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[Sankar]

Psychology is Everywhere...
I would ask you to throw away all your preconceived ideas and open your mind...

But I know you can't do it,
And thats why Psychology is Everywhere.

From the Movies your watch to the games you play, casual or hardcore.

Zynga is making millions just by aiming at the most basic psychological processes, so basic that even your cat would play it.
(But please, don't use it to teach him to ask for cheeseburguers)...

*Voice Over is... well, OVER!*

I'm a Psychology Major, and in this series of in-depth posts, I'll share with you ways that can be used to make your games more engaging.

ENOUGH INTRO, LETS ROCK!

CHAPTER 1
A Rewarding Experience

Why do you develop games?
You were once just a Player, and now you're a Developer. Did you grow an extra brain?
I hope your answer is no (or else i'm envious!)

Developing games can be rewarding experience, so is learning, teaching, playing and any other experience in human life.
But not every experience is purely rewarding, some are very very frustrating.


= Rewarding and Frustrating =

Games, as any other activity. Rewards and Frustrate you.
As a developer, you should use both.
Cause you can only Give, if you Take.

The reward is only good if the challenge was, and vice versa, the challenge is only acceptable if the reward looks good.


= What is a Reward? =

There are two kinds of rewards, In-Game and Out-Game rewards.
In Game Rewards, as the name say, are things that happen inside the game. Story, Challenges, Music and Graphics can be rewarding, if the player enjoys it. Learning more about the story, getting a new ability, being able to explore more of the beautiful backgrounds, listening to a new song... Keep in mind that i'm not talking about just collectibles, but in-game elements... We'll go deeper about this later.

Out-Game rewards, or self/social rewards, are related to “feeling good” about yourself. Either alone, by discovering that you can do something, or being praised socially (yay for speedruns on youtube).

Think about these words and see if it makes sense to you, next post I'll go deeper and talk about the Reward/Frustration challenge. I'll show how Derek Yu made a Rewarding and Addicting experience, out of spelunky. See you guys soon!

[Sankar]

CHAPTER 2
Hungry?

Picture yourself following a trail of bread pieces, believe or not, this is how most games work at their very core.
This “bread” is reward and players need it, or else they starve.

After some steps you realize that these small bread crumbs won't be enough, so you look at the horizon and you realize that some hundred steps later, you'll find a full bread... This will be enough, to keep you moving foward, to.... BREAD HEAVEN

Bread Heaven is the objective of every gamer. It can be the ending of the story, the 100% Completed on their Player-Stats, or the total Multiplayer Dominance.

So, Right of the bat, the player is already trying to attain a Reward. But, this reward is usually far away and if you don't drop out other little rewards along the way, the player dies.
You should make your player hungry, too. You need to put in some spaces between the bread, if you give too much he will just end up sick of eating the same thing, you gotta make him or she value it.

So most of the games employ a “group” of rewards. Let me use Mario as an example of traditional reward-design

First. Comes the nice little reward of feeling like you can jump a gap or kill a creature.
Second. Comes the end level flag, the reward of finishing something and feeling good about yourself. The game rewards you even more, by giving you a new background and music for the next level.
Third. Comes the Boss fight and the new World, Oh boy its totally different!
Fourth. The end game, the score and the feeling of “I Did It!”

Basically, the sum of rewards make a bigger one, that makes a even bigger one, and so on. The game sums the rewards. And at every new level or stage, it gets harder and harder to get the bread crumbs (that the game already convinced you that you can do it).


= What can I do? =

Tell me how do you feel when someone makes you feel like you CAN'T do something? No matter how hard you tried, no matter how much you study or practice, you CAN'T DO IT? Possibly this will make you feel bad, or piss you off.

Some games do that to us, these are the games we forget about and never play again. Unless we got an external motivation, we usually don't like games that makes us feel dumb, weak and incompetent. Have you ever saw a reviewer saying: “I didn't like this game because I suck at it?”. I bet not, it's always: “this game fails to explain what the player should do, the controls are stiff and unresponsive”...

And thats why most games give you some easy challenges right off the bat, and while you're it, the game tries to seduce you with music, graphics, storyline. So when things get harder, you know the rewards are worthy, and that you can do it.


= Spelunky =

When I talk about reward and frustration, probably Spelunky will come to mind for some developers. It may look like Spelunky just frustrates you, and for some reason you keep coming for more, how can it be?

Because Spelunky gives you bigger rewards at a regular intervals. Its not like Mario, where you can easily make 10 straight good jumps, Spelunky makes you value each jump, strike, rope or bomb. So every little thing you can do right is very rewarding. And even when you've died 10000 times, you feel like you've learn something new, because the game is filled with details that can create new approaches

Since the game randomly generates the levels, it uses the same idea of a slot machine: “maybe this time the level will be easier, or that monster that I hate won't be around”

The Small Rewards are the new things you learn, either skills (attack before you jump), or new features that you didn't see before (sacrifices).

Summing it all up, Spelunky is a Rewarding Experience. Because of its difficulty.


Thank you for your time,
next Chapter we will talk about different ways of Rewarding, and we will use Braid as an example (don't worry, no Spoilers!)

NEXT CHAPTER >>

[Pineapple]

This has been an interesting read so far. 

[Sankar]

In today's Chapter we'll talk about how filling the gaps is one of the most sucessful rewarding strategies, and why its so popular in Games, Movies and Books.

= Gaps and Theories =

As we saw in previous chapters, Games entertain people using a balance between Rewards and Challenges. If a challenge is well crafted conquering it is Rewarding. But completing a challenge itself is not the only way a game can reward the player, and in this chapter we'll go deeper about one of the oldest ways that books, movies and games have been rewarding people.

Curiosity may not have killed the cat, but you can be sure it took some extra-change out of your pockets. It's even present in religion as one of the main causes of human suffering.

"an APPLE!? I'm not that Indie to go to damn myself for this."

People naturally like to fill gaps, our brain works by constantly trying to fill gaps. Since our sensory organs are somewhat limited, our brain is a master of "guessing" and "link the dots". But "your very own conclusion" isn't enough for most people, as we are always trying to find the truth.

TV shows do this a lot, they always left some gaps open on their stories, so the audience can look like dorks while arguing on message boards. But no matter how cool your theory is, you'll check out next episode to see if you were right.
Probably you weren't, and you always end up feeling like "your theory" was way better than the one the creators come up with.

"A chewed orange isn't going to cut it too, sorry"

= Filling the Gaps =

When a gap is left open in the story, and the player feels like this was done on purpose (ie: not a plot-hole), the player will try to fill this gap with his own theories and reasoning, while still being curious about "what really is".
The things the player use to fill the gap will come from: 1) The hints the game gives, 2) His very own fears, likes, personal tastes.

In a world where you buy a cellphone that 1M people has, a game that 500K people played before you, any opportunity that a human has to "put something of his own" in something that he or she likes is GOLD. And, since it came from him/she it will be rewarding. And thats why we usually like our theories more.

"Now I may accept suffering forever for THIS."

Or very own theories are made from the things we like, things we worry about and things that scary us. Horror movies always tries to make we scare ourself, cause what is inside of us is way more terrifying than any image or sound.


CASE STUDY: Braid

Braid uses this way of rewarding very extensively, by both enticing your curiosity and allowing you to project your own feelings on the story.

"By giving abstract pieces of text, the game keeps you guessing and projecting."

In Braid you start the game on "World 2", with no clue about what happened before. And as you progress on the game, the game keeps giving you clues using text and puzzle-pieces (That put together create an image from the story).

The story resonates in everything on the game, the backgrounds and puzzles are always reminescent of what the chapter story is about. Everything makes you guess and at the same time elaborate your own theories, put something of your own in it.

"The reward of collecting every puzzle piece is being able to see a new painting of the story. "

With every new painting comes new clues, but these clues are almost always abstract. This abstraction feeds your theories even more, and the story keeps on getting more and more personal as the game goes.

Braid masterfully mixes good and old curiosity, with a big empty canvas for the player to express himself.

Thank you _Madk for your commentary, and Thanks to everyone who has been reading so far.

Next chapter we'll talk about Layered-Difficulty and how you can Reward hardcore players and newcomers (without having a difficulty selection screen), and our Case-Study will be Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee.


PS: The black tag on the eve picture is just my way of frustrating you, btw. She isn't really topless on the original picture. But i'm pretty sure your mind filled some gaps already .

NEXT CHAPTER >>

[SplinterOfChaos]

After some steps you realize that these small bread crumbs won't be enough, so you look at the horizon and you realize that some hundred steps later, you'll find a full bread... This will be enough, to keep you moving foward, to.... BREAD HEAVEN

Might this bread heaven be, to some gamers, complete mastery? I especially love playing games that i will never master and if you took all sense of progression out while leaving variety in, i would be happy. That's the philosophy i use to make games, so if not: (a) I'm in trouble or (b) i dissagree, or (c) bread heaven is only one form of motivation for gamers.

[Sankar]

Might this bread heaven be, to some gamers, complete mastery? I especially love playing games that i will never master and if you took all sense of progression out while leaving variety in, i would be happy. That's the philosophy i use to make games, so if not: (a) I'm in trouble or (b) i dissagree, or (c) bread heaven is only one form of motivation for gamers.

I believe to some gamers complete mastery is their objective when they play a Game, we got some people who actually can expend hours and hours trying to find the quickest way to finish a whole game. So I believe that to SOME gamers, Complete and Total Mastery of a game is a big motivator and probably the Reward that will be really satisfying. But this isn't true for most gamers.

I like to think that variety is actually a way of showing progression. If every new level you come in has a different feel to it, you'll realize that you're getting somewhere. So, New Levels, Skill, Enemies and so on show us that we're moving foward and getting somewhere.

But, getting to the end of the game, completing it, getting to the end is always on the mind of the player, I believe. People have a natural tendency to finish things, to complete, get to the end. We're curious, we want to know what happens next and we're somewhat prepared to accept some frustrating things on the way.
So, the idea of getting to the end is one of the motivators to play a game, of course that for you to care about this "end" you'll have to care for the game in the first place.

So of course, while we do have some games that have no ending (Minecraft for example) people end up coming up with a "progression" of their own, like trying to create a giant castle or an automated train system.

So, in short. I believe that having something to Aim to is an important part of Games and Life Itself, but, as life itself, its the path that really matters, not the destination. So the ending is just something to get the ball rolling, what happens in-between is what really matters.

[SplinterOfChaos]

That reminds me of something i read on Wikipedia once (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Analogue):

(Important part bolded.)

Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action. You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again... So what’s the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully. There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know. . .

I keep wanting to post in contrast to what you say about completion/progression, but no matter how i think of it, the existence of a goal--which is required by the definition of "game", though it needn't be concrete--seems to make this an absolute requirement. A game without a goal or completion is toy instead. I think the concept of a game is directly psychological. Most adults abandon toys, even digital ones, but children get more utility out of them perhaps because they construct games with them like House or Hot Lava. Games emulate life, yet we expect to accomplish something in them...

Well you've got me thinking about both games and life. Much more than i can say about most articles on the topic. Looking forward to the next chapter.

[punking]

too many pictures; didn't read.

The way your framed the pictures implied that they were the main message of your posts, but many of them do not communicate. (Like the picture of lips covered in candy.)  I was unable to read your message because the cues told me that it has very little content for the vast amount of space it takes up.

I just thought you might like to know about Psychology and Forum Posts.

[eiyukabe]

too many pictures; didn't read.
  I was unable to read your message because the cues told me that it has very little content for the vast amount of space it takes up.

You're supposed to fill in the gaps yourself

[pgil]

I am a smug little dweeb.

psychology!

[punking]

I am a smug little dweeb.

psychology!

I agree with you 100%

[Sankar]

Thanks everyone for their comments, a new chapter will be posted in some minutes, But I decided to answer the posts in a separate post.

SplinterOfChaos Thanks for your post, and I'm glad you're enjoying the series. The quote you've posted is great, there is something about challenges that is irresistible to us. Goals most of the time means ways of achieving more freedom, and lots of games use this as a big motivator.
Thank you!


punking Thanks for you criticism, but I don't think the pictures were the reason why you didn't read the text. There is a reason why they showed up only in the third chapter, and since you didn't comment about any of the previous "picture-free" posts I came to realize that you just scrolled-down the thread and the pictures were the only thing that caught your attention. So, Ironically enough, because the pictures weren't directly related to the theme of this thread, they were able to grab your attention.
And there is nothing wrong with that really, some people don't like Psychology, some people don't like to read and so on. If someday I turn this into a Youtube series, I'll PM you

eiyukabe Thanks for your post, and you're absolutely right. The first one is pretty direct, Adam and Eve is linked to the religious view of curiosity. Locke comes from a TV show about filling gaps and the Lips after the part about "what we imagine is always better". They are constantly stretching the gap.

pgil Thanks! I love to see psychology being used! 

punking Oh hey you again!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i suspect punking just has a short attention span and hates to read anything longer than a few paragraphs -- and moreover is rude because even if something is too long for an individual to read you don't need to mess up the thread by posting in it and telling everyone how little attention you have

psychology is really important to game design -- part of the reason i took so many psychology classes in college and have gone through so many books on it (even though it wasn't my major) was to apply that info to my games. my personal applications of psychology to game design are different than the ones in this thread, though (but that's to be expected; psychology's a wide field and everyone's games differ). for instance, personality psychology and humanistic psychology (maslow's pyramid) go a long way towards explaining why certain people like certain types of games and don't like other types of games

[Sankar]

Paul Eres Thanks for your comments Paul, good to see you here on this topic. I have been following your daily development of your game game for some weeks now. I remember first seeing you on a post about Cortex Commando, where you suggested this daily-updates method, its great, hope to see your game soon!

I really like Maslow Pyramid too, I think he was very clever to build a hierarchy of needs, from the most physical and basic, to the more abstract and complex. The idea of Self-Steem coming after Social Rewards is very very good too. Humanistic and Personality Psychology are a great source of inspiration for game-designers and I plan to talk about some of its theories in future chapters.
Thank you very much for your post! .


And here we go to chapter 4!

   The relationship between Challenges and Rewards is one of the Key elements in developing a Successful Game. But what may be easy for one person, in the eyes of another may be considered impossible.
   In this Chapter we'll see how games tried to deal with this issue, and how a classic can teach us a great way to deal with it.

= Difficulty =


   For more than 3 decades Electronic Games have been an daily part of human life, and yet, we can't seem to get to a consensus: How easy, easy mode should be?
   A single game can be played by millions of people, each with their own skill level, frustration tolerance and confidence. The question of “how hard my game should be?” is in the mind of every developer.
   Difficulty Selection Screens are tricky, cause if the player makes the “wrong” decision, a otherwise rewarding experience can be considered too easy or too hard.
   And there is no middle ground between games as far as difficulty goes. In ome games “easy” mode is equally challenging as hard mode in in others.
   All of this amount to a challenge that every developer must face. Lets see how designers from the past tried to solve this:


= It gets easier with time =


   Believe it or not, games used to be a social experience. If you had an Atari, you could expect friends to come to your House.
   Hot-seat was very popular and a rewarding experience because we weren't just challenging ourselfs, we're competing with our friends. And like we talked before, social acceptance and praise is a big-reward, we go a long way for a round of applause.
   So games used to be just plain hard, people used to accept the frustration because of the social rewards it gave.

Being made fun of was so rewarding, that even games did it

   The same thing was true for Arcade games. People used to go to the arcade to compete and measure scores. Getting to the end of a level wasn't the way to test and prove yourself, destroying the other guy score was.


= Back to the Future =


   We still have social experiences in games these days, but hot seat isn't that popular anymore. That means that “single player” is really, single player, and game designers cannot count solely on social rewards to keep the player on the seat.
        Most games today either allow the player to select the difficulty or complete the levels in a non-sequential manner. These ways are pretty much self-explanatory and common, so lets investigate how a game came with a very inventive way to solve this, by mixing both techniques.

Games today need to make you be able to have fun with just yourself

   

Case Study: OddWorld: Abe's Oddysee


   Abe's is a classic PC and PSX game, the game plays as a side-scroller with extended controls. Abe can do the basic run and jump, plus kneeling down, rolling, hanging on ledges and so on. On top of that, Abe can talk to his friends, give them orders or just fool around.
   Instead of a difficulty challenge screen, or a non-sequential approach to levels. Oddworld's Difficulty is layer-based. Its the attitude of the gamer toward its challenges that actually define how hard it will be.

This whole series is just an excuse to talk about this amazing game

   Abe is given two tasks: Save Himself and Save His Friends, from this comes 3 different layers of challenge:

Easy: Try to finish the game not caring about your friends.
Medium: Try to save all the friends you can find laying around.
Hard: Try to save everyone, even friends hiding or in secret areas.

   The secret areas are easy to find, but since you need to be looking for them to find, the game allows a novice player to just “do what he sees” and not worry about VERY challenging puzzles and platforming sections that you need to save your hidden friends.

   When you get to the end of the first area, you can see that if you escape, all the friends left not saved will die. So its up to the player to either go back (now having a good knowledge of the controls and mechanics) or simply not care about it and go on.
   And saving half of your friends is more than enough to get a good ending, but saving everyone is rewarded with a bonus feature.

A friend died but you were able to control an enemy, would you restart the area?

   This is a very well suited method for games that focus on immersion, since the player can “choose” his difficulty without even knowing it. And it allows the player to project something of his own on the game, deciding how he will play, who he will save, and what's really important to him.

   In our next chapter we will go deep into one of the most popular Playstation 2 games: Shadow of the Colossus, we'll look how the game uses many of the theories present here to make an engaging and unforgettable experience.

Until next time, folks!

NEXT CHAPTER >>

[Hima]

Love this series so much. Are you planning to write a blog? I'd love to print your articles.

Keep up the good work. 

[Lustdante]

I'm very exhilarated to read this psychological interpretation of video games.

It also gives me a thought that game developers are manipulating player's instinct to make more money. Well, it's undeniable that nearly every single commercial products out there manipulate consumer's mind to sell more, but here is an interesting point.

The area of industry closest to video game in terms of product's nature I can think of is film industry, and yes they manipulate audience's thoughts hell out of it. But this manipulation is more on emotional level while video game's manipulation is rather on behavioral. The former deals with humans while latter deals with lab animals.

[SplinterOfChaos]

It also gives me a thought that game developers are manipulating player's instinct to make more money. Well, it's undeniable that nearly every single commercial products out there manipulate consumer's mind to sell more, but here is an interesting point.

Braid's creator talked about this extensively:

[Lustdante]

It also gives me a thought that game developers are manipulating player's instinct to make more money. Well, it's undeniable that nearly every single commercial products out there manipulate consumer's mind to sell more, but here is an interesting point.

Braid's creator talked about this extensively:

Oh, I happen to be from Rice University and I was sitting right next to this camera during the entire lecture. 

[Sankar]

Hima: Thank you for your interest! I'm glad you're enjoying the series. I've been planing to make a PDF document when I reach a good number of chapters. I'm having ideas as I go writing these series, like to use or not use pictures. But I plan to release a PDF soon. When I do, i'll post here!

Lustdante: I believe that Games are using the same techniques as the movie industry to evoke emotions, but its very hard to talk about these theories. It's not that they are hard to explain, it's just that
Behavior Psychology has a very "scientific" feel to it. Psychology roots are in philosophy, all those ideas about what is real, what isn't, why we do this or that. When the first Behaviorists came, they felt that it was time to treat psychology like chemistry or physics. So thats where all the lab-testing, Skinner's box, Pavlov's dogs came from.
Other theories came, like Freudian Psychoanalysis, Pearl's Gestalt and Maslow's Humanist Approach. These theories didn't stop in time, they were (and still are) further developed by other theorists.
Behavior theories were updated too, and in today's World Cognitive Behavior Therapy is very popular.

So, this is why these series of posts are touching the most "Behavioral" aspect of Psychology in Games, because its a popular theme and people usually accept it more than other approaches. But I don't feel, for example, that is a coincidence that lots of games feature the whole "save the princess from the dragon/beast" theme, and I believe freudian theories could explain this very well. And Paul here talked about how he uses Maslow's theories in his games.

I'm not sure if I was clear, but what I'm trying to say is that there is lots of different psychological theories being used in Games today, but since talking about our emotions and "explanations" behind them generates lots of "emotions", It gets harder to touch the subject without risking really upsetting some people, so most Games/Movies just use it behind the scenes and never talk about it anymore. I feel some people "feel like" Its wrong to use psychology in games, the whole "Oh it's playing with our minds!" myth.

Anyway, I plan to go deeper into other theories in future chapters, I just feel that its easier to talk about the more "Human Behavior" first because, you can fit these theories in any kind of game, even games without any story or setting behind them.
Hope I made any sense. Thanks for your post and interest!

SplinterOfChaos: I really like this speech by Jonathan, he gets really shy in the first minutes. But I recommend everyone to sit tight and wait some minutes, because when he starts to talk and relax a little more, he touches some really interesting theories and approaches.
Thanks very much for this link, great post!

For anyone interested in "less ethical" ways that Psychology has been used with people, I would recommend the first episode of the "Century of the Self" documentary, you can find it here:


It talks about how Sigmund Freud's theory have been used by marketing companies to try to sell people stuff they don't need, its the birth of consumerism. Its pretty interesting, and gives us a better view of Freudian Theories + Business.

Later today I'll post the next chapter in our series about Psychology and Game Design, Thank's everyone for the interest!

[baconman]

That fear is totally bogus. Because face it - the whole reason people play games and watch movies is to quench their own psychological needs. Duh.