Ever had to sacrifice something in a game? Ever had to take one step back to go two steps forward and still didn’t feel great about it? Then you’ve experienced loss aversion.

Loss aversion refers to the fact that we feel more pain from a loss than we do pleasure from an equivalent gain. Losses are worse than gains are good. Most of the time game designers want to avoid triggering this feeling, but not always. I talk with my guest expert this episode about how game designers can incorporate –or not– loss aversion into their game design. In fact, he wrote a book about it!

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  Links for this episode:

• Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design by Geoffrey Englestein 
• Geoff on Twitter 
• The Dice Tower podcast 
• The Ludology podcast 
• Othercide 

Audio Credits

•  “Robot Motivation” by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 
• Despair Creation by Max Lija, Othercide OST