Tag Archives: Steam

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Steamed Endowed Progress a la carte

I recently wrote about the endowed progress effect, which makes us more likely to complete progress towards a goal if we have the impression that we’ve already begun taking the necessary steps. For example, people who get 2 free stamps on a “buy 10 get 1 free” card are more likely to put in the purchases needed to earn the freebie –even more so than people who got no free stamps but needed two fewer stamps to qualify.

Valve, the masters of digital distribution and the art of Steam, recently illustrated another application of the endowed progress effect when they launched The Great Steam Treasure Hunt. The idea is that you earn Steam-based achievements by completing game-specific tasks such as earning a score of 1,124,400 in Chime, which just happens to be on sale for $1.25 today. ((Coincidence? I THINK NOT.)) Earn any ten of these achievements and you get entered into a lottery for 100 free games. You can also earn progressively cooler Team Fortress 2 hats by completing any 5, 15, and 28 Treasure Hunt achievements.

Of course, many of these are game-specific achievements, so you have to buy the game to earn them. But the clever thing Valve has done, at least on this first day, is to insert some easy to earn achievements to get you started. In fact, the first one is simply “Setup an avatar,” which is so easy that many people currently using Steam will have already started their progress towards 10 achievements:

Bam. Endowed progress effect. Well played, Valve. Well played.

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Three Reasons Why We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scarcity

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

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

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

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

Obscuring True Value

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

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

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

Anchoring

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

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

8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1

And then they asked another group to estimate this product:

1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8.

Those of you with a grade school education may know that because of how multiplication works these products are equal.4 Yet the average estimate for the group that was given the problem starting with “8″ was 2,250 while those who saw a “1″ at the beginning of the problem had an average estimate of just 512. Why? Because one group anchored on a high number and the other anchored on a low number.

Similarly, behavioral economist Dan Ariely and his collegues conducted a study5 where he used anchoring in an auction simply by having bidders write down the last two digits of their social security number at the top of their bid sheets. Those whose numbers ended in the 80s and above actually were willing to pay up to 346% more for things like wine and chocolates than were those whose social security numbers ended in the 20s or below. CRAZY.

Not one, but two anchors here

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

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

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The Glitcher’s Dilemma: Social Dilemmas in Games

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.

The Glitcher's Dilemma

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 World ((1. Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Publishers.)) 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:

Prisoners Dilemma

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, ((as well as a game-balancing patch or two, I believe)) 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:

Zerg Rush Dilemma

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:

Loot Dilemma

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. ((Ringing a bell? You may be thinking about my article on how deindividuation fosters antisocial behavior and how to similarly deal with that))

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.

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How Social Identity Theory Predicted the Console Wars of ’07

Fanboys. You don’t have to be a very experienced browser of gaming-related forums to see your share of discussions fouled by flames between people hysterically defending their favored game/console/genre/whatever and attacking everything else in sight. Some of it is deliberate trolling, for sure, but not always. There were (and still are) way too many Xbox owners ready to point and laugh at the Playstation 3′s lack of games. Or good luck trying to find someone who will stand up as a fan of BOTH Halo AND Killzone. ((And don’t even get me started on the whole “table versus jetski” debacle.))

Why do gamers do this? One word: “social identity theory.”

Fans

Typical Fans

This theory explains (or at least predicted) the Great Console Wars of today and tomorrow. In one study, psychologist Henry Tajfel and his colleagues brought together teenage boys ((There’s the bulk of your console war soldiers right there, in fact.)) and asked them to express preference for one of two sets of paintings, saying that their choice would place them in one of two otherwise arbitrary groups. Thus sorted, the boys then participated in a separate study where they distributed (fake) money to their fellow subjects under a variety of conditions. But here’s the key: each boy was told whether those to whom he was doling out the virtual cash were in “his” group or in the “other” group.

I’ll bet you can guess the results: subjects showed stark favoritism for people who had liked the same set of paintings as they had and who were thus in “their” group. Remember that like messageboard denizens, these kids had absolutely no self-interested reason to do this –they weren’t rewarded for favoring their group and they weren’t given any reason to expect their fellow group members to return the favor and be best friends forever. They just did it because they considered those strangers to be “us” and –perhaps more importantly– the rest to be “them.” ((Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149-178.))

Tajfel and his collaborators theorized that people have a natural tendency to construct identities based on group membership. Part of who you are –and how you communicate that to others– is defined by what groups you belong to. And we naturally want to belong to high-status groups, right? Okay, fine, but everything is relative; a group isn’t high status unless there’s a low status group for it to be contrasted against. So not only do some people identify themselves as Xbox fans, they attack Playstation owners in order to raise their status. This tendency is human nature, the researchers concluded, and a lot of other data support them. What’s more, we’re perfectly willing to do it at the drop of a hat.

Some savvy game designers even build this kind of thing into their game, the biggest example being Blizzard’s long-standing “Horde vs. Alliance” rivalry in World of Warcraft. Some folks will roll toons on either side of the divide, but many hardcore players will vigorously stick to just one side, and Blizzard happily plays this rivalry up in the player versus player aspects of the game.

One of the most interesting uses of social identity theory I’ve seen, though, was pulled off by Valve Software during their recent “Demoman versus Soldier” event for Team Fortress 2.

Valve uses social identity theory for fun and profits

Harnessing their flabbergasting ability to track gameplay stats through Steam, Valve promised a new in-game weapon for the class (Demoman or Soldier) that scored the most overall kills against his opponent during a certain time frame. The results were nuts as people chose sides, let rockets/stickies fly, and created renewed buzz for the game. ((In case you were wondering, Soldier won the shootout, but just barely –6,372,979 Soldiers gibbed vs 6,406,065 Demomen.))

I think the Soldier explained it best on the Official Team Fortress Blog:

Gentlemen, I have NO IDEA what this weapon is. I don’t even know if I’ll WANT it. But BY GOD, I know what’s IMPORTANT, and it’s that WE get it and the DEMOMAN DOES NOT.

This is psychological warfare at its finest.