Tag Archives: Fairness

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The Psychology of Fair Play

GamePro.com recently put up my article on the psychology of fairness as it applies to video games. You can read it here once you’ve managed the art mouse clicking. Again, it’s in the form of a nicely formatted pdf file so you can see the nifty layout work they did.

The irony is that both the hammer and bomb were pre-order DLC bonuses. Click to read the whole article.

This article also has one of my favorite openers so far, which Bobo the Quote Monkey has retrieved for us:

Here’s an Old Testament story that many gamers may identify with more than they realize: Jacob had 12 sons, but he liked little Joseph the best. So one day he gave Joseph an awesome coat of many colors. It may have given damage reduction against all elemental attacks, but we don’t know for sure; the scripture is kind of vague on the stats. What is clear is that Joseph’s brothers, who had been pretty happy with things before, thought this was unfair, and when Joseph rather blithely told them that he was having dreams of them bowing down to him and his snazzy coat, they decided to throw him down a well.

In gaming parlance, Joseph’s coat represents a clear case of “twinking,” which is when players get extravagant gifts that would otherwise be out of their reach. This may come from generous guildmates or players buying in-game money—or even whole accounts—from third parties. Most of us won’t throw someone down a well, but retaliations to these activities range from message-board mutterings to throwing up our hands and canceling subscriptions.

The idea was to examine what “fairness” means to people, and to do so with a psychological slant. Is it fair to play on special servers in Team Fortress 2 or other shooters designed to let you farm achievements and unlock new weapons? Is buying gold from a World of Warcraft gold farmer fair? Is it fair to get a bucket full of unlocks off the bat in Dead Space 2 just because you played the previous games in that series? Is it fair to use a FAQ to solve Subject 16 puzzles in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood while others figure it out on their own yet get the same achievement?

I thought these were interesting questions, and psychology does have some things to say about them. Fairness is a judgment, and we know that judgments can be radically different depending on how the situation is framed or presented. Unfortunately while the question is interesting (I think) I didn’t have a chance in this article to really reach out game designers, academics, or other experts on the topic, so I think the article suffers a bit because of it. But still, I love the artwork and layout that goes along with this one. It’s a nice example of what print magazines still do that web usually doesn’t.

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Procedural Justice and Nerfing

Most of us have been in a situation where we feel that we’ve gotten the short end of a pointy stick. Maybe we were booted from a game server, banned from a message board, or had our favorite MMO game character weakened by a patch in such a way that left us shaking our tiny fists at the injustice of it and vowing that we’ll show them, we’ll show them all. And maybe other times the same exact things have happened but we’ve able to just sigh, say “Well, that sucks, but looking back I can see why they did it,” and move on.

Such differing ideas of what constitute “fair” treatment given identical outcomes have long been in the interest of psychologists, particularly those studying justice in the workplace. The research started off in the 60s by examining what people considered fair pay and distribution of other rewards relative to inputs like work, time, and nice bottles of scotch ((Adams, J.S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. Advanced Experimental Social Psychology, 62 335-343)) Since then, though, the field has expanded to include the fairness of the process by which decisions are made, and several “procedural justice” rules to live by in order to create procedural justice have been discovered.

A ninth of a second cooldown increase on my glowy yellow ball things? NEEEEERRRRF! QQ!

In addition to some applications in consumer psychology of pricing fairness, most of this research has been done in the context of the workplace, specifically trying to understand fairness perceptions of compensation, performance appraisal, and hiring decisions. For example, some jughead named Madigan ((Madigan, Jamie and Macan, Therese. (2005). Improving Applicant Reactions by Altering Test Administration. Applied H.R.M. Research, 10(2), 73-88.)) identified several sure-fire ways in which you could mistreat job applicants during the interview process in order to make them hate you and think that the whole thing was unfair. ((Or, if you preferred, you could NOT do these things and better the odds that people feel treated fairly. Your choice!))

It occurs to me that these same rules apply to the perceived fairness of “nerfing” in MMOs –that is, when the efficacy of a class, ability, or any other part of a game is toned down. It is not hard to find people complaining about a given nerf and calling it unfair. But fairness is not an objective state like having an elevated heart rate being on fire. It’s a judgment made by squishy human brains, and as such it’s susceptible to molding by perceptions and how information is presented or framed. Below are a few lessons from fairness in the world of work that developers and community managers should keep in mind when putting together the patch notes on any big nerfs. I’ve even included relevant quotes from World of Warcraft players on the official Blizzard boards for the sake of illustration. ((Which is not to say I think Blizzard is doing a bad job in this regard. You cannot make all the people happy all the time, and with 15 bajillion players it is not hard to find a few disgruntled ones to quote.))

Voice and Participation

We all know that the community was asking to nerf warriors right? No not really. Almost no one asked that.

One of the clearest and most reliable procedural justice rules is providing those affected by a decision a chance to voice their opinions. This is one reason job applicants tend to think less structured, open-ended interviews containing questions like “Why are you qualified for this job?” are more fair –they give you more of a chance to participate in the process and influence the decision relative to tightly structured interviews that ask the same (often technical) questions of all candidates. ((Latham, G. P. & Finnegan, B. (1993). Perceived practicality of unstructured, patterned, and situational interviews. In Schuler, H., Farr, J.L., & Smith, M. (Eds.) Personnel Selection and Assessment. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.)) Likewise, developers who solicit and acknowledge input from players make things seem more fair. You don’t even have to take their advice; just listening to it helps. Of course, if you DO happen to hear something useful and act on it, it’s always good to point that out, too.

Consistency

It has always been this way… random nerf here, random buff there, suprise nerf there, odd buff there…just the rollercoaster of WoW and the whims of the class designer and his buddies.

This one is kind of a no-brainer. Being consistent in your decisions helps them seem fair, even in the absence of bias. For example, research has shown that people tend to see subjecting ALL job applicants to drug testing is more fair than random testing. ((Murphy, K.R. (1986). When your top choice turns you down: Effect of rejected offers on the utility of selection tests. Psychological Bulletin, 99, 133-138.)) Likewise, efforts made to show consistent application of a guiding design philosophy or goals should combat perceptions of unfairness.

Transparency

I often find myself scratching my head at the decisions that get made about how/why to nerf and buff various classes. I chalk it up to I don’t have all the data, the Developers at Blizzard do. …I will admit that some of the changes they make are just completely baffling to me however.

Some researchers have posited that job applicants feel that more simulation-based tests (like disassembling an actual pump or troubleshooting real computer code) are more fair tests of ability than abstract tests (like paper and pencil tests of personality) because it’s easier to draw a straight line from their performance to the hiring decision. ((Smither, J.W., Reilly, R.R., Millsap, R.E., Pearlman, K., and Stoffey, R.W. (1993). Applicant reactions to selection procedures. Personnel Psychology, 46, 49-76.)) Likewise, players want to see a direct line between the decision to nerf or buff a certain class and the performance of that class in the game. To the extent that they can see the data and understand the goals of the change, they’ll see it as more fair. Show them the math.

Freedom From Bias

Being regularly nerfed with no warning or explanation (not that the nerfs aren’t needed sometimes) is one of the main parts of the Warlock class… Shamans don’t usually get many changes. Mage, DK, Warrior and Druid changes I’d guess are the ones that get more blue posts.

People generally don’t like it when decisions are made based on extraneous factors unrelated to the goals of the decision. In employment we call that “discrimination.” In WoW, they call it “you guys hate my class.” Again, some context usually helps, as does showing some kind of big picture or master plan.

Recourse for Bad Decisions

Ah but therein lies the challenge. You have to prove what blizzard is obligated to do. And I’m sorry to say, but gameplay/content changing isn’t something blizzard is obligated NOT to do…

People like to feel that if they disagree with the way a decision was made, they have some formal way of protesting it or asking for it to be reconsidered beyond sitting in a shack in the middle of Montana and banging out angry missives on an old IBM typewriter. Even something as simple as a survey, a poll, or a procedure for voicing displeasure to a class representative in the community can help. Again, you don’t have to actually overturn the decision if it’s the right one (and lord knows developers usually have a lot more data or a broader view than players), but just giving people a chance to appeal it helps.

So there you go. Some of you may be thinking “Well, duh” but that’s kind of the point –these are somewhat, but a lot of time it’s amazing how much work and playtesting and engineering will go into devising a patch, but how relatively little work will go into communicating the process by which those decisions were made.

Anyone else got other fairness rules to follow they want to share in the comments, or examples of these they want to share?