The Psychology of Video Games | Tag

I have recently been hearing a lot about SimCity Social, the “Farmville with a candy coating of SimCity” game from Bigfish and EA. Mostly I’ve heard about how the game pulls all kinds of tricks to get players to spam each other, trade items, recruit new players, and spend real money. All of these things are par for the social game course, but apparently we have a more egregious than usual offender here. So I decided to investigate what psychological tricks SimCity Social pulls by forking over all kinds of pervasive permissions to my Facebook account and trying it out.

Wow. There’s so much going on here that within a few seconds I blacked out and woke up some time later in a puddle. I don’t know how this happened.

What I do know, though, is that SimCity Social wears many of its machinations on its custom tailored sleeve. I counted seven pretty much immediately and decided to stop there, because I love alliteration and had this great idea for a blog post title. The convenient thing is that these are all things I’ve written about before, so instead of going into depth on each I’ll give you the gist and then point you at other articles if you want more.

Sin #1: Reciprocity

Reciprocity is the impulse we feel to return favors, and it’s a pretty fundamental factor in human society and psychology in general.1 Whenever you get a free sample at the supermarket, the nice lady in the hairnet is banking on reciprocity to at least listen to her enthusiastic description of this new snack cracker if not buy a box right then and there. Famed psychologist Robert Cialdini explained in a 2001 article in Scientific American how the Disabled American Veterans organization used reciprocity to increase the success rate of their mail-based fundraisers from 18% to 35% simply by free return address stickers as a tiny gift with each appeal.

SimCity Social has gift trading baked into almost every aspect of the game. You can, once a day, gift other players with a few resources. If you’re low on specific resources –say a scientist to staff your research lab– you can request them as gifts. And you get points for every gift you accept. The game makes it easy for you to return the favor, and each exchange sends you a Facebook notification that prompts you to launch the game and keep playing. Non-players can receive gifts too, provided they first install the game and start playing themselves.

Sin #2: Funny Money

Like most “wait to play” games, SimCity Social lets you spend real money to accelerate the game and get past the time and resource restrictions. Need more “bliss” to finish construction of your toy factory? I don’t know what “bliss” is, but you can get out your credit card and buy some! But, of course, you can’t just charge stuff straight to your card. You have to buy some of the game’s currency, little purple diamonds, and then spend those.

The problem is that like travelers spending money in a foreign currency, spending purple diamonds makes you susceptible to several biases and errors in thinking, ranging from being too lazy to do the mental currency conversions, to applying different (and irrational) mental accounting to diamonds than you would real money, to overspending unused diamonds because you don’t want to “waste” them.

Sin #3: The Status Quo Effect

Let’s stick with the little purple diamonds for a minute. When you click to buy some, you’re presented with six different denominations you can buy, ranging from 900 diamonds for $100 to 35 diamonds for $5. Notice in the screenshot which of those options is selected by default, though: the most expensive one.

This is designed to take advantage what’s called the status quo effect, which describes our tendency to accept default settings, decisions, or options rather than make the often trivial effort to change them. This is especially true in ambiguous or cognitively demanding situations. For example, in one study,2 researchers were able to drastically increase the number of employees who participated in a savings plan just by requiring them to opt out of the program rather than opt in.

Similarly, more people shopping for diamonds should go with the default choice of 900 for $100. Of course, many of you may be thinking that this is too extreme to work in most cases; most people are looking to spend just a few bucks, not $100. And you’re probably right, but SimCity Social uses the status quo effect elsewhere as well. Whenever you have to confirm sending a request to another player via Facebook, the system automatically checks a box that says “Don’t ask again before sending requests to [NAME] from this app.” When you accomplish something in the game, it often throws up a notification that includes the ability to “Share Rewards” to your Facebook wall after you click “OK.” This is, of course, selected by default as shown in the screenshot above.

Sin #4: Artificial Scarcity

Sometimes we just want something because we soon won’t be able to have it. This is known as the scarcity effect. Consider a simple 1975 experiment by psychologist Stephen Worchel3 where researchers 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. In reality, they were THE SAME COOKIES but people reported the cookies from the mostly empty jars as more delicious, more desirable, and more expensive. Just because they were more scarce, and our brains are wired to be averse to losing the option to have something once it’s available.

We see the same thing with plentiful goods or digital goods with limited time offer. If something is on sale for one day only, we’re averse to losing our chance at getting it for a good price and are more likely to buy it than we would if it were that same low price every day. Just look at Steam sales or Amazon.com’s deal of the day. SimCity Social creates this artificial scarcity by offering you a deeply discounted new building every time you level up. But you have to buy it RIGHT THEN before dismissing the “Level up!” notification –the text stresses “One Time Offer! You will NEVER see this offer again!”

Sin #5: Endowed Progress

Once we get started down the road to a goal, we’re reluctant to give it up. This is a great hack you can use to motivate yourself to reach goals, but it can also be used against you. And what’s more, it turns out that we’re super susceptible to suggestions that we have already started an undertaking, even right off the bat.

My favorite example of what’s called the endowed progress effect is a 2006 study by Xavier Dreze and Joseph Nunes4 where they gave half the customers at a car wash a rapid rewards card that required 8 total stamps to get a free wash. Others were given a similar card that required 10 total stamps, but were given two freebie stamps to get them started. So both groups needed only 8 more stamps, but the one that got kick started with the two freebies were more likely to come back for future visits and to wait less time between them.

SimCity Social leverages the endowed progress effect in a few ways. Upgrading building requires various resources, but you’ll often have at least some of these before you start and will thus immediately see something like “2 of 20 hard hats” when you check the progress of your upgrade. Each game chapter also has multiple, specific goals for completion (e.g., “Build a Bakery”) and I found that I had often already satisfied one of those goals in the course of messing around on my own.

Read more about the endowed progress effect:

Sin #6: The Availability Heuristic

The availability heuristic kicks in when we overestimate the frequency of event because instances of that event are easy to recall from memory –they are, in other words, more available for recall. (Interestingly, the converse is true as well; if we have difficulty remembering examples of something, we underestimate its frequency.)

Many things can make an event easier to recall from memory, including seeing it happen to friends. SimCity Social capitalilzes on this by encouraging you to spam the living daylights out of your wall with notifications of things that you’ve done in the game and the fact that you’re playing the game in the first place. Friends who see these notifications recall them more easily and are thus likely to overestimate the popularity of the game when they see an ad or receive an invitation to play.

Read more about the availability heuristic:

The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 2: Availability Heuristic and Loot Drops

Sin #7: Benign and Malicious Envy

Social comparisons are, unsurprisingly, important to social games. This includes that old standby, envy, especially what’s been called “benign envy.” As opposed to “malicious envy” where you want to tear down the other person and take away their pretty shiny thing, benign envy is elicited when we think that a person deserves what they have because they earned it. Benign envy motivates us to improve ourselves (or pay money) to get the same rewards. In one study5 researchers instilled benign envy in a group of college students by having their friends earn a new iPhone. As a result, subjects said they were willing to pay 64% more to get their own iPhone.

SimCity Social capitalizes on benign envy when you visit other players’ towns. You can see everything they have built and bought. What’s interesting (and probably the most amusing thing about the game) is that you have the option to be either kind or mean to them as you click on all their stuff. You can “knock over display stands” in their stores, or you can “compliment the decor” when you visit their Mayor’s home. You can even send either hot air balloons across their skies, or a flock of incontinent seagulls. And, of course, if you experience benign envy over their accomplishments and layout, you may be more motivated to recruit more friends or buy some of those purple diamonds to keep up with them.

Read more about the benign envy:

So, there you go: my epic post on the psychological shenanigans of SimCity Social. I’m not saying Playfish set out to brainwash you –these are old design principles and the people who make videogames tend to be smart so they figure out and remember what works. Nor are they unique to SimCity Social, in that most of them apply in one way or another for most social games in this vein. But if you decide to engage in a little urban development on Facebook, everything above is good to keep in mind.

P.S., Thanks to readers Zachary and Danielle for stepping up and accepting the friends request to play the game with me and pose for some screenshots.

One day when going to check on my friends’ status updates on Facebook, this jumped out at me:

Attention Facebook friends: Please for the love of God stop sending me gifts and invites for Farmville, Mafia Wars, Vampires, and whatever other crappy THING you’ve been playing. DO NOT WANT. Just …STOP. GOD.

Those of you on Facebook or MySpace can probably sympathize. How many times have you checked your notifications and thought “Gee, you sent me a …virtual goat. THANKS. I guess. Guess I should click on your link.” Indeed, developers of these social games have gone to great lengths to make “gifting” of imaginary stuff a core element to the gameplay, and they’re even starting to offer pixilated gifts for real money. Why is that? Why do people do that?

The answer has to do with one of the most powerful habits in social psychology: the reciprocity effect. When people give you something, you feel the need to give something back; it’s that simple. Or possibly if you’re like my friend quoted above, you yell at them. But usually you want to reciprocate. Some evolutionary psychologists think that this is an evolutionary advantage in that it encourages societies to form –and enforce– mutually beneficial norms. Adhering to the norm is seen as a good deed, and others want to return that deed; breaking the norm is an attack, and will earn you a misdeed in return, like shunning or a punch to the neck.

Thank you for the sheep, Guy I Knew in High School.

The reciprocity effect is put to use by marketers and savvy businesspeople all the time. Every year the March of Dimes charity sends me a lovely set of return address labels for use with my Christmas cards ((Tip: if you try to use them with e-mail greeting cards, it gets your monitor all sticky)). The labels are a free gift, but not coincidentally, they come in the same envelope as a plea to donate. The message is clear: “Dude, we totally just gave you some free stuff. You should return the favor with a donation.” Psychologist Robert Cialdini explained in a 2001 article in Scientific American how the Disabled American Veterans organization used this same trick to increase the success rate of their appeals for donations from 18% to 35%. ((Cialdini, R. (2001). The Science of Persuasion. Scientific American. February 2001))

The same technique is used by supermarkets giving you free samples of new cheese crackers, or the video game developer who gives out free tee shirts to the press or buyers during a trade show. I’m not saying that you’ll be mind controlled and compelled to return the favor by buying the crackers or giving a favorable writeup, but you’ll at least think about it more than you would have otherwise. Many organizations even invoke “no gifts” codes of conduct to guard against things like the reciprocity effect.

But what about Farmville? That’s a free game, right? And most of the gifts are free, too, right? For the most part, but Zynga, the makers of Farmville and other social games like Mafia Wars, nevertheless want new players to come in and existing players to stick around. The gifts in these games are useful to their recipients within the game, so seeing a notification that you’ve gotten one encourages you to log into the game and put it to use. And actually just clicking on the link will start you down the path to installing and playing the game, which increases Zynga’s numbers. Then the reciprocity effect then encourages you to return the favor by sending a gift back, which creates a cycle of reciprocating fruit plants, livestock, and penguin statues flying back and forth. Even worse is when you realize that if you DON’T perpetuate the gifting loop, you’ll hurt your friends by making them waste in-game money for things they were hoping to get from you as gifts, you heartless bastard.

This is an effective mechanism for getting people to perpetually log back in to Farmville, for example, instead of moving on to other games. There’s the notification telling you that you need to log in to reciprocate the gift, and while you’re there you might as well play for a while. You can even send gifts to people who don’t play the game yet, encouraging them to pay you back by starting up a game as your neighbor or teammate. Farms everywhere in an unholy amalgamation of psychology and agriculture!

But wait, there’s more. The real money for companies like Zynga comes when you feel compelled to spend REAL money to reciprocate a “premium” gift. In fact, let’s see what Mark Pinkus, CEO of Zynga, had to say in a recent interview with Charlie Rose ((And if there’s one thing I know it’s that the kids, they can’t get enough Charlie Rose)):

We are excited about the future of social games and virtual goods as a revenue model within social games. What I mean by that is …these are free games, and one to two percent of the users will spend money in the games. And they can spend it on virtual goods, virtual gifts we just started selling, and that has been a revenue model that has enabled our company to be profitable for eight straight quarters.

So, enjoy your free sample. But don’t underestimate its effect on you.