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Event Highlights: Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) 2017 There’s something strange yet gratifying about watching a game that you know intimately well being expertly maneuvered through for the first time, even more so for games that you’ve played for years but isn’t talked about or that you don’t normally see when old games get brought up.

#AGDQ #AGDQ 2017 #games done quick #speedruns

Let's talk about: Player-Driven Context; Final Fantasy XV, That Dragon, Cancer and How a player connects to a game

New Post: exploring a player's experiences prior to a play help provoke a stronger response to the game #GameDesign

Final Fantasy XVis an interesting game. The first 80% of the game feels endless. You get in the car, Noctis and friends, trying to help Noctis find himself, his purpose and his responsibilities. You take detours exploring caves, hunting for the next big fish, camp under the stars and wish you would find the next town soon so you can get a decent shower. During it all, there’s friendly ribbing,…

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#Analysis #Game Design #Game Development #Gaming #Gaming Discourse #Let&039;s Talk About #Personal Context #Player-Driven Context #Psychology #Video Games

Bias in Gaming - Learning Patience and Understanding through Cooperative Online Games

Bias in Gaming – Learning Patience and Understanding through Cooperative Online Games

How much of life is about learning patience over immediate reaction? Patience in seeing that the hard work that you’re doing now will have some payoff in the future instead of taking seeing a way out now and changing tracks. Patience in dealing with others, taking a situation in and seeing things from another’s viewpoint, instead of letting subconscious reaction take over and responding in the…

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#Bias in Gaming #Game Ideas #Gaming Discourse #MMOs #Online Gaming #Psychology #Social Development #Video Games

Bias in Gaming: Music as a Frame for Changing Behavior

Not Bias Post: Looking at how music in games affects how we interact in the game #VideoGames #Psychology #Music

Music is…

Music is a mood enhancer. The soundtrack to your life, to your experiences current and past. Music highlights the drama in your life, the carefree moments with friends, the intensity of a shootout in a movie or game. Music and sound build off of what we already feel and amplifies it when done correctly to saturate our senses in the mood of the moment.

But music and sound are largely…

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#Behavioral Psychology #Bias in Gaming #Blaugust #Game Design #Game Development #Gaming Discourse #Psychology #Video Games

Bias In Gaming - How Brand Trust is Built - Blizzard and Steam, yes. PoGo, no.

New Bias Post: How Steam/Blizzard build Brand Trust and how PokemonGo squanders it #Psychology #VideoGames #PokemonGo

PoGo PoGo PoGo

The summer of Pokemon Go is almost completed and it still seems like many are still at it. Walk by a public park and you’ll still find people at all hours of the day with their head down at their phone flicking towards the top of the screen.

Everybody who tried playing during the first few days knows how poorly made the game is, how clunky the UI and controls are, how fickle the…

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#Analysis #Behavioral Psychology #Bias in Gaming #Blaugust #Brand Trust #Game Design #Gaming #Gaming Discourse #Psychology #Video Games

E3 happened a few months back and PAX West (originally PAX Prime) is about to happen in a few weeks. Game companies showcasing their pet projects for all to see, people to play and experiment with the parts that seem to be working and find the flaws that developers thought would go unnoticed, and the gaming media generating as much buzz around these games as can be mustered since (as we mentioned in the previous post) any advertising is good advertising.

But there is one part that I never really enjoy about these events, which mostly applies to E3, and that’s the publisher-sponsored conferences.

Microsoft E3 2016

Sony E3 2016

In essence, these conferences dedicate special time to showcase the exclusive/timed-exclusive games for a particular console or showcase all of the games under the same publisher.

But why is it so important for a game to be tied to a publisher/console so heavily? Wouldn’t you think that being untied to a particular lineup means that you have more accessibility to all consoles? I know that being a console exclusive gets you special broadcasting time, but why does it matter so much for non-first party games to be a part of the Microsoft lineup or the Sony brand?

Funny enough, it has a lot to do with why game studios and movie studios push so heavily for sequels and spinoffs.

Studios know the importance of a brand and its recognition in the consumer’s mind. Brands influence our choices as we gravitate towards things that we’re used to, yet we don’t always actively take their influence into account. We’ll look into why this is the case below the break.

The Short and the Long of Decision Making – Active/Passive Systems

Have you ever played an MMO like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV and came across a point where they required you to repeat a set of daily quests to get tokens, of which after collecting a month or two’s worth of tokens you get to trade them in for shiny high level items, custom alternative-costumes for your character, or a new creature to ride. You start off energetic, thinking that it’s only 15 minutes a day, which won’t be that hard to burn through , right? Then day-10 rolls around and you’re utterly bored of having to repeat the same three to six quests every day since it turned into tedium instead of being engaging? You repeat it for a few more days and you feel like you’re ready to drop the game out of burnout.

This highlights a difference in how we make decisions based on our current context. In this case, making the choice long before I felt the tedium of doing the same task everyday vs when I’m stuck in the middle of investing my time to get half way to the end and knowing that I still have another half to go of doing the same thing.

A different illustration comes from competitive gaming. League of Legends, Street Fighter, Smash Melee, Overwatch. Anyone that plays these games can tell you firsthand that half of getting better comes from the training you put outside of the game. That training comes from exercising your reflexes and learning how to read a situation, but competitors can tell you that reading a situation while in the middle of a game is a whole lot different than reading the situation from outside of the game. Inside the game, you’re playing a reactionary game because actively-splitting your focus on reasoning why people would make certain decisions based on your decisions means that you aren’t giving focus to reacting. Most of the time, knowing how someone else will play based on your movements comes from developing your instincts, which means that the only analysis that you can do is to either play out enough matches to develop corrected instincts or to take the study offline and analyze why a play went the way it did so that you can learn to recognize it without the added stress of playing a reactionary game.

This second scene highlights how reactive decisions might be different from ones that can be made with more contemplation and forethought.

Its these two dipolar systems for which we make decisions that get us into making irrational decisions.

Not anything new, though. They’ve been studying this academically for a while. Jonathan Evans hypothesized about the heuristic(the reactive, fast processing)-self and the analytic(contemplative, slow processing)-self back in the 1970s and Daniel Kahneman talked about the two-executive systems [1], the intuitive-subconscious decision system (System 1) and the reasoning-conscious decision system (System 2). Both philosophized that our decisions are a victim to these domains, of which don’t always have the right-results as they frame themselves with different intentions.

In some sense, the reactive-intuitive system can be considered the passive one as it’s the one dealing little with active inflection and weighing of choices but instead uses cues for shorthand assumpions, while the conscious-analytic system is making active choices based on a more holistic perceivable contexts.

Context changing decisions

These two systems affect how we react to a large degree; and manipulating our situation, the context in which we make decisions, affects what choices we actually decide to make.

For example, here’s a study on how people react when something as innocuous as a smell permeates the air. People walk around in a mall during the day set and tracked during different days. On one day the experiment group had smells of freshly baked cookies or freshly brewed coffee being pumped into the mall. The experiment came to this: if you came across someone else who was shopping and they dropped all of their recently purchased boxes and bags, would you go help them?

This study done by Ackermann et al in 2010 had data showing that when the pleasing scents were around these people, they were more likely to help the person in need. They suggested that the automatic-subconscious decision factory was primed to be in a good mood due to the pleasing scents and because of this primed them to be more helpful. [2]

This study also shows that our decision making can be influenced by things that are completely unknown to us, changing how we would act in a situation, with something as simple as a scent in our surroundings changing our likelihood to behave a different way.

Context changing expectations

If you were to look at a package of brown pudding, how do think it would taste? If I were to give you a cup of warm coffee, how do you think you’d feel afterwards?

Hold onto your answers for a few paragraphs.

Looking at the brown pudding and the warm coffee, you probably have some expectations on these things. The smooth, silky cream of the pudding and the slightly bitter, slightly earthy coffee are probably parts of them. But do you think the brown pudding would taste like chocolate? Do you think that the warm coffee would perk you up for a few hours?

A study by Hoegg & Alba in 2007 tested the brown pudding test with a couple of participants. The actual experiment had some of the brown pudding be chocolate while the other group had brown vanilla-pudding, but if you asked participants from either group they would tell you that it was a smooth silky chocolate flavor on their tongues. [3]

Now, wait a minute. Why would they say that the brown vanilla-pudding tasted like chocolate?

A different study by Dawkins et al. in 2011 studied the coffee scenario but experimented with some of the coffee being decaf. Just like the brown pudding experiment, they asked how the participants felt to which both sides said that they felt energized from the caffeine. In fact, if you checked their blood and heart rate, both sides’ bodies exhibited the same physical characteristics of having caffeine in their system.[4]

Just like the brown vanilla-pudding experiment, why would the decaf coffee make the participants believe that they were on caffeine to the point where their bodies reacted as though they were on caffeine?

The answer to both of these is that regardless of what we actually receive, what we expect to happen causes us to perceive that it is happening. In the case of the brown vanilla-pudding, we thought it was chocolate so we will probably think we’re tasting chocolate. In the case of the coffee, we thought it was caffeinated so our bodies prepared itself for receiving caffeine.

But why is this important? Because it shows that our expectations, while subconcious, affects our experiencing of a thing.

(side note: this is also probably why the first time tasting of an “Acquired Taste” is so off putting the first time since it’s hard to know what the expect.)

Automatic Expectations, Brands and Game Conferences

Games and the companies we associate with them are no different than the brown vanilla pudding (if you’ve skipped the previous section, this is going to seem like a really weird metaphor). Like the brown vanilla pudding, when we look at companies that back games we develop automatic expectations about the game.

We make automatic assumptions about the quality of the game, the way that it will handle multiplayer, the quality of the game design, the complexity of the level design, the pandering to the fans, the scaling of the difficulty, etc…

These automatic assumptions that are developed by associating a game with a company give the game a higher perceived value because they trade an expected social currency, the goodwill from previous games associated with the company. A mixture of fandom and expectations.

To illustrate this, there was a study done by Decode Implicit Marketing that found that, at least for telecoms, when trying to roll out a new product there’s a 4x increase in perceived value for the new product because it’s tied to a well known brand.

This is at least one of the reasons why it’s important for a game to be tied to a company so tightly and why it’s important to be associated with them in these gaming press conferences. If you’re a new IP (Intellectual Property) or even an established one, having the higher expectations in the quality of the game gives the perception of a higher valued game, meaning that you’re going to get more buzz, more sales and more players.

Being tied to an existing brand is also a large reason why new IPs are rare in the high risk AAA market and less so in the indie market. If you can develop the same game under an already established brand, why not capitalize on the people who might perceive the game better than it is? It might even turn out to be a good game?

Nintendo is notorious for leveraging old IPs instead of risking new ones with new characters. Kirby’s Epic Yarn originally being “Fluff of Yarn”, Super Mario Bros 2 more famously starting as “Doki Doki Panic” in Japan, Square rebranding Final Fantasy Legend from the first SaGa game. I know that I gave Kirby’s Epic Yarn a good look the first time I saw it for the main fact that it had Kirby as its mascot and the yarn aesthetic and interactive kid’s storybook interactions played a strong second place finish to me having an affinity for Kirby games.

That doesn’t mean that being tightly coupled to a brand will get you into the millions of sales, but it matters when getting gamers to give your game a strong first and second look because we love games with a history and we love games from the companies that we win us over.

So what does this all mean? Well, I know that from all of this, I’ll still be excited for many of the games that get showcased during E3, PAX and all of the other big events. I know that my expectations may never get met because the showcase will always be better than the final product. And maybe I’ll still believe in the hype to some extent, but I’ll just have to know what I’m actually hyped about. Is it the hype from what I think the game will be or is it the hype because of the companies associated with the game. Either way, if it’s a good game, it doesn’t wholly matter, right?

Twitter: @GIntrospection

Other Bias in Gaming Posts:

Attention, Rank and Choosing which Games to Buy

Complexity and Toxic Communities – League of Legends and Overwatch

How Game Preferences Change, Assortative Mating and Coping Mechanisms

References

[1] See Dual Process Theory

[2] Ackermann, Nocera, Barth (2010). Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decision. Science, 328, 1712-1715

[3] Hoegg, Alba (2007). Last perception: More than meets the tongue. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 490-498

[4] Dawkins, Fatima-Zahra, Ahmed & Edmonds (2011). Expectation of having consumed caffeine can improve performance and mood. Appetite, 57(3), 597-600

Blaugust

Post: Why having a game be tightly assoc'd with a company (e.g. E3) affects our expectations #Psychology #VideoGames E3 happened a few months back and PAX West (originally PAX Prime) is about to happen in a few weeks.

#Behavioral Economics #Behavioral Psychology #Bias in Gaming #Blaugust #Game Dev #Game Development #Gaming Discourse #Psychology #Video Games

Imagine this scenario, you’re on Steam perusing the store and you find your way to one of the multitude of game categories – let’s say Action games. So you start looking through the games to see what you might like.

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What do you think you’d click on? There are 600+ pages of Action games, is it likely that you’d click on all of them? Probably not.

But would you have at least clicked on the first few? Do you even know if they’re good? What about the first 10? Maybe. First 20? Less likely.

For me, I’d probably at least look at Batman – Telltale and Abzu, but I’d have hoped that I would’ve noticed Abzu on the second page and not abandoned my browsing already.

I bring this up because making choices is always tricky. You’re are presented with options, some of which are influenced by our immediate wants and some by your distant ones, and you’re asked to pick one of those options. But if you’re told to answer now then you might give a different answer than if you’re given a half hour or a half day to answer. The person asking you the question is giving you pressure, your immediate wants are clouding your judgement and you just might give an answer that you might regret because you’re forced to answer it at this moment.

The reason why I bring this up is because most (if not all) Bias In Gaming posts are about the choices we make and the situations in which we make them, inside and outside of gaming. Those choices are affected by when and how we’re asked and how those choices are presented which influences how and what we’ll choose to do. The context of which we make a choice is typically called a Frame (as in how do we frame our choices) and talking about frames is bringing to light the many ways that those frames influence our choices, intentionally and unintentionally for better or worse.

Frames can be thought of some category that we filter out options. When purchasing something like a TV, we might first Frame our options based on brand like Sony or Samsung, then Frame out options based on TV definition 1080p or 4k, then on Price, then on number of HDMI ports, etc…

But what is it about the Steam store, Playstation Network, Xbox Live Marketplace, etc… that influence how we decide what to look at and what to play? It’s all about availability and rank.

Availability Heuristic and Advertising

During 2013 and 2015 respectively, these two trailers were shown between TV shows and preroll for YouTube videos constantly. You could’ve probably seen or heard the ads four or five times an hour at its peak just before the games launched.

Not like it’s uncommon for big blockbuster games, movies and TV shows to put up a lot of advertising to promote a highly anticipated piece of media, but there’s definitely a reason why they do. Because advertising works.

Advertising works because it preys on our inability to remember all things at all times so we cheat it by remembering more recent things more strongly and that we gravitate towards things that we’re familiar with. The term is Availability Heuristic.

In general Availability Heuristic is a mental shortcut where we can better recall more immediate examples than other older ones and it leads to a mental bias called Recency Bias where we assume things that are easier to recall happen more frequently.

This was tested in a few ways. The Availability Heuristic was tested in 1974 by Tversky & Kahneman where they noticed that investors would judge the quality of a company based heavily on recent news while ignoring other relevant information about the company [1]. Recency Bias (an extension of the Availability Heuristic) was also studied by An. in 2008 where they showed that people who were able to recall Antidepressant commercials gauged that Depression was more prevalent than those who had less ability to recall those commercials. [2]

We judge things more with recent information vs overall information and we expect easier to recall events as more frequently occurring.

This is also why televised world disasters, epidemics, shootings and terror attacks get us to worry more often than things like car crashes or standard public health crises even though they happen more frequently, because they are news events which get us to remember all of the times that similar events recently happened reinforcing the idea that they are happening more frequently. Televised terror is advertised terror and advertised terror preys on our bias towards short-term-memory.

Effects of the news on us aside, advertising still has the effect that the more we view something the more likely we are to remember it when we come up with examples for things similar to it. You see those ads, it does a first order job of trying to get you interested in the game, but also a second order job of getting you to remember their game more readily when talking about it with friends or thinking of a new game to play because you’re bored of your currently library.

A different problem that advertising presents was found in other research suggesting that we don’t give attention to things that we prefer. Instead, it’s the other way around. The things that pull our attention lead us to give preference to them. This was studied using eye tracking technology on preferences between products against different brands by Krajbich et al., 2014 [3]

Take a minute to let that sink in. Attention affects preference more than preference affect attention. That means that the more times that NFL 2k17 ad gets plastered between commercials, the Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer starts as a pre-roll on YouTube or the new Call of Duty banner shows up on Kotaku or Destructoid, the more it implicitly affects our preference towards the game more so than us actually having a preference for or against it.

Probably another good reason for Adblockers. Too bad you have to pay extra for no ads on Hulu, but for $4 a month it might just be worth it.

But the effects of advertising has been studied in depth for years, at least the byproduct of advertising not necessarily the social or psychological reasonings for it. What’s equally interesting and relevant but less talked about is about how products are presented to us and how that affects our preferences in deciding what to try out next.

Ranks as a Frame

Seeing a product in an ad is one thing, but how does seeing a group of things together influence what we’ll pick?

One problem is that we don’t see things empirically, evident by the last section where we talked about how more recent ads influence our choices and preferences, but even with many things to choose from in front of us we have a shortsightedness in our choice.

What I mean by this is that the many choices that we make are based on what choices are actually presented and not always based on all of the possible choices that we could’ve made.

Imagine being given a choice of wages to rate, something like $15, $17, $19, $21, $23, $25, $27, and $29 per hour. We ask you to rate them by how attractive you find these wages. Obviously you’d view higher wages as more attractive than lower ones.

Lucky for us, this scenario was tested back in the mid 2000s.

What was interesting was that regardless of how much people made, they rated the set of wages similarly. Even if they made $40, $50, $70 per hour, they gauge the wages based on the set given to them. This was also tested with different wage ranges and diversity to a similar effect. (Brown et al., 2008) [4]

There was further study showing that this extended to more complex options, as well. We typically go on websites that let us know things like quality of the product, the price and who developed/published the product all of which we use before making a choice.

In a different study they tested people’s choice of auto-insurance with metrics of provider, price and quality of service shown and asked which participants would choose.

They tested people’s choice by mixing up the table in varying ways, having results sorted by quality, by price, by varying the providers for each position, etc… What they found was that it wasn’t price or quality that influenced people the most but the rank of an insurance quote among the other quotes that produced the most clicks.

Think about that for a moment. You gravitate towards an option not by how much it costs nor the quality of the option but by how high on the list it shows.

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So as you’re browsing through the Action-games list on Stream, released games on PSN, Amazon or any other marketplace, you’re more likely to click and buy a game that’s higher in the list. Is this because we’re so accustomed to better things being presented first? Do we anchor our preferences based on the first things that we see? Probably one thing we do know from the studies that I talked about today is that our choices are heavily influenced by the how those choices are presented and the context to which we make those choices.

But the marketplaces like Steam, PSN, and the like aren’t completely predatory to the point of taking total advantage of us as the more often we’re let down by our selections the less likely we’d be to return. For most of the time, they at least employ some basic algorithm to populate games higher in the rankings based on a mix of release-date, purchase frequency, and user rating and weighing each of these more heavily based on what you might be interested in.

So what?

So what’s the takeaway from all of this. That even though game marketplaces have a desire to give gamers a high quality sorting of the games presented or else gamers have less trust in their browsing system leading to a worse experience. That our choices as game consumers are still affected by the fact that they rank them a certain way. Games near the top, in the featured section are in essence being advertised to us similar to commercials on TV, YouTube and website banners; and that advertising affects our views on that game preferring it more so than our original preferences would dictate if the ad weren’t there to begin with.

It’s not like we have a choice because in order to have a good browsing experience to happen upon new games or see what’s being released, we have to view them in some sort of order. The only other alternative is to always have a clear intention of what you’re looking for, but then lose out on the discovery of a new product. Even looking at a curated list means that you’re looking at games in some order, just with the subset of games the curator has sifted through but still a preference affecting order.

Don’t view it as the market place and all of these options as bad, just view it as a necessary evil. As long as it does a good enough job to give you a good game more often than not, it’s an evil I can live with… except for the ads.

Twitter: @GIntrospection

Previous Bias-in-Gaming Posts

Game Complexity and Toxic Communities, a case study of League of Legends and Overwatch

How our Preferences in Games Change, Assortative Mating and Coping Mechanisms

Coop Fights and the Not-Invented Here Bias

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