiating a contract with the hotel where the event would take place. ((Hi Steve! I know you read this!)) Part of the contract dealt with giving hotel room discounts to a limited number of attendees, but they were first come first served, after which the room price would go up. My friend wrestled with how to present this to attendees, grumbling about how he was having to tell people he was punishing them by raising the prices if they made last minute plans to attend the conference.

“Dude,” I said, ’cause I really do say things like that, “It’s not a penalty for late registration, it’s a reward for people who register early.” And with that, the wording on the conference registration changed from “late registration fee” to “early registration discount.” And nothing else changed, except that people probably thought it was more fair.

WoW Framing

Word of Warcraft framing. Get it? Eh? Eh? Eh, yeah, you're right, it's not that funny.

In a recent episode of the nifty Idle Thumbs podblast ((Wizard, bird noise, horse bag, etc.)) Gamasutra’s Chris Remo articulated another great example of this kind of simple framing in how World of Warcraft’s “rest bonus” system came about:

In World of Warcraft what they did when they first designed the game was they had an experience system that would, over time, lower the amount of experience you got because [Blizzard] wanted to encourage people to play for like two hours at a time instead of twelve hours at a time. So the longer you played you’d get this experience degradation and then it would bottom out and at that point it would be a fixed rate of experience. And people just hated it.

And so they went back and [Blizzard's Rob Pardo] was like allright, basically what we did was we made everything in the game take twice as much experience to achieve as before and then we flipped it. So actually what happens is you start getting 200% experience and eventually it goes back down to 100%. So that effectively now how they spin it is that if you log out for a while you get this 200% boost when you log back in! And then over time it goes away and you just get regular 100% experience. It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like “Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!”

So, in other words, people hated the system when it was presented as a penalty for playing too long at a stretch, but they loved it when it was framed as a reward for taking a break. Even though the results were exactly the same. Such is the magic of framing.

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Et Cetera, March 2010

And now comes the time again where I dump a bunch of little stuff I didn’t want to make individual updates for.

ONE: The website is getting more attention than I thought it would, so a big thank you to everyone who linked here from your blog, Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. I even got huge a traffic spike the other day from Metafilter, so OH HI to everyone who came from there. Grab the RSS feed before you leave. Now, next on my checklist is getting onto the front page of Digg.com…

TWO: On a similar note, I’m really impressed with the quality of comments people are leaving. I learned long ago to accept having my ideas debated (if nothing else, grad school familiarizes you with the art of ruthless critique), but what really impresses me is that when people disagree or offer a different interpretation, they’re doing it in a civil and thoughtful way. This is generally true, but the stories on the glitcher’s dilemma, genres, and attraction-selection-attrition are particularly good examples, both of differing views and people expanding on my own initial thoughts. Go read those comments if you haven’t.

THREE: I’m taking this show on the road! In collaboration with some of my buddies at GameSpy Industries I’m presenting a lecture at the Login 2010 conference in Seattle come this May. The title is The Psychology of Games: Why We Do What We Do With Friends (and Screw That Other Guy). Here’s the abstract:

What can decades of research by psychologists tell us about how gamers behave differently when playing video games with strangers versus with friends or alone? Under what conditions will grown men and women in multiplayer games do things like cheat, abuse glitches, hurl vulgarities, form allegiances, return favors, play fair, welcome newcomers, and form communities that persist outside of your game?

Hey, this stuff is human nature, and psychologists and behavioral economists have been looking at these kinds of things in other contexts for a long time. They just use their own jargon –stuff like prospect theory, deindividuation, reciprocity, game theory, social identity building, decision-making heuristics, person-organization-fit, distributive justice, and other fancy terms. Sometimes they even draw diagrams.

In this session, a Ph.D. in psychology who also happens to be an avid gamer will bridge the gap between these two worlds by looking at what the science of psychology has to tell us about why gamers do what they do when they’re in groups and how game designers might leverage these kinks in the human mind to design better experiences for everyone involved. Each topic will be accompanied by a review of relevant scientific research from the fields of psychology and behavioral economics, as well as real-world data from actual gamers to back up the claims and test the hypotheses.

I’m going to post a more detailed outline of the lecture soon, and hopefully after the conference I’ll be able to point you to where you can get a recording of the presentation. But if you’re going to be at the conference, please come see me! Shout “UNEXPECTED HOT POCKET!” in the middle of my talk and we’ll share a laugh.

FOUR: Thanks to Alex for hitting the PayPal donation button and buying me a copy of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. I’ve referenced the book once or twice already on this site, plus I have at least one other article idea drawing from it. Want a review? Lucky day! I wrote a full review of Nudge over on my personal blog.