[Continuing his regular GameSetWatch column, psychologist and gamer Jamie Madigan looks at how a few simple psychological manipulations could tip players in online games in the right direction.]
Imagine that two people, Kim and Carlos, notice that their cars are filthy and both go to the same car wash to make things right. With their wash they each receive a special card that lets them earn a free car wash if they get the card stamped enough times during future visits.
Kim’s card says it requires ten purchases for a free wash, but the perky girl at the counter gave her a head start with two free stamps. The card Carlos got doesn’t have any free starter stamps, but it only requires eight future purchases instead of ten. So both Kim and Carlos are looking at the same number of purchases to score their complimentary car cleaning.
Who do you think is more likely to come back enough times to fill up his or her card? Kim or Carlos?
It turns out that it’s Kim, who got saddled with a card that required ten total stamps, but who received enough free stamps to get her 20 percent of the way towards her goal. This is thanks to a phenomenon called “the endowed progress effect.”
Basically, the idea is that when you give people just a feeling of advancement towards a distant goal, they’re more likely to try harder and try longer to reach that goal, even relative to people who have an equally easy goal but who got no sense of momentum off the bat.
Researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze coined the term in a paper where they performed the car wash experiment described above. They found that 34 percent of people who received a ten-stamp card with two freebies ended up coming back enough to redeem the cards, compared to 19 percent of customers who started with an unstamped card requiring only eight stamps.
This despite the fact that both sets of customers only needed eight stamps for a free wash. Nunes and Xavier also found that those endowed with the two free stamps tried to reach their goal faster by waiting less time between washes.
Why? The researchers argue that the reason for the results is that by giving out free stamps, the merchant was framing the task (i.e., buying enough car washes to get a freebie) as one that has already been undertaken. There’s a substantial body of research that shows people are naturally motivated to complete tasks that they feel they’ve started and will want to remain consistent with previous intentions.
Other research has shown that the closer someone gets to completing a goal the more likely they are to increase their efforts towards closing that last little gap. Apparently, giving people a couple of free holes on a punch card is enough to trigger both of these effects.
This has a few interesting possibilities for game design. Imagine, for example, that I’m playing through Fallout: New Vegas and I get a quest to save ten slaves from a nearby encampment. One way to deliver that quest to me would be to meet a NPC and have her say “Hey, there’s ten slaves. Go free all ten.” And so I’d go off, and the quest would tick up “0 out of ten slaves rescued, one out of ten slaves rescued,” et cetera.
Alternatively, if the game designer wanted to invoke the endowed progress effect, I could first receive the request upon opening the cell door for a pair of slaves on the outskirts of the encampment. One of the slaves could say “There were 12 of us altogether! Free the others!” and my progress would start off as “two out of 12 slaves rescued” as the first two sprint off over the horizon. According to everything discussed above, I’d be much more motivated to complete this quest if it were presented this way.
Other examples aren’t hard to imagine. What if some NPC wanting 12 Goretusk livers in World of Warcraft gave me two to start with and raised the request to 14? What if, upon learning a new crafting skill that requires combining 5 widgets into one superwidget, the game gets me started with one widget and makes the recipe call for six?
What if, when I’m waiting impatiently in a multiplayer matchmaking lobby for Halo: Reach to find me 10 opponents, the game populates the first two slots with “Player Found!” after a couple of seconds even though it’s still looking? Would I be more likely to wait for the rest even if the search takes a long time?
Well, you get the idea. If you’ve got other examples, let’s hear them in the comment section.
[Jamie Madigan examines the overlap of psychology and video games at PsychologyOfGames.com and for GamePro magazine. He can be reached at jamie@psychologyofgames.com.]
Very interesting, and it makes sense. Did they study if this has diminishing returns, though? Because if every single quest in the game started out partially completed, players would probably put two and two together and stop feeling so impressed with themselves.
Formulation and variation is the key to good manipulation, and good designers manipulate well. Although the idea is solid, the Goretusk example (for example) is likely to fail if mass-implemented; it has the person giving you the quest of retrieving things also giving you the things you need to give back. That trick won't last long. It's too superficially evident. To embellish a bit, if you meet an NPC that gifts you with 2 Goretusk livers and mentions that NPC X, right over there, is looking for some (e.g. 10)...
We go through our lives generally ignorant of the vast number of regular manipulations that enact themselves on our interactions, no matter how often the same type of behaviour is used to manipulate. It is the identification of manipulation by others (such as Jamie Madigan here) that allows us to see it, and often we then take the position 'well, that doesn't work on me' because it has now become evident. Likely it worked on you before, and unless you remain cognizant of it, it will continue to do so.
I was not aware of this effect regarding personal goals, but regarding people on servers I noticed.
When I was a teenager, I was a GM at a private Ultima Online server (there are no official UO in my country, so ALL players here play on private servers), and one of the things I most hated in the "other" server was that it was disonest by claiming to have more players than it did. But then I noticed that on days where noone was online, all the ones that came online just logged off shortly after, but on busy days, noone wanted to leave.
Later I noticed this pattern on my IRC channels, the IRC network where I work, Team Fortress 2 servers I for example once joined a game that had 3 people online, I asked them to stick around for 20 minutes before giving up... 20 minutes later the server was full, while when I attempted this on other server, my connection crashed (along with some other guy, a few seconds before me) when there was 6 players online, when I returned there was 2...
In the IRC network I work, the admin decided to use bots designed to pass Turing Test (they don't pass, they are designed to... :P managing that goal is quite hard) as "extra users", he would create several bots and leave them on channels that have potential to be popular, then he would ask all the staff to hand in there too, after the channel gets sufficiently popular (like, have more real people than staff and bots), he slowly removes the bots and staff there, and eventually the channel popularity fuel its own popularity.
A great weapon for the game designer's arsenal, though I agree that using it in the individual quests could get old pretty quick. What if it was used in the overall narrative instead? So start off the game with a very clear goal: for instance, the player must defeat the seven warlocks to save the princess, but the game starts with the death of the first warlock. This way the implementation of the endowed progress effect isn’t so transparent. In fact, overlapping narrative arcs with the first steps of the overall goal being initially complete could just be a great way to keep a gamer interested over the course of a much longer game…
This is a cool idea especially if the player accomplishes the first goal themselves as part of the tutorial. Say the tutorial takes them through a dungeon and they defeat the warlock, then the player receives their quest to defeat the other six.
I see this done in games all the time. Ocarina of Time starts out with the Deku tree dungeon, and then when the player becomes an adult they receive the light medallion for free.
This was basically the case for Harry Potter (SPOILERS!) when he found out that there were 7 thingamabobs he needed to destroy to kill Voldemort, and that he had already destroyed one without knowing it, and that Dumbledore had already destroyed another one for him...
Hmm. Do I need to apologize for being a dork if I'm already on a site for video game developers? :)
how do we KNOW that the reason for the increased completion of the cards is because of the customer feeling they had a "head start"? i can see the merits of the conclusion, but there is another possibility.
you are given a card with the promise of a free service, so the card is VALUABLE. of course, most consumers realize this is an advertising gimmick and usually dont want to feel like they are being wrangled into buying more. they want to make their own decisions, and that decision in many cases (i know ive done this) is to simply throw away the card. it does make the cars interior cleaner after all.
but a card with two stamps on it, that is valuable. it is close to being worth a free wash. also, the person who gave you two stamps when you should have gotten only one, or possibly none, has given you something out of generosity, and thats something everyone likes and seeing the card gives you a good feeling.
"oh, they were so nice to me" rather than "oh they want more money".
and since the card is valuable. they dont throw it away, and every time they see it they think, with a good feeling, about cleaning their car.
so yeah lots of possible reasons this works not just the one reason.
I believe the two-stamp customers returned because they feel special, like an exception. They believe someone "gave" them something not everyone else got. As for how this works in a game, I'd feel a little cheated if someone else killed one of the seven baddie bosses for me. I think this approach works in some instances, especially in online games like Mafia Wars, but I believe this works because we all want a feeling of exclusivity. The industry loves "free" upgrades with the purchase of a special edition package (Bioware anyone?) until we realize that everyone is just as special as we are. Then we feel manipulated, which could lead to less overall enjoyment of the game.
Off hand, don't many Mario games start like this. You beat the tutorial and get a star (or whatever). And learning a new move tends to show you/hint at stuff near by that you can use it on.
I agree that it's not something that you would want to overuse and implement on every quest. Humans have an amazing ability to become acclimated to stuff like that and have it lose its potency.
Regarding some of the other questions about whether players/shoppers might clue into the fact that they're being manipulated, you've got the right idea. The researchers had it too, so they looked at what effect giving a reason for the free stamps would have. They found that giving no reason diminished the effects, but giving any kind of reason kept them around. It didn't even have to be a meaningful reason. They could just say "Just because" and they still saw the endowed progress effect as much as a "reasonable" reason like "Because you shop here a lot."
Also, regarding perceived value of a blank versus kick-started card and not wanting to waste something of value, they thought of that, too. They found the same results even when people placed more or less dollar value on the program.
Why not use this idea to get people into the achievement/trophy system on Xbox/PS3? These systems are essentially reinforcement schedules to get you playing more games, and also set up social comparisons which try and encourage you to again play more games (and play games to completion). But when you first turn on your Xbox (and I presume PS3, sorry sadly I don't own one at the moment) this score is 0.
Why not have a "Turned on Xbox for the First time" or if that is too obvious "Created your Gamer Profile" achievement pop up? This would be the equivalent of giving a pre-stamped bonus card, and meet the criteria of having a reason behind it. It would get people into the system and introduce to the of Achievements/Trophies. Then you could add a few more like "Customised your Avatar" or "Installed Sony Home" just to get people going in terms of using the features of the console.
Thx for this great article and the good comments. I try to throw some more thoughts into the discussion. I think it's not only the feeling of the customers to have an fostered start to achieve the goal, it's also the feeling to be treated special. So far I'm agreeing with Daniel Blumhorst and Christopher Engler (and many others of you as well) that exposing that special treatment as a pure marketing trick would prevent my recurrence through the bad feeling of a manipulation. Regarding the special treatment I only can feel extraordinary treated when I think in another situation I wouldn't have get those stamps i.eg. I had a nice chat with the vendor before or I'm driving his or her most famous car brand etc. It doesn't matter what are the reasons for the special treatment what counts is that other persons would not get the same conditions or if they do then only in a limited period of time. Either they can feel lucky (a random factor could be the reason for their free stamps like the hundreds customer of the day) or they feel like deserving it (i.eg. throught their charme) or like Jamie already quoted that the free stamps are based on a meaningful or "reasonable" situation.
If we are translating that in gamespace and not in external bonus or achievement systems, because there I think marketing knows its place very well (look i.eg at League of Legends with their rotating Price-Offers etc.), then we should think about how we give the player the feeling of the extraordinary. If it's an event that reoccurs whenever I start over the game or load a saved game or all my friends have the same conditions at the same place in an Online-Universe the mechanisms exposes itself and brings me back to the feeling of "Nice try, but ... no". It will not get me more enganged with the game.
So let's stick to the warlock example posted above by Alex Belzer:
The player must defeat the seven warlocks. Now at the beginning of the battle some combatants (NPCs) helping you out. But the result of how many warlocks you kill is depending on some random or skill factors of the player. For instance if the player already experienced similar situations and knows it's really hard to kill three of them in the first place than a kill amount of three would really encourage him to go further to hunt the rest of them down, because he knows about the extraordinary condition that he now plays.
It's just a first thinking about how a feeling of getting an extraordinary treatment from a game could increase your dedication to it.
Levelling, in most games that implement levelling of characters, work on a similar principle. Your early levels are easy, but then things start slowing down for you.. For that matter, the whole micropayment business model works on a similar principle, where you can get in for free but that's just the start... that said, these are open-ended examples and this page was about more finite goals.
It's nice to know it is now scientifically proven.
We go through our lives generally ignorant of the vast number of regular manipulations that enact themselves on our interactions, no matter how often the same type of behaviour is used to manipulate. It is the identification of manipulation by others (such as Jamie Madigan here) that allows us to see it, and often we then take the position 'well, that doesn't work on me' because it has now become evident. Likely it worked on you before, and unless you remain cognizant of it, it will continue to do so.
When I was a teenager, I was a GM at a private Ultima Online server (there are no official UO in my country, so ALL players here play on private servers), and one of the things I most hated in the "other" server was that it was disonest by claiming to have more players than it did. But then I noticed that on days where noone was online, all the ones that came online just logged off shortly after, but on busy days, noone wanted to leave.
Later I noticed this pattern on my IRC channels, the IRC network where I work, Team Fortress 2 servers I for example once joined a game that had 3 people online, I asked them to stick around for 20 minutes before giving up... 20 minutes later the server was full, while when I attempted this on other server, my connection crashed (along with some other guy, a few seconds before me) when there was 6 players online, when I returned there was 2...
In the IRC network I work, the admin decided to use bots designed to pass Turing Test (they don't pass, they are designed to... :P managing that goal is quite hard) as "extra users", he would create several bots and leave them on channels that have potential to be popular, then he would ask all the staff to hand in there too, after the channel gets sufficiently popular (like, have more real people than staff and bots), he slowly removes the bots and staff there, and eventually the channel popularity fuel its own popularity.
I see this done in games all the time. Ocarina of Time starts out with the Deku tree dungeon, and then when the player becomes an adult they receive the light medallion for free.
Hmm. Do I need to apologize for being a dork if I'm already on a site for video game developers? :)
how do we KNOW that the reason for the increased completion of the cards is because of the customer feeling they had a "head start"? i can see the merits of the conclusion, but there is another possibility.
you are given a card with the promise of a free service, so the card is VALUABLE. of course, most consumers realize this is an advertising gimmick and usually dont want to feel like they are being wrangled into buying more. they want to make their own decisions, and that decision in many cases (i know ive done this) is to simply throw away the card. it does make the cars interior cleaner after all.
but a card with two stamps on it, that is valuable. it is close to being worth a free wash. also, the person who gave you two stamps when you should have gotten only one, or possibly none, has given you something out of generosity, and thats something everyone likes and seeing the card gives you a good feeling.
"oh, they were so nice to me" rather than "oh they want more money".
and since the card is valuable. they dont throw it away, and every time they see it they think, with a good feeling, about cleaning their car.
so yeah lots of possible reasons this works not just the one reason.
I agree that it's not something that you would want to overuse and implement on every quest. Humans have an amazing ability to become acclimated to stuff like that and have it lose its potency.
Regarding some of the other questions about whether players/shoppers might clue into the fact that they're being manipulated, you've got the right idea. The researchers had it too, so they looked at what effect giving a reason for the free stamps would have. They found that giving no reason diminished the effects, but giving any kind of reason kept them around. It didn't even have to be a meaningful reason. They could just say "Just because" and they still saw the endowed progress effect as much as a "reasonable" reason like "Because you shop here a lot."
Also, regarding perceived value of a blank versus kick-started card and not wanting to waste something of value, they thought of that, too. They found the same results even when people placed more or less dollar value on the program.
Why not have a "Turned on Xbox for the First time" or if that is too obvious "Created your Gamer Profile" achievement pop up? This would be the equivalent of giving a pre-stamped bonus card, and meet the criteria of having a reason behind it. It would get people into the system and introduce to the of Achievements/Trophies. Then you could add a few more like "Customised your Avatar" or "Installed Sony Home" just to get people going in terms of using the features of the console.
If we are translating that in gamespace and not in external bonus or achievement systems, because there I think marketing knows its place very well (look i.eg at League of Legends with their rotating Price-Offers etc.), then we should think about how we give the player the feeling of the extraordinary. If it's an event that reoccurs whenever I start over the game or load a saved game or all my friends have the same conditions at the same place in an Online-Universe the mechanisms exposes itself and brings me back to the feeling of "Nice try, but ... no". It will not get me more enganged with the game.
So let's stick to the warlock example posted above by Alex Belzer:
The player must defeat the seven warlocks. Now at the beginning of the battle some combatants (NPCs) helping you out. But the result of how many warlocks you kill is depending on some random or skill factors of the player. For instance if the player already experienced similar situations and knows it's really hard to kill three of them in the first place than a kill amount of three would really encourage him to go further to hunt the rest of them down, because he knows about the extraordinary condition that he now plays.
It's just a first thinking about how a feeling of getting an extraordinary treatment from a game could increase your dedication to it.