The Psychology of Video Games

How can developers of multiplayer games get their players to behave, cooperate, play their role, and not be such incredible jerks? I have an idea. Psychology is involved. You probably guessed this.

One of my favorite little experiments in psychology was done by John Bargh, Mark Chen, and Lara Burrows¹ who were interested in how stereotypes were triggered. In one experiment, they had participants unscramble sentences that made heavy use of words like Florida, old, bingo, wrinkle, ancient and the like. A control group did the same thing, but with words not reminiscent of the elderly. That wasn’t the real experiment, though.

The important part of the experiment actually happened after the participants left the lab. Another experimenter sat in the hallway outside and discretely used a stopwatch to time how long it took participants to walk from one end of the hall to the other. Those who had been working with words related to old people actually walked significantly slower² than those who had worked with other words.

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows also did another experiment where some people unscrambled sentences with words related to rudeness (bold, bother, brazen) and some worked with words indicating politeness (patiently, courteous, unobtrusively). All subjects then walked in on a staged scene where they had to interrupt a conversation to get some needed information. Those in the “polite” condition waited 9.3 minutes on average. Those in the “rude” condition jumped in after just 5.5 minutes on average.³

These are examples of what psychologists called “priming,” which is basically getting people in a particular state of mind or getting them to think about what you want them to. It’s a staple of advertising and surprisingly easy to do. I’ve been thinking for a while that game developers should take better advantage of it.

What if, for example, certain words of phrases were thrown around on loading screens between levels or in the matchmaking lobby for a multiplayer shooter? Would simply showing words like “sportsmanship” or “communication” or “fairness” prime people to behave themselves during games? If you didn’t want to be that transparent, you could include little stories, vignettes, or even comics or movies that included those words or illustrations of them. Or maybe you could use real data, like the number of heals provided by players in the previous game or awards for best defense. Or maybe you could include a graphic of naked, pre-pubescent angels like this:

I know you read this blog, Cliff Bleszinski. This needs to be in Gears 3. You can make it happen, man. There's still time.

In his book, Predictably Irrational,⁴ behavioral economist Dan Ariely suggests some even better ways of making this kind of thing work. He describes some experiments that he, Nina Mazar, and On Amir did where they asked students at MIT to solve as many math problems as they could in a fixed time. Everyone was entered into a lottery where the winner would receive $10 for each correctly solved problem, so there was incentive to answer lots of problems. Some subjects were given a chance to cheat at the task by self-reporting the number of problems solved, and some couldn’t cheat because a research assistant graded their answers.

But let’s back up a bit. Some subjects in the “cheating is possible” condition were also asked to write down the Ten Commandments before starting the math problems. The others weren’t asked to write down anything.⁵ Relative to those who didn’t have the opportunity to cheat, those who did but were not asked write down the Ten Commandments claimed to have answered 33% more questions –a clear indication of cheating since that’s way more than could be expected by chance alone.

But what about those who had the chance to cheat but were asked to write things like “Thou shalt not lie” and “Thou shalt not steal?” Dude, they didn’t cheat at all. They answered exactly as many questions on average as the people who didn’t even have a chance to cheat. In a follow-up study, the same researchers replicated these results by omitting the Ten Commandments and having students acknowledge understanding that their actions were “subject to the MIT honor code.” Which, ironically, was a lie; there was no such official code.

It seems that the Ten Commandments or a reference to an honor code was enough to prime people for behaving themselves, but I think the study also tapped what’s called “the consistency bias.” This is where we tend to behave in ways that are consistent with our stated intentions, especially if stated publicly.

Look, if this dude tells you to hang back and build some base defenses, you'd better listen to him.

So what does this mean for gamers? Again, I’m thinking of loading screens and between rounds of multiplayer and matchmaking lobbies. What if you presented subjects players with simple yes/no questions like these?

• Will you change classes if your team has too many of the class you wanted to play?
• Will you stick around to the end of the match even if it looks like you’re going to lose?
• Are you going to curse and be rude in this next match?
• Will you hang back and play defense if your team needs it?
• Will you fortify your team’s defenses if needed?
• Will you give other people a chance to drive the damn tank once in a while? Please? Pretty please? You always just drive it off a cliff, anyway. C’mon, what do you say?

If, while waiting for the match to start, each player could answer those questions, what do you think would happen? Would they be primed in good ways? Would they want to behave consistently? Would having their answers shown to other players have an effect?

Personally, I think this could work. It’s at least worth experimenting with. C’mon, someone out there try it and let us know how it goes.

1. Bargh, J., Chen, M. & Barrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of Social Behavior: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(2). [↩]
2. You know, like an old dude [↩]
3. …Jerks. [↩]
4. Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York, NY: HarperCollins. [↩]
5. Actually, there was also a condition where subjects wrote down the last 10 books they read, just to rule out the unlikely possibility that it was the act of remembering and writing something down that affected rates of cheating or math performance. [↩]

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: The Glitcher's Dilemma

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

Back in the 1960s research on these kinds of dilemmas exploded and out of it came what’s known as “the prisoner’s dilemma” based on an anecdote about getting confessions from two prisoners held under suspicion for a bank robbery. In his book, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World¹ Robyn Dawes summarizes the classic scenario thusly:

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

Here are those choices in table form:

Figure 2: The prisoner's dilemma

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

Now let’s take another example from the golden years of PC gaming. In the early days of Starcraft, a strategy called “Zerg rushing” emerged where at the beginning of the match players would quickly build lots of cheap Zerg units to overwhelm opponents before defenses could be constructed. Counter strategies developed,² but for a good chunk of the player base Starcraft became a game of seeing who could Zerg rush faster, which wasn’t nearly as much fun as choosing from any other number of play styles or even races. So the dilemma was:

Figure 3: The ...Zerg dilemma?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. 1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers. [↩]
2. as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe [↩]
3. Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that [↩]

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

Ah yes, a classic experiment done by Edward Diener at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues way back in the 1970s¹ Little did they know it, but Diener and his colleagues laid the foundation for understanding, at least in part, why all those smacktards on Xbox Live keep calling you a “gaytard,” whatever that means. And they did it with candy –delicious, 1970s candy.

Diener et al. were interested in what situational factors lead children to engage in antisocial behavior, specifically stealing and breaking rules. So in a clever little quasi-experimental study they had researchers in Seattle, Washington turn 1,352 Halloween trick-or-treaters into unwitting subjects. They set up several houses’ entryways with two bowls –one with fun-sized candies and another with money. When children came up to the door, the experimenter would greet them and tell them to take ONE candy from the bowl. They would then say they had to attend to something out of sight in another room, but would actually go behind a fake wall and spy on the children through a peep hole² to see how much candy and/or money they took.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it as easy as possible to do things like file complaints and player reviews also helps make people feel more accountable for their behavior.³ Muting and booting systems, if employed by more mature players, also seem like they would lower the likelihood of people modeling the behavior of others and transferring the responsibility of fouling up the group’s behavior.

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

1. Diener, E., Fraser, S., Beaman, A., & Kelem, R. (1976). Effects of Deindividuation Variables on Stealing Among Halloween Trick-or-Treaters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33, 178-183. [↩]
2. That feels …strange to write. [↩]
3. Though, ironically, I wonder if low feedback ratings that travel with a player from game to game might have the same effect as did the transferal of responsibility to one child in the Halloween candy experiment above; somebody test that! [↩]