Board Game Design Day: Board Game Design and the Psychology of Loss Aversion

my name is Jeff angle Steen and thank you for joining me today to talk a little bit about one of my favorite hobbies collecting interesting psychological trivia and tricks and I've become obsessed over the last five or ten years about loss aversion and all of the aspects that it has in human psychology so I'm excited to share some of that with you today so first a little bit about myself so I am a board game designer I've done about ten games now some of my big bigger ones were space cadets dragon and flagon fog of war was just recently released and I've a my first licensed game the expanse coming out which I'm excited about probably around June since this is a video game conference I will say that I also have to publish video games for the Apple 2 which you probably can't get any more star blaster and panic button both published in around 1982-83 something like that so and some of you also may know me from my podcast I am on the diced our podcast I do the game tech segment there and also the long-form about an hour long podcast called the dolla G which talks about game design and gets into the nuts and bolts specifically around board game design although we do get into a lot of topics and I also teach a board game design at the NYU game center for about I've done that for about two years so it's a game conference so I'm going to be playing a bunch of games throughout this throughout this lecture so why don't we start by this one I usually do live and grab somebody but in the interest of time I planted a stooge in the audience sorry a volunteer in the audience mr. Rob dabio before the conference before this talk I asked Rob I made him an offer I said I asked him if he had ten or twenty dollars he did say that he had a twenty dollar bill and I offered to make him a wager that I would put up $20 he can put up 20 I flip a coin he could call it in the air and the winner would take the $40 and I asked him if that was a wager that he would like to take and you said so I asked him to go with his gut and he said he said no he said he would not take that bet that the $20 was his that was the lunch money that you had set aside for today and I made him a couple of other offers I said would you do it if I put up 21 dollars against your twenty dollars would you do it if I went up to 22 dollars and he said that he would do it at twenty-five dollars if I recall correctly yes twenty-five dollars against my twenty dollars he would take that bet and that gets to the two really the the base illustration of a concept called loss aversion and just kind of in a nutshell what it's saying is that getting something feels good gaining twenty dollars feels good losing twenty dollars feels bad okay but losing the twenty dollars feels worse than gaining the twenty dollars feels good I've been trying to come up with a more elegant way to say that for a long time and I have failed so I'm just going to stick with that you know if you're looking in graphical form again gaining your ten or twenty dollars makes you happy and losing the ten dollars makes you unhappy but in a arbitrary scale more unhappy studies have shown we're gonna get a little bit into the details of how we know these numbers but studies have shown that losses are about two times as intense as gains the first research on this was done by Kahneman and Tversky back in the 80s they were two Israeli psychologists and they did a lot of really really interesting work about how people are really not acting rationally and act irrationally and they were approaching things in terms of what they called in economics there was a principal called Homo economicus which is that all of the studies of economics was based around the idea that people acted absolutely rationally and perfectly in their own interests and they found a lot of ways that people do not and this is one of the biggies ultimate they did win the Nobel Prize for this work actually Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize Tversky had passed away a couple of years before they were awarded it and as far as I know he is the only non economist to win the the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work so what are the purpose of this talk and what I'm hoping that you're going to bring out of it is that when I teach my game design students one of the questions that we always talk about early is do you start with the mechanic or do you start with a theme or you know how do you want to start and I always recommend that they start with an experience that they want to give the players or they start with an emotion that they want to give the players and for those of you that were here for the talk prior to mine about pandemic legacy you know learned a lot about the the beats and the emotional rollercoaster that was specifically kind of pre-programmed for the players and the way that they interacted with that and as a game designer as game developers we want to manipulate the players emotions so some of these are you know tools about things that are gonna make the players upset things are gonna make the players happy you don't want to necessarily avoid loss aversion sometimes you can use it in a very effective way to manipulate the players again going back to pandemic legacy or risk legacy when that game first came out one of the very first things that it made you do was tear up a card or sticker here was a card right card yes you had to tear up a card and that's a very emotional thing for players not both because it kind of goes against the social taboo of destroying the game but because it's tapping into that that idea of loss this is something that I bought this is something that I own and the first thing that the game is asking me to do is take a piece of it and rip it up so the idea is that by leveraging Judas you can get the players to the point that you want them to get at in that case by having them tear something up it was telling them that you know you're invested in this and it's gonna be an emotional experience okay this one is an all play it's this game by the way in these games in these little demonstrations it will go a lot smoother if you don't try to out think what's being asked just look inside yourself and go with your first reaction and think about what you would answer if you were what your feelings are because that's the way your players are gonna react they're not going to necessarily see that there that it's manipulative or that is being framed in a particular way so just just kind of go with that so here's two choices that you've got choice a I will give you $3,000 and then choice B you have an 80% chance to win $4,000 or a 20% chance to get nothing and the question is would you take choice a or choice B and just as a little hint I will take tell you that the average winnings on choice B is $3,200 just to take the math out of it so how many of you would take choice a and how many would take B okay almost all of you in actuality when people are surveyed on this about 80% will choose choice a and I've now from an economic standpoint going back to our homoeconomicus choice B is better overall for you to do yet people choose a we'll talk a little bit about the reasons into that in a second but let's jump to two other choices now choice a you're guaranteed to lose $3,000 and in choice B you have an 80% chance of losing $4,000 but a 20% chance of losing nothing so in this case how many people would choose choice a and how many would choose choice B okay we have a very average crowd here this is good so 72% of people surveyed on this will choose B and again those of you that shows a and the first one to be in the second one you have made choices that are against your economic interests in both cases but most people will go with that the general rule is that people will take a shore but people will gamble to avoid a loss that's a really really important concept and you sure you're already thinking about some of the game play implications of the way that that works so to kind of just look into a little bit of a game example I know this is a board game talk and this is a card from hearthstone which is not a board game but I'm counting it as a board game counting is a card game that can do some fancy things that regular card games can't do this is a card from the hunter class called tracking and the text on the card in case it's not clear says look at the top three cards of your deck draw one and discard the others so you basically see you'll draw the top three cards of your deck you see one of them and the other two are gone from the game forever and this card if you go onto hearthpwn or you go on two sites that talk about hearthstone this card is not usually well-received especially by new players I pulled some comments out about tracking I see the use of tracking but psychologically I voice dislike the idea of burning two cards to get 1/3 if I put a card in my deck and means I want to use it not to discard it in favor of something else or the bottom one tracking burn to other cards to draw one and possibly lose key parts of your deck this is tapping into that idea of it's it's giving anxiety to players they're worrying about okay I'm gonna draw three cards and that's a problem but the reality is from quickly mathematical standpoint is that it really discarding two cards from your deck only becomes an issue if you get all the way to the end of your deck the way hearthstone works you have 30 cards at the at the end of the 30 cards if you have to draw some more cards you start taking damage so yeah I mean discarding cards can be a little bit of a problem but for those who haven't played hearthstone if you're a hunter and you've reached the end of your deck you're probably in trouble anyway so mostly it doesn't really factor into the game but psychologically people are seeing those cards and seeing those goods cards and knowing I'm never gonna get to play them again here's an alternative reworking that I've run by other people and most people are happier with this phrase with this wording of the tracking effect look at the top 3 cards of your deck keep one and shuffle the other two back into your deck then discard the bottom two cards in your deck without looking at them now it's basically the same effect you get one card of your choice and two other cards are gone from your deck but because they're at the bottom of your deck most people feel psychologically well they're at the bottom of my deck I was never gonna see those cards anyway the reality is is that this is actually a worse effect for you then the real tracking effect because in the actual tracking effect you know two of the cards that are never gonna come up and so if you're planning your tactics or whatever you know that you you're never going to draw that and so you can work around that and this you don't know what you've lost but people psychologically are happier with this effect here's another case study that comes in to loss aversion level draining in RPGs I gave this presentation to my class about a month a couple weeks ago and when I put the level draining slide up there was an audible moan that went through the class again these are some quotes from from some D&D forums about draining levels and I've you can read that but I've highlighted some of the other stuff in there on the bottom there is little you can do in D&D to viscerally terrify players but for whatever reason level draining does it and a couple of more quotes this is all from the same thread all versions of D&D have some form of raised dead not all versions have restoration many players would rather die than lose 50% of their XP which I have verified with my daughter she agreed with that maybe this is a more emotional than sensible reaction but many players feel that way and my favorite quote of the whole thing on the bottom there but what I've always liked about level drain is just how personal that loss can be as if part of the characters life truly was just ripped away forever lessening them for it that's a real visceral emotional response to to losing something and people don't even really like said have that effect a lot of times if their players if their characters die it's the ending of a story it says in some service but level draining as a different different aspect to it and interestingly if you look at D&D and what they've done over the years with level draining in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons the first version I got into level draining was there was an undead ability and there was no save against level draining he got hit by a white or a litter or something you were screwed in the 3rd edition there was a saving role that was allowed at least but if it failed you lost the level then in 4th edition they completely got rid of level draining and if you go to Pathfinder which is kind of like sort of an offshoot of 3rd edition they didn't make that many changes from 3rd edition D&D but one of the ones that they did was they got rid of level draining so it's obviously over the years that this was recognized as something that was not something that players wanted that put them into an emotional state that they found uncomfortable so giving something to a player and then taking it away is really emotional and that goes back to that idea of from risk legacy of forcing the players to tear up a card in the very beginning better not to have given them that card in the first place or just have them randomly draw one and leave the other one in the box you know it has it has the same effect from a mechanical standpoint but it does not have the same effect from an emotional standpoint like to take a quick detour into a game show that my family including my in-laws will no longer watch with me Deal or No Deal I'm assuming most of you are familiar with the show but for those of you that are not there's a bunch of suitcases that all have varying values of money in them ranging from $1.00 to a million dollars you pick one case at random that you're going to keep and then you gradually open the cases showing the money so you know what you didn't get and then at various points in the game there's a banker that comes on very shadowy figure and he gives offers you money for your case now from a purely mathematical standpoint there's you know you know the expectation value of that case you know the average value of all the cases that are left and the expectation value that remains is you know the average of that is what you should all should get for it if it's less than that you're leaving money on the table but the reality is in the show is that the banker always offers less than the expectation value it's actually really interesting if you track the show is the first rounds they offer way way less than the expectation value and they gradually approach it to just they don't want people walking away in the beginning of the game but why does anybody take the offer if there's if they're leaving that money on the table and this goes back to that first one of the first examples that we did which is captured in a psychological theory called utility theory and that goes to the idea that if I'm offering you a million dollars or two million dollars as far as you're concerned it's probably not going to getting the two million dollars it's not going to change your life as much as getting that first million dollars it's going to is going to be so in your mind they're about the same amount of money and that's really what Deal or No Deal is playing on this is playing on people's okay this case you know the guys offering me one hundred and twenty thousand dollars but it could be a million dollars so for me personally where is that falling on my utility spectrum and that's what's interesting to watch it's interesting to watch people struggle with that idea of you know it's not just the number it's not just going for the biggest number but it's the utility and how that's going to apply to your life now if we go back to that first example that I gave you guys about the chance to get $3,000 and the 80% chance to get $4,000 our brains are not great at math for the most part most people see $3,000 thousand dollars and put them in the same box in their brain so really for most people from a utility Theory standpoint this problem is really I'm guaranteed to get X or I have an 80% chance to get X and in that case I'm always going to take the one that's guaranteed to get X the fact that is $3,200 doesn't really apply that the expectation value is higher so that's just another way of looking at looking at these things and we'll talk a little bit in a bit about about bigger numbers as well okay this example is is for those of you they're here again for the pandemic legacy talk this is actually it was a real study that was done that I did not choose because I did not know that I was going to be directly after the pandemic legacy talk but this is the problem a deadly disease is rapidly spreading if nothing is done then 600 people will die so a cure has been developed but you have two choices of which cure you're gonna do you can either do choice a number 600 people will die if nothing is done so choice a is that 200 people will be saved and choice B is a one-third chance that all 600 will be saved and a two-thirds chance that nobody will be saved so how many people here would do trace egg and how many would do B okay when surveyed about three-quarters of people will do a 200 people will be saved let's do another problem same situation deadly disease is rapidly spreading if nothing is done 600 people will die in this case you could take choice C 400 people will die or if you pick your D then there's a one-third chance that nobody dies but a two-thirds chance that 600 people die so who will take C a lot fewer people and it would take D okay so in this case 78% choose D so most people are with you guys so these are the four choices put together here so choice a B C and D now since 600 people are going to die choice a and choice C 200 people will be saved 400 people die or exactly the same and choice B and choice D are also exactly the same so did anybody here pick a for the first one in D for the second one that's very common a lot of people do that and this leads to a concept that's called framing what is a gain or what is a loss and this is another great manipulation tool for player psychology if you say 200 people will be saved that's a positive positive emotion people like that 200 people will be saved and the other one is all probabilities the other one is 400 people will die okay so again we're going back to that idea that people will take a gain a Shore gained over gambling to gain more but people will gamble to avoid a shore loss and that's exactly what's happening here except in this case the outcomes are exactly the same it's not you know losing money versus gaining money it's but if you express it as saving people or express it as people dying then people will approach it differently and we will have a different response to it so in a board game context this can be used a lot of different ways one of my new games which is coming out in the spring is called pit crew and it's about the players it's a team-based game where each team is trying to repair their race car and get it back out onto the track as quickly as possible against the other teams if you make mistakes it's a real-time game you're trying to do things as fast as possible if you make mistakes you get penalty points and we looked at a couple of different ways to do this originally the way that we did it is you got points for doing good things and if you've got penalty points you lost points and we found that when this is aimed at families and in a family game is if you had a lot of kids playing and stuff like that they didn't like losing the points if they made mistakes on the cars there's also a strategy to intentionally make mistakes to get back you know get your car out faster because the first team that's out can get a bonus and can earn extra things so what we did instead when we kind of saw that is we flipped it around and we said okay if you get a penalty you don't lose points but all the other teams gain points and it was easy because it was a score track and we'll just could move their tokens up on the track and that worked really really well people enjoyed that it it it opened it up it took away the negative feelings okay penalty points aam on there it's fine it also fortuitously enabled us to make the score track look like a race track so you have a little car running around the race track and just metaphorically race cars don't usually go backwards so you push the other cars forward but it really just changed the whole dynamic of the game and the way that people approach the penalty points that it helped your opponents instead of hurting you I mentioned the expanse game that we that's coming out in that there is a mechanic where you can keep an event there's event cards and you can save one for later but if you choose to save one for later it costs you a victory point or there's other things you can do in the game that cost you victory points and I considered applying the same kind of idea that instead of costing you victory points it could give bonuses to all the other players but in that case emotionally I wanted the players to feel invested that they were really committing something into getting this this event and saving it so in that case we chose to have it apply as a specific penalties on players where you actually have to give up victory points in order to do this action in general we have seen a shifting away from losses and players losing things over the years I mean the old-school games you know from the that we all grew up with monopoly and risk are very much about loss but they're very much about a specific type of loss where you gain and then you lose okay so in monopoly you start with no properties and money you get properties and you get hopefully a little more money and then for everybody except for the winner you lose everything same thing for risk risk you start with with territories and you'll take more territories you build up an empire and then it's taken away and that classically will give you all of those negative feelings about losing stuff whereas the the newer games and what the Euro games really brought to the table in the 90s was this idea of constantly building in the sylla's of Catan everybody starts with more than what they ended up with nobody is losing stuff once you build a city you get it even the the bonuses that you get largest army if you get the largest army card you don't lose it because your army is defeated and you shrink you lose it because people got bigger armies than you same thing with the longest road if you have a long road well people can cut off your road if they build a settlement in the middle but that's kind of an edge case but for the most part if you got the longest road people are only going to take it away from you by building an even longer road okay so given loss aversion why do people play in casinos ultimately they have to overcome this in a big way I mean the $20 bet that I made with with Rob in the beginning was basically a roulette spin was basically blackjack and there's a couple of different techniques that they use the first is chips what first thing you have to do when you walk into a casino is you have to exchange your money for an abstract token and a lot of studies have shown that when people start exchanging tokens instead of exchanging money that they don't ascribe the same value to it it gets abstracted and they get some Strack 'td and they don't assign as much value to it and casino specifically will try to make it difficult for you to convert to you know it's easy to eat for one-way trip but you can't go back the other way also once you convert to chips if you sit down a blackjack table I can give 200 hours to a blackjack dealer and help me a stack of chips but if I want to turn my chips back in the money I have to can't do it right there I got to pick up and I got to walk across but the other big thing is also jackpots people are really bad at dealing with big numbers and small probabilities and the casinos are starting to take advantage of that most of the games now if you go if you've been to casinos lately blackjack tables a lot of these new games they all have these little jackpot bonus bets it's very common people like that people like the idea that they're going to get a lot of money and that helps them overcome this idea of loss aversion basically the lottery as an example to put it into the same frame that we've been using on these other things is that choice a is I'm guaranteed to lose nothing choice B is I've got a ninety nine point nine and a ten percent she has to lose a dollar or a really really tiny chance to gain a half a million dollars okay and again the expectation value trace B here is negative but this is a bet that people make all the time whereas that $20 bet people won't make it so what's going on here is that people are really bad at that number that point zero zero zero zero zero one percent you know the the and and the lotteries are all taking advantage of that powerball used to be about a hundred million to one odds to win and they keep changing the game every couple of years and now it's like 300 million to one to win because they like these big jackpots and if people think point zero zero zero zero one percent she has to win or point zero zero zero zero zero one percent she has to win mentally they put that in the same bucket just like the three thousand dollars in the four thousand dollars or the 1 million dollars in the two million dollars once probabilities get really high a million to one two hundred million one three hundred million to one people have no idea of what that is okay this is one of my famous favorite studies from 2012 the Chicago teacher bonus study they gave they went into his classroom in Chicago and they gave three different bonus plans to different different groups of teachers one was just the control group no bonus plan the other one was a more traditional merit-based bonus plan which they gave the students tested the 80 or in the end of the year and if they got to a certain level then the teachers got a bonus then group three got $10,000 the beginning of the year and they told them if the students don't reach this test score you have to give it back and of the three groups only group number three actually showed any improvement in test scores so you know there's a couple of issues with this study and I always teach you these things with a grain of salt you know there's always a novelty factor and it's time to go into details on that here but typically just changing things up doing something different will make people react differently you can implement in a large scale actually tried to do this in my company and I decided that it was just never going to work but the the point remains that giving something to people you know just most people when they see this idea of getting a bonus that's a start of the year and you have to give it back if you don't form it's very stressful even though again financially it's really the same thing you know if you just put it aside and you put it in a box you can make it the same as group number two but people just don't do that so in a game as a game example if you're doing a pick up and deliver board game just as a little twist on it is you could have your players get paid in advance you pick up a contract card and it says you get you know a hundred dollars for this card but you have to deliver this good in three turns if you don't deliver the good in three turns you have to give the hundred dollars back same idea is a really basic thing but just that little bit of a twist is gonna change the emotional investment of the players okay you volunteer you sir this is what I'm gonna do I have here because I always travel with dice I've a red dye and I have every right dye okay I'm gonna put the red dye in one cup and a white go in the other Cup and you have to try to guess you're trying to find the red dye okay there's no trick here I'm just gonna mix them up okay if you are correct you will win $5 there we go so which one would you like to pick oh you can tell oh she's I need to get opaque ups okay well I should give you five dollars just for playing the odds okay well you pick a cup most people when I do this demonstration when I use the correct materials is this backlighting what I usually do is I will offer somebody to pick a cup and they pick a cup and I will say okay if you stick with this cup and it is correct I will give you five dollars okay or if you want to you can switch to the other one and I give them an opportunity to switch to the other Cup and you know again if you switch you'll win the $5 either way most people a vast vast number of people will not switch away from their initial choice so the next thing is I will offer $6 they will win $6 if they switch in there right $5 if they stay $7 $8 $9 people don't like to switch their choice and this is a concept that's called regret and there's been a lot of studies about this and this specific dye in the cup study used with actual opaque cups love to remember that for next time they find that when the values are equal $5 if you stay with your original pick that 10% of people will switch if you triple the value of the offer if I say $15 if you switch on your right $5 if you stay 50% of people will switch and if you go to 10 times 90 that's when you can get 90% of people to switch I was surprised at how high it went on these things but most people do not like to switch so switching to a wrong choice feels three times as bad as making the wrong choice originally and this goes back you remember in the beginning I said that the loss feels twice as bad as the gain this is one of the studies that kind of feeds into this so the old advice that you get on a multiple-choice test to stick with your initial answer if you pick a and later on you have second your second-guessing yourself don't switch I really believe that it is mostly because you don't want to feel worse so if you pick a and you switch to C and then a was right you're gonna feel worse than if you picked a stuck with a and it turned out C was right most people will try to avoid this so from okay we'll come back to that in a second okay so this game I can play with these cups so in this case although I'm not actually gonna play it I'm gonna offer you what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna roll a die well the game is that a die is going to be rolled and you have to decide whether it's even or odd that's your pick so you have a choice of two different games to play one of which we could actually play with this one is you make your pick whether it's even or odd and then I roll the die choice B is I roll the die I look at it I put under cup but I don't tell you what it is and then I ask you to make your pick so how many people would rather take game a in this example and how many people would rather have B okay so again you guys are pretty much in line about two-thirds and people choose egg and this is a concept that's called competence that's somewhat related to regret and the definition of competence is the amount that you know in proportion to whatever can be known and this was originally these studies and this idea was put forth by Tversky and Heath that's the same Tversky of Kahneman and Tversky so in the first example where I'm just gonna you guess and then I roll you know everything that there is to know in the world about this problem but on the second one where I roll and it's under the cup and it's sitting there there's information that exists that you don't have access to so you feel less comfortable making the choice so in in a game perspective a very simple game if you have one player that's playing an attack card punch or kick and another play is playing a defense card block punch block kick okay would you rather play your card first play your card second I haven't actually done this study but I'm pretty confident that most people from my experience just anecdotally are happier playing the card first when they make a choice like that and then the other person will stare them down and try to figure it out but certainly if you want to put the pressure on the other person picking your card first is going to be an easier choice so relating to this is the idea of choice theory so giving players too many choices is not a good thing and there's been a lot of studies have shown in spite of the number of salad dressings that are available in the supermarket that when your choices get to about more than seven people's decision-making ability goes away and gets much much worse people avoid making a decision rather than making a rather than making a wrong one there was a study done on 401 k's that as they presented people with more options for where they put their investments fewer and fewer people participated in the plan from a game perspective this is a game called struggle of Empires done by Martin Wallace which is a really terrific game those who haven't played it but one of the things that Wallace did which wasn't so great is there's the special ability tiles that you can select from and the very first thing you have to do in the game is you have to pick one of these tiles is what your special power is going to be and they're all available to started the game and there's about thirty of them and it's a really overwhelming choice it's great once you get into the game and next time you play it and you know what all these options are but for new players its paralyzing you have to go through all of these cards and they're basically you know people later posted online it was like look if you're playing this game these are the three that you want to present you know for new players pick one of these three and then they'll go with it having this many choices especially for a new player that doesn't understand the context was a big mistake and you know fed right into this concept of regret and loss aversion so the endowment effect is another really interesting offshoot of this and the idea of the endowment effect is that when you give something to somebody that they ascribe it more value than if it was just off to the side or they didn't have it the the classic study that they did on this is they had participants do something and just in the beginning of it they gave him a mug as a prize for it I gave him a candy bar as a prize for it and they then at the end of the study asked people if they wanted to switch to the other prize most people wouldn't switch even if they asked them beforehand would you rather have a mug or out of a candy bar and they got the one they didn't want once they got that and they had it that it was um it was something that they just wanted to stick with and this comes up a lot in games so before we get to games let me just talk about this so this is the the Rifleman's creed which i think is for the army i apologize if i'm wrong on that but the idea is that you take an object and you personify it for the person who has it and the endowment effect is something that happens naturally but there are techniques that you can use to emphasize it the rightfulness creed is one thing that does that another game that does that really effectively in the video game world is portal in the game portal for those that haven't played it there's lots of cubes that are round that you pushed onto buttons and stuff like that but at one point you are literally endowed with a special cube called the companion cube which is a cube that has hearts on the side and you're told that for the whole level you have to carry it through the level and then you you just very immediately naturally get attached to the level to attach the cube and they do certain tricks they say certain things are at the level to get you more and more attached to it it never says anything it never does anything it just sits there but you get this attachment and then at the very end of the level famously you have to I everyone's played portal right so spoiler you have to incinerate the companion cube you have to literally take it and throw it into the incinerator and there's stories from the developers about how people have agonized over this and have waited you know tried to do other things that see what they could do avoid it and it's just such a great example of a way to take this and use it as a way to manipulate the player experience and the emotions that they're feeling you know you can even do this in a board game and I don't think board games have really done this but you could certainly take you know include it in a really cute little stuffed animal or something that goes to a certain player for doing something and then other player you know try to take away from it and take take it away from them you know usually those those type of tokens or totems represent the players themselves so we tend not to take them away the really cool stuff but there are certainly things that that could be done with that but you could give your player or something give them a pet give him a sidekick give him something and then threaten to take it away and that's gonna really up the emotional stakes because of all of this psychology that we talked about okay the last thing I'd like to talk about the last effect that I like to talk about is called the endowed Progress effect this is one of my personal favorites so this was a car wash study that was done in 2006 these the team went to a car wash and they gave half the people that came in the car wash they gave him the first ticket and said if you punch it eight times I will you'll get a free car wash and the second group the other half they gave the second ticket which had ten punches on it and but two of them were already punched they said if you come back with you know the whole thing punched you get a free car wash so both cases you have to come back to the car wash eight more times and what they found was that the first ticket was redeemed completely nineteen percent of the time and the second one almost doubled that twice as many people completed the second ticket than the first they had to do the same amount of effort but they were given some progress they were given they were given what was called endowed progress and it had a very strong psychological effect on people people were on a journey already and they once you're on that journey you kind of have to take effort to walk away from it but you also you know you're already given something and you're worried that you're going to lose it so it ties into all of that psychology so there's a board game actually that uses this pretty famously although I'm not sure if he was really intended to but in the Settlers of Catan or Catan I guess is called now I will never get used to that but you have to get ten victory points to win and the players start with two victory points so this is exactly the same case as the second carwash coupon where you got to get ten points but you've got your first two punches so you're already on the road to success the south of Catan actually came out before the car wash study was done obviously so I'm sure that it wasn't influenced by that but I think it's really interesting to to see the way that that players were already moved down the road you know it would have been easy to say you have to get eight additional points or had a little scoring track or something like that but that's not what the game does the game says you got to get ten points but everybody starts at two so again all of these things come out of this concept of loss aversion and you know over the years I've learned more and more about you know learn about these different psychologies and it's it's just fascinating how it always come back to that basic idea that losing stuff feels bad and feels worse than getting it does in the first place so framing regret the endowment effects all of this stuff comes into play so it's it's a really you know when you're aware of it it's both interesting in your own life when you see how it's affecting you and things that you can do but also in terms of game design of using it really as a tool as a scalpel to push the players into the emotional state that you're looking for them to to experience so that's why I have prepared thank you very much and be happy to take any questions I think there's two microphones if anybody has any questions yes so I feel like I'm the only person ever who didn't get attached to the companion Cuban portal yeah and and just to kind of keep it in the sort of the universe of what your you've been talking about I feel like the reason that I didn't is because the game up until that point I I more felt like the game was framing what I was doing as a relationship with GLaDOS now more than you know than the companion cube and so this was like an instance of you know of kind of a point in that relationship so I guess if I were to take that and turn it into a question I would say what do you think about like how can framing kind of backfire I guess well first off I will say that my my niece who's a lot younger than my kids came over about a year ago and my kids insisted on playing portal with her and she like immediately took the companion cube and threw it in the fire and they were my kids were horrified that's how could you do that and felt that she immediately needed to be sent for some sort of psychological counseling but you know I the key is to draw the line between you know it's it's you don't want to see the the wizard behind the man behind the curtain okay you want to do it in a way that's subtle and if people start to feel that they're being manipulated they're gonna push back against it and that's why you know even at the beginning of this talk and I talk about it's just like go with your gut don't try to out think it I think if people are doing that or in a different place in a mindset then you know you can have a problem so you want to use the tools I think you want to use them sparingly and you know you can get into a situation yet where people backfire and we didn't talk about a little bit you know even there's a lot of techniques like this that are used in free-to-play games or freemium type games where you're trying to get people to buy other stuff and if it's done in a real heavy-handed way it's gonna turn people off yeah I guess this is related to loss aversion for often like oblique multiplayer games where you may be adversarial towards other players but you know that may that may just be optional and perhaps not when you can attribute the loss of something you care about to the game itself that's a fairly neutral feeling like there's no villain there necessarily unless the game has an antagonist which is a non-player character when you're playing a multiplayer game and perhaps sometimes you're you're attempting to of loss tied to another player or attempting to be the like the reason that someone else loses something this this is something that I'm interested to explore and like have you have you kind of done any studies which involve like averting loss player two player versus player two game I think that to a certain extent specifically study that or looked at that I I my my initial instinct is that yeah I mean there certainly is like if you look at monopoly or there's there's plenty of games where players are taking stuff away from other players and that's really the objective of the game and I think that it triggers this stuff but I think if it's from from a systemic way if it's done from the point of view of the game I think it can be a little bit more intimidating you've almost like walking into a casino and there's this you know you're playing against the house is different than if you're at a poker table and you're playing against another player so I think the idea of Authority also kind of factors into it in some sense but I think that it's so so I think that you you want to have the I think having the game do it is more effective than having other players do it I think that the game telling you to take a card and tear it up is perhaps more I don't know maybe not more effective than you know having another player is allowed to reach into your hand and pull out a card and rip it up depends on the reaction yeah yeah it depends on your relationship with your friends but you know I I think that they think there's a little bit of a subtle distinction there in terms of how they trigger things hi with the card game example you mentioned how there's cards that kind of have a negative reaction even though gameplay wise they might be more beneficial than some other options and many people who play a lot of card games will actually kind of internalize those you know it doesn't matter how many cards you pitch it only matters about the cards you need to win etc etc do you find the people who get into that mindset typically only have that effect those particular situations with those card games or do you find that they also in other risk aversion situations have maybe a lower threshold there I think first off you can totally be habituated away from loss aversion and there's tons of studies that have been done like on stockbrokers that and maybe initially when they start you know like like the the casual person that's buying and selling stock will have an issue with you know holding on for stock for too long to avoid the loss of version and the loss of selling the stock but with a stock broker they start out with a little bit of loss aversion but if you just do it day in and day out and day in and day out you get over it the tracking is ample and hearthstone you know once you play the game a lot you've you get past that and you see the utility of the card I am not aware of any studies specifically that says if you know if you're a stockbroker and you're used to doing this and you transplant into a different environment about whether that goes with you I would with with no real evidence I would speculate that it probably does to a certain extent but you you but the first part is you can definitely you know you will be habituated out of loss aversion if you're if you're paying attention to it or doing it over and over again thank you yeah oh sorry yeah that's quite high so I was just going to ask a lot of what you talked about and the studies that you referenced focus on specific sort of small scale choices within a juh hole so you know like the level draining being a mechanic within you know what obviously a wider game so I was wondering how you feel loss aversion applies across perhaps a game as a whole so the time investment or the sense of loss if you didn't you know accumulate your victory points before everybody else or you know that that level I'm sorry I'm not sure I totally understand the question you mean like on a that the whole game is kind of built around yeah it seemed like everything that was mentioned in the talk was about the specific steps within the whole yeah but I was wondering whether there was kind of a broader loss aversion that applies once all of these things are folded in and it gets more complicated or more well yeah I mean I I think that you can certainly take aspects of this and you know loss aversion you know I perhaps you know at its sharpest is going to be you know that that critical pivot point in in a game or an experience whether it's throwing away the companion cube or Floyd the robot and planetfall where you know you you you lose a companion or something like that and you feel the loss immediately but you know I think you could and there have been some games like brothers and others that try to take that concept of loss and and explore it but have to you have to go through that setup phase to kind of to tweak it and then kind of go from there okay cool thank you sure hi going back to your example with the 3000 against the 4000 I was wondering if we modified the $4,000 option so that even with a lower expected value or a higher expected value if the instead of getting nothing the partial time you just get less so if it was $1,000 and 5000 as the two possible outcomes against the shore 3,000 if it would be different and I don't know yeah I think that's a really interesting point I you know nothing zero there's just some numbers that are really just go off into different areas of people's brains and and nothing is one of a hundred percent is something you know or like you know so if I tell you that there's a hundred percent chance that something's gonna happen versus a 99.99% chance something's gonna happen you know you don't focus on the fact it's 99.999% you focus on the fact that there's a chance that it may not happen and then you're really gonna get hosed so you know a hundred percent a guaranteed sure thing is a totally different kind of part of your brain so and it's the same thing with zero dollars and you even see that at you know at trade shows and stuff like that you know just yesterday over in the other hall this booth was giving away view masters their little 3d view master clicky things I don't need a view master but I got it because it was there on the table was free if they charge a penny for the view master I never would have gotten it but I stood online I will talk to the guy I wanted the view master because it was free so I think yeah I mean having that there's certain things that are treated in a very free is different than a penny and 99.9 a nine is different than a hundred and you can use that as part of the manipulation sure thank you hi I was just wondering if you have any reading recommendations about incorporating this either into games or even just broader like behavioral psychology I mean the best book on this is written by Kahneman recently a couple years ago called Thinking Fast and Slow I can't recommend that book highly enough that's it's it's it covers a lot of this territory and goes even into deeper deeper types of stuff talk he talks about endings which is really just a whole other talk where he talks about colonoscopies and how that applies to whether you enjoy an experience or not which is a whole other game development talk spoiler alert the ending is really really important so yeah I would definitely recommend that book Thinking Fast and Slow thanks a lot sure yeah hi I was curious when you're talking about the example of say the companion cube and giving the players something and then taking it away what is or do you have any ideas or studies about like the effect of then giving that that back to the player essentially like if the companion cube for example showed up like three later what would the emotional effects be on the player you want the holiday the Hollywood ending from when a dramatically a singed companion cube comes comes into the last scene of the game as it's brought back yeah you know I mean I think that there's there's certain expectations and movies and storytelling in general that a lot of times that those sometimes those characters come back and that's used to varying effects in different different genres you know in the movies you know I guess obi-wan comes back again at the end of Episode six as a ghost but at least he's there and stuff like that III think it may give the player a little bit of a sense of completeness but I don't think it's really necessary to get the effect you know they should have no expectation that it's gonna come back and you should really convince them that they're really gone otherwise it kind of cheapens the effect if they think they could get it back that's a different situation because you've lost something but you know but I can I have a method of getting it back so okay thank you hi yeah so you started your talk with the example of kind of making a bet on a 50/50 chance right with the coin with the coin toss yes I'm interested in in lots of multiplayer games now you know there is the concept of a zero-sum scenario where you're where you're betting something against your opponent and I'm wondering if you look for instance at the trophy mechanic in clash Royale right where if you win you gain certain trait and amount of trophies and if you lose you actually it takes them away from you now that's not it's not always the same number using your understanding of kind of loss aversion and and how to you know optimize the player's psychology through this process I'm wondering if you have any kind of view on how to design such a trophy system in that way yeah in terms of what you take away and what you give yeah I think that I'm not familiar with clash Royale but I there's a similar thing you know I showed the hearthstone example and I think that that Blizzard a really nice job with their ranked system in horse town with a couple of tricks to do that we're first off if there's the win streak mechanic so if you you know if you win a couple of games in a row you get bonus stars and the other thing is that also when you lose stars there's when you go up a level in hoarse tone there's when you go when you get to level four or I've never made it to levels rank for it but for me rank nineteen when you're at ranked 18 and you go to 18 if you lose immediately after getting to 18 you stay at 18 there's like a weird little half level thing inside there so from 19 you go up to like 18 and then you go down like 18 zero and if you lose again you go you drop down to the same step under 19 so I think that in that case they also try to soften the blow because they're trying to be friendly or they want people to do it and gradually you know with the win streak thing you'll you know if you play long enough and you're it's a coin flip over and over again eventually you'll get enough wind streaks to advance through the ranks so yeah I think there's definitely manipulations that you can do in there to try to keep the you know keep the players engaged and not get too discouraged I think we got two minutes left so I guess we can get these last two questions yeah really quick so for the Cuban portals for example the way it was described almost as if it was like a good design for the game actually make the game better and in the talk it seemed a lot about and when you take something away it hurts more and when you give it it's not worth this much to like the net gain being negative and not when is it a good game design idea to actually do the mechanic of giving something and taking it away and would you ever do it with real money a game sure there's games that do it with real money but yeah I I think it depends on the effect that you're looking for in the player like I said when I was doing a family game of which was pit crew was aimed at younger kids I didn't want to do that I specifically soften the edges so that other people were getting instead of them losing I didn't want to take things away from them but if you want that emotional beat if you're trying to get that emotional state and give the experience to the players of you know this is you know that that's kind of a point in Portal where it's just really obvious that something weird is going on with this computer in the beginning the computer is your friend to steal a line from paranoia and you know then you gradually get the feeling that things are not what they seem and so it's an important point to get across really clearly that hey you know this this is not something that's looking at for your best interest so I think that that's why it's it's important in that interestingly the that does the developers the reason that they kind of did it it wasn't although it wasn't initially as an emotional thing they just the problem initially they had was players kept forgetting to bring the cube at them and then we get into all these weird spots and they just they and they were looking for a way to get the players to remember to get the cube so they put the hearts on it and they first they had the computer say make sure you remember in periodically to the levels they make sure remember and they just kept ramping it up until they like cross this threshold where it stopped just being reminders and created a true emotional attachment to it thank you so I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between player loss aversion and wanting to reward players and give them reward mechanics there's a free-to-play game that has a reward wheel and so it's like hey every day if you come and play you can get a reward and the some most of the things in the reward wheel are tiny and some of them are really awesome so you keep coming back to want to spend the wheel to get the awesome thing but they kind of mess it up because they give everybody an equal slot size on the wheel but the wheels rigged like clearly you don't have a one in six chance of winning the awesome thing and in fact that's telegraphed by the fact that you spin the wheel and it will like zoom past the expensive thing and then slow down and stop inside it rotates in this way that makes it really obvious I don't think on purpose to the the player that they're they're being messed with and so even though I only get a benefit from spinning the wheel every day it's my least favorite part of the game yeah there's a bunch of other really good mechanics but so I'm I'm experiencing loss aversion for something that I don't even have because I have the perceived value being equal because the way it's represented and then I'm having that taken away cuz I know better they could have fixed that by either giving the the more expensive things a smaller slot so that I perceived my chance is smaller or by really hiding the fact that it can't come up so that I just feel unlucky I mean I would I would hate that less than knowing that I'm being manipulated in the way that it does that's a little harder in boardgames because you can't hide it as well right like you can't have a wheel that spins that actually calculates where it's going to end up and then gives me even spend and makes it feel natural if you want to reward players with a variable reward in a board game how would you do it without making them feel bad it's it's a lot harder to do because like you say it's I mean the problem of the board game is everything is there and one of you know even in the legacy game you know the packets that are available on what you need to do to get there so there's not really true true totally hidden content so right it is challenging to do I'm not sure off the top of my head at how you would do it and you know that that other Mechanica talking about is interesting in fact slot machines had a slot machine designer on the on our podcast a couple of months ago and we talked about this and they map on the video slots you know they decide what the final thing is going to be at my end or this before everything starts animating and they specifically program in the near miss they program in so that right off the line that scores you see the winning thing which is a very powerful psychological ploy which actually starting to get outlawed now there's some jurisdictions or nala to do that in slot machines so yeah there's there's ways to do that that are better than others that won't piss off the players so if there's any other questions I will be around afterwards but thank you so much for your attention really appreciated you

Channel: GDC

Views: 68,130

Rating: 4.9437838 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, board games, psychology, game design

Id: F_1YcCcBVfY

Length: 62min 52sec (3772 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Geikamir]

Wasn't this the talk from a previous year? I've seen this before.

[u/latetothetable]

I've been addicted to GDC for the past week lol