You Can Cheat, But Don’t Be a Cheater

My wife was once highly offended by a cartoon mole, and the story highlights how a simple attack on self-concept can reduce the frequency and severity of cheating in video games.

Twitching and Choking: The Audience Effect in Games

Between Twitch and YouTube, many people are now gaming for an audience. What effect does this have on performance? It depends on the audience and the game.

Fake Feels and Free Passes

The story of one very scary bridge may explain why Game of the Year discussions ignore the flaws in games like The Last of Us.

50-Something Gaming Academics on Twitter

Here’s a list of 50+ academics on Twitter who study or write about the overlap between video games and fields like psychology, communications, sociology, law, and more. Find someone new to follow!

The Psychology of Video Game Avatars

Are you more dominant, kind, assertive, clever, or flirty depending on how your character appears in-game? Both new and old research has shown that the avatars we adopt can influence our behaviors not only inside the game, but outside as well.

How Not to Compare the Xbox One and PS4

With the Xbox One and PS4 in stores this month, many of us are comparing bulleted lists of features when trying to decide which to buy. That’s a step up from blind fanboyism, but such an approach can still trigger a couple of mental errors in judgment. Here’s how to avoid them.

The Psychology of Video Game Nostalgia

With the help of researchers in psychology and marketing, let’s explore why we tend to get nostalgic about old games, why we may be fooling ourselves about how great they were, why it may be a good thing anyway, and why it makes us vulnerable to marketers.

Saucy Necromancers And the Psychology of Self-Perception

What effect does using highly sexualized avatars have on our preoccupation with body image and acceptance of rape myths? Some new research on self-perception theory and virtual reality avatars suggests some things you should be aware of the next time you sit down at a character creation screen.

Less Humble Bundles Are More

The “less is more” effect can make one product seem more valuable than another even though it has less to offer. The Humble Bundle deals provide a great real-world example of how you might be willing to pay more if the deals were presented in just a slightly different way.

Why You Don’t Burn Out on Candy Crush Saga

Candy Crush Saga is the most popular game on Facebook, iOS, and Android. Unsurprisingly, it uses a few psychological levers to move its players, and this article focuses on one of them to answer the question: Why do they limit the number of lives you have per day instead of letting you play as much as you want?

Why Do Color Coded Clues in Level Design Work?

Level designers often use colors to guide players along their way. The psychology of inattentional blindness and traffic accidents has more in common with this than you might think.

Does Respeccing Your Character in Diablo 3 Make You Happy?

My latest column over at Gamesindustry.biz looks at the question of whether we’d be happier if we had to stick with our choices in games instead of always having the option to respec, respend, and revise without penalty.

Why Gone Home Is So Immersive

The first person exploration game Gone Home is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever seen, and it was done with just a tiny budget and team relative to AAA games. Let’s look at what theories of spatial presence have to say about what the developers did and why it works so well.

The You Are Not So Smart Podcast: Video Game Edition

For some reason, author David McReady asked me to be his guest on his You Are Not So Smart podcast. As you might guess, we talked about psychology and video games.

It’s Not So Bad: Cognitive Dissonance and Cheap Games

All else being equal, do you enjoy the games you pay full price for as much as the ones you buy on sale for cheap? While it of course first depends on the game, a certain well known theory in psychology suggests that paying $60 for the new Tomb Raider game when it came out…

A Blind Gorilla with a Fez Walks Up to a Border Checkpoint…

Here, I’ve got a quick task for you. Assuming aces are worth 11, quickly double the value of each card below and add them up. The answer is 50, right? Well, yes but that’s not the point. The point is that you probably missed the fact that the 4 of hearts is black. Assuming a…

The Psychology Behind Steam’s Summer Sale

Summer is here! Time to pump up your video game backlog until it’s bloated, gurgling, and making vaguely taunting motions from over in the corner. In other words, the Steam Summer Sale has begun. I just bought Hotline Miami, Fez, and The Swapper for like 14 cents while typing that. Like last time, Steam is…

Can The Xbox One’s Kinect Read Your Mind?

Well, no. Of course not. That’s a silly question. Why would you even ask it? That said, the updated supercamera on the Kinect 2.0 is capable of some pretty amazing things. Microsoft demonstrated how it can tell where you’re looking, estimate your heart rate from the color of your skin, and even infer your mood…

I’m Writing a Book. You Can Help.

When I started this blog over three years ago, I did it because the topic interested me and I thought it would be fun. I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of reception, but it was actually pretty good! People found the site, passed links to it around, and editors at a few magazines…

The Left-Digit Effect: Why Game Prices End in .99

Why, when you saunter into a game store or navigate your favorite e-tailer, is everything priced $59.99, $29.99, or $19.99? More specifically, why do all those prices end in “.99?” Why not just be honest and price them at $60, $30, and $20? Retailers aren’t fooling anyone by pricing them one cent cheaper, are they?…

A Tale of Two Talent Trees

Can the presentation of choices on an upgrade screen or talent tree affect how we feel about those choices? Consider the two screenshots of talent trees below. No, look, don’t ask why just yet. Just consider them! The first one is from the first person shooter Syndicate while the second is from the latest Tomb…

The Uncanny Valley and Character Design

Attention, Internet: I have a new article on the psychology of the uncanny valley up on gamesindustry.biz. You know what the uncanny valley is, right? It’s that theory originally from the field of robotics that says if you stick a couple arms and googly eyes on a trash can it looks cute, but if you…

The Availability Heuristic is Always On

One of the stories that’s making the rounds right now concerns Adam Orth, a (former) Creative Director at Microsoft who caused a ruckus by cramming his foot in his Twittermouth. He did so while weighing in on a potential “always on, always connected to the Internet” nature of Microsoft’s next Xbox console. The gist of…

The Psychological Appeal of Violent Shooters

I have a new article up on gamesindustry.biz exploring the psychological appeal of violent shooters via self-determination theory. I draw from work by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan, and Andrew Przybylski that looks at how this theory of human motivation can explain why violent shooters are so popular. SPOILER: It’s because good shooter design also happens…

Heuristics, Ho!

This pricing I just saw on Bioshock Infinite inspired me to make a quick note: This is just a nice example of what psychologist and influence connoisseur Robert Cialdini would call a “click, whirr” moment. Bioshock Inifinite is only discounted three cents here, but we’re so used to thinking that something is a good buy…

The Zeigarnik Effect and Quest Logs

What do waiters in a 1920s Venetian restaurant and today’s average role-playing game fan have in common? They both tend to remember what they have yet to finish. Sometime during the 1920s, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in an Austrian restaurant (or maybe German; accounts differ) when she noticed something peculiar: waiters displayed an…

Modifying Player Behavior in League of Legends With Honor

One of the blind spots in my gaming experience is the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre, which consists of competitive multiplayer games like DOTA, Heroes of Newerth, and League of Legends. Part of the reason I’ve never jumped in to any of these massively popular games is the one-two combination of a daunting learning…

The Walking Dead, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

Oh man, have you all been playing The Walking Dead from Telltale Games? I have, and with every installment of this episodic game I’m newly impressed by how hard it yanks on my emotions. Like the comic that spawned it, the game is unapologetically bleak. Its appeal largely comes from watching characters getting crammed into…

How Game Tutorials Can Strangle Player Creativity

Okay, let’s do one more article on creativity and games, based on this question: Is it better to hand hold new players through a game tutorial to teach them all the mechanics and intricacies of a game, or is it better to let them figure things out on their own? The “tutorial level” has become…

Creativity, Puzzle Games, and Brain Damage

Have you ever encountered a puzzle in a game that utterly stumped you, then wondered why it seemed so trivially easy when you stepped away and came back to it after doing something else for a while? I have, especially on a recent playthrough of an indie puzzle game called “QUBE” (http://qube-game.com/). For those not…

Competition, Cooperation, and Play

One of the topics that’s conspicuously absent from this blog is that of the relationship between violence and video games. The short version of the reason why is that I think the issue is too polarizing and too much tends to get read into findings on either side. Something I did recently find worth discussing,…

Seven Psychological Sins of SimCity Social

I have recently been hearing a lot about SimCity Social, the “Farmville with a candy coating of SimCity” game from Bigfish and EA. Mostly I’ve heard about how the game pulls all kinds of tricks to get players to spam each other, trade items, recruit new players, and spend real money. All of these things…

The Psychology of Game Nostalgia in Edge Magazine #242

Another of my articles on the psychology of video games has been published in Edge Magazine, Issue #232 July 2012. This time I wrote about the nostalgia we feel for good old games and how game developers and marketers capitalize on nostalgia to sell us reboots, sequels, and retro games. I have written about nostalgia…

Some stuff lost in a restoration…

Ack. Sorry, folks, something went awry and I had to do an emergency restore of the site from an incomplete backup. This means that comments on the last three articles –of which there were a few dozen– are now gone. I’m so sorry, there were some really good comments in there. I’ve backed everything up…

The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 4 Historical Items

Wait, did I say the series on Diablo III loot would be a three parter? By that I obviously meant it would have four parts. Don’t put words in my mouth. I was listening to the always excellent Giant Bombcast podcast recently and the gang was talking about their experiences using the Diablo III auction…

The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 3 Dopamine Binds On Pickup

In Part 1 of this series on the psychology of Diablo III loot I talked about how the anchoring effect can affect our estimates of value for auction house items. In Part 2, I described how the availability heuristic can trick us into thinking that epic item drops are more common than they are. In…

The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 2 Availability Heuristic and Loot Drops

In part 1 of this three part series, I suggested that Blizzard could move more money through its auction house economy if it sorted prices from high to low by default, thanks to the anchoring effect. All of those items still had to be found from drops, though, and that involves a lot of tedious…

The Psychology of Diablo III Loot Part 1: Anchoring the Auction House

Oh man, you all, I’ve been playing a LOT of Diablo III lately. I’m sure that many of you who have played have been through the same scenario I have time after time. After running around avoiding AOE attacks, dashing in to rez fallen teammates, and swatting aside trash mobs, you and your co-players finally…

The Psychology of Genres in Edge Magazine #241

My latest article on the psychology of video games for Edge Magazine has been published in issue #241. It’s the one with the Crysis 3 cover. In it, I explore a bit about some theories of decision making and genre usage that may clue us in on why we like the genres we like. Why…

Draw Something Uncertain

Imagine that some wealthy lunatic comes to you with an offer to choose between the following gambles in order to win five bucks: Option 1: A stock is selected at random from the Wall Street Journal. You guess whether it will go up or down tomorrow. If you’re right, you win $5. Option 2: A…

The Psychology of Avatars in Edge Magazine

I have a new article about the psychology of video game avatars in issue #240 of Edge Magazine. It’s this one: This article was a lot of fun to write. My standard operating procedure is to look at some body of psychological research or theory that has nothing to do with video games, and then…

Needs and Gratification Theory and Game Genres

Hey, do you guys watch Extra Credits? If not, you should. Each week the team there shares insightful, animated essays on topics related to video game design, culture, and business. They’re often pretty amusing, too. A few weeks ago they did a series on the difference between Western and Japanese RPGs that reminded me of…

The Psychology of Free-to-Play Games in Edge Magazine

Good news, everyone! Well, good for me and possibly good for you if you’re inclined to read Edge Magazine. Because my mutterings on the psychology of games are now appearing there. Specifically, I have an article about the psychology of free-to-play games in the latest issue (April, #239) with the cover below. The article is…

The Dunning-Kruger Effect and Multiplayer Games

Let me describe a scenario that I think we’ve all been in. You pick up a game like Gears of War 3 or Starcraft II or the deck-building iOS game Ascension. You jam through the single-player campaign or do a little comp stomping in skirmish mode –maybe even on the second-to-hardest difficulty ‘cause you’re totally…

Two Lessons From Team Fortress 2

I’ve gotten sucked back in to Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately and taking notes of the changes that have happened since I last played. In the course of poking around the Mann Co Shop I’ve been reminded that they have some pretty smart cookies over there at Valve and I for one welcome our new…

Self-Perception Theory and Marketing through Avatars

I recently found out, via this article on Mindhacks.com, about an interesting paper by researcher Jeremy Bailenson in The Psychologist. In it, he reviews recent research on how viewing online representations of ourselves –like our avatars on the Xbox 360 or our Miis on the Nintendo Wii– can affect our behavior. He talks some about…

Ideal Self Image and Game Choice

So why do you think you choose to play the games you do? NO! WRONG ANSWER! Well, actually, you’re probably mostly right about that, but an recent article in Psychological Science suggests that your choice of games and your motivation to keep playing them may have something to do with how well they allow you…