The Psychology of Video Games

Despite a huge backlog of games trying to get my attention, I found myself playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately. This is in part because of the loot system, which drops random items –mainly hats or weapons– for you to use in customizing your avatar.¹ This system has been in TF2 for a while, and it used to be that the only way of getting the gear you wanted was by getting it from a drop or by crafting it from raw materials (which also essentially came from drops). Many players rejoiced and were very proud of their silly hats and weapons.

Then, in late September 2010 Valve introduced the Mannco Store, which allowed you to buy –with real money– almost all of the items that you used to have to score from lucky drops. Players were suddenly faced with the prospect that the Kritzkrieg or Backburner that they had been running around with would now be indistinguishable from those bought from the store. Comments began to arise on message boards that this would lower the appeal of those original items, the implication being that the “pre-Mannconomy” versions should be worth more than the new copies readily available in the store.

Buy stuff AND get in fights? Double sold!

This made me think about a series of experiments performed by Paul Bloom and Bruce Hood, as related in the book, How Pleasure Works.² Bloom and Hood wanted to see if invoking an item’s history could make it more valuable. Capitalizing on a recent visit by the Queen of England to the town where the research was to take place, they brought in a bunch of six-year old children and showed them certain items (a spoon or a cup) that had supposedly belonged to the Queen. They then placed the items into a mock “duplicating machine” that would supposedly make copies of the items. The machine consisted of a pair of boxes with hidden doors in the back through which one could slip an item’s twin in order to trick the kids into thinking that the original item had been duplicated. You may think that this is selling the average six year old’s intelligence a bit short, but Bloom explains himself pretty well:

When we showed this machine to children, none thought it was a trick. This fits with other research that finds that children are perfectly credulous about unusual machines. There is no reason why they should be skeptical. They live in a world with giant flying canisters, metal-cutting laser beams, talking computers, and so on. And we already have a rudimentary two-dimensional duplicating machines –you can take a piece of paper with Michael Jordon’s autograph on it, put it in a photocopy machine, press the button, and end up with something indistinguishable from the original. What is so strange about a three-dimensional version of this? For the children we tested: nothing.³

(Indeed, one could actually imagine doing this study using scanners and 3D printers without resorting to tricky. We live in the future, people. Let’s start using our technology to more thoroughly deceive our children in the name of science.)

The researchers then had children assign value to the original and duplicate items. Not surprisingly, they valued the original items much more highly because they had history and that history was seen as not transferable to the copies. To see if the same effect would happen when it was YOUR history that went with the object, Bloom and Hood conducted a follow-up study where they offered to duplicate kids’ security objects –for example, blankets or stuffed animals that some kids will never sleep without. Some kids refused to allow their special objects to be subjected to such shenanigans, but for those that did, the researchers offered to let them take home either the original or the copy. Almost all of them chose to keep the original.

Bloom argues that this is all because we perceive items as having essences based on their history or who they belonged to. I’ve written about the endowment effect, which causes us to value an object more once we own it. Similar thing. And I don’t know if Valve was thinking of blankies and teddy bears when they rolled out the Mannco store, but they did apparently realize that items with a history –that is, that were acquired from drops before they were available to buy– would be seen as more valuable and players would feel a sense of loss if it was suddenly considered –or perhaps more importantly seen as– equivalent to readily available duplicates.

It also has +10 psychological weight.

Their solution: put the word “Vintage” in front of the item. So “Force of Nature” is what you can buy from the Mannco Store or find via drops after the update. “Vintage Force of Nature” is the thing you’ve had all along. It’s different, even if it looks the same and acts the same and may have been owned by the Queen of England. I’m curious what would happen if Valve ran an experiment where they offered to buy back duplicate items and asked people what they’d sell them for. How much more would the “Vintage” versions of items be worth relative to the non-vintage? I’d guess a LOT more.

1. Hey, by the way, I have an article on the psychology of loot drops in an upcoming issue of GamePro. COINCIDENCE? You decide. [↩]
2. Bloom, P. (2010) How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. [↩]
3. ibid, page 109 [↩]

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.¹ 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.

1. Coincidence? I THINK NOT. [↩]

What leads gamers to join one guild in a massively multiplayer game or one clan in an online shooter over another guild or clan? Why do you post on the gaming messageboard that you do as opposed to one of the other countless alternate ones? And once you’re in a group, what kind of things make you leave?

Industrial-organizational psychologists, who use the tropes of psychology to study people in the world of organizations and work,¹ have come up with a lot of theories on why people choose to work for one company over another, why they leave, and how those things affect the “culture” of the place –the shared understanding of what is expected and rewarded within that group. Some of these models lay more credit at the feet of organizational structures, and some credit the environment. But another view known as the Attraction-Selection-Attrition (ASA) model,²³ says that it’s the people that determine the culture of whatever organization you’re looking at, be it guild, clan, messageboard, or mod team.

In brief, ASA says that it’s the people in the group that define the culture⁴ , not just the environment, structure, or rules of the game. It does this through a three-step cycle:

1. New members are attracted to the group by what they perceive to be similarity in values, goals, and interests
2. When petitions are made for membership, the gatekeepers in the organization select would-be members based on who is most similar to them
3. Attrition happens when people who don’t fit in so neatly after all find better things to do than hang out and deal with the guild drama

Figure 1: The ASA cycle. Also, this whole thing is moderated by lolcats. Somehow. Science is still working on that part.

This isn’t exactly mind blowing, but it has implications if you think it through. One being that it explains the three-pronged mechanism by which cohesive, like-minded groups of people develop over time. People that are at odds with the culture within the guild or clan tend not to want to be a part of it. And if they do, they tend not to be selected for membership. And if that happens, they tend to rage quit over time.

For example, back when I was playing lots of Team Fortress 2 I hung out a lot with guys from a website called “Portal of Evil.” These were guys who ran goofy game mods, played on experimental and occasionally awful maps, and who broadcasted obnoxious music and trash talk over allchat. I played with them regularly because I thought all of this was hilarious and fun. But if hadn’t wanted my Engineer wearing a jaunty party hat or couldn’t tolerate hearing “Baby Got Back” on allchat FOR THE FIFTIETH TIME THAT NIGHT, I would have found someone else to play with or been mocked for complaining.

Likewise, guilds in massively multiplayer games are sometimes interesting in how they evaluate petitions for membership. A friend of mine who wanted to join a hardcore raiding guild in World of Warcraft once described this process as an audition where he was grilled about his play style and history, his character build, his equipment, and how many hours a week he was willing to devote to to the guild. He was then taken along on an actual raid where the guild’s recruiter used UI mods to track his performance in the game along very strict measures to see if he could properly play his role. In the industrial-organizational psychology parlance, we call that kind of thing a job interview and a work sample test. It’s exactly the kind of thing that the “S” part of the ASA model describes. (And if you, dear and handsome reader, have personal experience with this kind of thing, I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.)

What’s even more interesting to me is to consider is how game designers and community managers might use something like this model to guide their efforts if community is a big part of their game.

First, the ASA model points to providing players with tools that they can use to communicate their goals, values, and desires to each other. Allowing players to formulate and share a charter that signals these things would be great, as would communication channels like messageboards and private chat to which prospective members could be invited to eavesdrop. Statistics about guild/clan activities could also provide a strong signal –things like rankings, achievement counts, manhours played, headcount, or other metrics could be invaluable to people shopping for a group to become part of.

And this information works both ways –people who aren’t as into PvP combat could self-select out of the process while those who are will find it easier to find guildies who share those values. Heck, what if you borrowed another idea from the world of Industrial-organizational psychology and allowed players to submit anonymous responses to standardized surveys asking about what values their guild or clan holds? “On a scale of 1 to 5, my guild is forgiving of people who miss scheduled events.” Useful.

Game developers might also want to provide tools that team leaders can use to evaluate potential members. Gameplay stats and standardized application blanks could be really useful, as could be information on complaints filed against that person by other players. If you provide a useful tool, players won’t have to rely on third-party tools. Or maybe THAT IS your plan, and you can facilitate it by providing data and APIs upon which players can build.

The point is that both current and potential group members are going to be looking for information about those shared expectations (i.e., organizational culture) in order to make decisions about each point in the Attraction-Selection-Attrition cycle. To the extent that a game or a service outside of a game facilitates that, people will find it useful.

1. Hey, I’m one of them guys! [↩]
2. Schneider, B. (1987). The people make the place. Personnel Psychology, 40, 437-453. [↩]
3. Schneider, B., et al. (1995). The ASA Framework: An Update. Personnel Psychology, 48, 747-761. [↩]
4. it also acknowledges the disproportional weight of the organization’s founders in determining culture, but that’s another article [↩]

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.¹

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

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 boys² 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.”³

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.⁴

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.

1. And don’t even get me started on the whole “table versus jetski” debacle. [↩]
2. There’s the bulk of your console war soldiers right there, in fact. [↩]
3. 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. [↩]
4. In case you were wondering, Soldier won the shootout, but just barely –6,372,979 Soldiers gibbed vs 6,406,065 Demomen. [↩]