Excellent thought here.

I think you're completely right about motivating people to take the action you'd like.

That said, I think extreme care and caution should be exercised when taking things away from players. When a company, any company, talks about deleting or getting rid of something that's mine, I resent that a bit. In the back of my head I can hear myself think "I paid them, I paid them a lot. Why are they taking this from me?" If the reason isn't good (and has to be better than "We're cleaning our servers"), it damages the relationship I have with that company.

They have something of mine, and they'll do what they want with it, unless I pay them. Though technically speaking it's not my data; I feel that they have MY data for ransom. Yes, I might pay the ransom, but I will no longer feel like that company has my best interests at heart.

In the AoC situation above, I'd probably buy one months' worth of time to put all of my really cool stuff on my main, and then sell the rest, and put the cash on my main... And then think long and hard about buying that expansion later.

So yes, it may give a short burst of income, but it can also damage hard-forged customer relations. A risky move, to be sure.

Nice article.
It would definitely be interesting to see what developers could come up with if microsoft and sony changed their achievement & trophy rules and TRCs in order to allow experimentation with these things.

@John Smith: That's irrelevant to the point. The idea isn't that there is a 'right' answer or the actual logistics but rather that people will choose different things based on whether it's described as gaining something or losing something. The language itself could be clarified and the point would remain the same - whether you spent 1000 words describing how many lives would be saved or 1000 words on how many are lost, it'd still suggest that people would pick the given options as mentioned.

@article: It would be interesting to see people taking this approach but like Blake, it'd surely be a risky move if not done carefully and appropriately. It might be more appropriate to do so (framed as a loss) within the context of the game rather than working on the game as a whole where it'd be better to frame it as a gain. I think most would be willing to accept, say, a loss of a game life rather than a loss of a perceived portion of the game itself.

Super cool, Jamie. Psychology used in advertising and game design may be sneaky, but its firmly entrenched. Loss aversion, or to be more precise, the perception of the potential for loss that can shape motivation, correlates with a line of thinking related to a propensity of reliability and efficiency for the mind. I would be interested/honored to hear your take on it, in part or in full; found here: [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GlennStorm/20100121/3911/Sentiology.php]

I love this kind of Article. Thanks.

Blake's point is excellent. As strong as loss aversion may be in the general public, it seems to be particularly strong in gamers. Any game forum is always full of flames about this or that character class being "nerfed."

There's definitely an issue of perceived ownership by gamers of in-game assets. This is well-documented for online games like MMORPGs, but the various complaints against the DRM systems intended to protect single-player games from piracy suggest that a sense of ownership is in play there as well.

So, here's a question. Some social observers have claimed that young people today seem to have much more of a sense of entitlement than recent previous generations -- they want the best, and they want it now. Is there some truth to that assertion? If there is, wouldn't that explain why the sales technique of framing offers in terms of loss, rather than gain, may be more potent when applied to gamers (who tend to be young) than to non-gamers?

I take no sides on this question; I'm just lobbing it out there for discussion... and then ducking. :)

The problem with using loss aversion as a coercion tool is that rarely is there a binary choice of either A or B, there's always a hidden C choice which is a action of escalation. If a company sends a message that they will be instigating a loss in its clients with an ultimatum of A or B, the client may also choose C, which is an aggressive action against the instigator. This could be a criticism, a boycott, petition, or even a violent action like a personal verbal assault. As is presented in the article, people will go to unreasonable lengths to avoid loss, so expect out of the box thinking from people when presented a binary choice.

"- Option A gives you a $5 credit
- Option B lets you avoid a $5 monthly surcharge"

These options are not quite the same. I'd be willing to bet that the $5 credit is in some form of "funny money" - by which I mean a form of capital that can't easily or quickly be put back into my bank account - and that the surcharge will come out of my bank account directly and immediately.

Having said that, the basic principle of the article is sound, it was an interesting read, and I appreciated it.

Thanks for the comments, all! I'm looking forward to sharing more articles here.

@John Smith: not my wording, but it seems clear to me that anyone not saved will die and anyone not killed will be saved.

@Blake Schreurs: I think that's exactly why loss aversion is so powerful -- it does feel like ours, and we don't want to lose it. Even when we logically know that it's not "ours" per se (i.e., it's a virtual thing in a service we actively separated from).

@Stephen Chin: Yeah, there are definitely better and worse ways to phrase it so as to not make it seem so exploitative. Even though, you know, it IS.

@Glenn Storm: Woah, that's a lot of stuff you wrote! I've flagged it for more thorough reading later, but on a side note I just drafted an article about psychological flow and gaming that will probably appear on psychologyofgames.com next week.

@Bart Stewart: Oh man, I can't believe I didn't think of the nerfing angle on my own. That's huge in MMOs or even any multiplayer game. RE: sense of entitlement, I'm not sure off the top of my head if that's been supported by any actual research. Doesn't mean that it hasn't been, though. I seem to remember reading some stuff about generational gaps (e.g., baby boomers, gen-x, geny) that talked about how more recent generations feel more ownership in their careers and less attachment to a particular company, though. There may be an angle there.

@Mickey Mullasan: Wait, wait, wait, are you actually telling me that highly controlled lab experiments don't always perfectly align with conditions in the real world? No way! ;) Snarkiness aside, I take your point. But I think companies like Funcom --especially Funcom, since it's struggling with AoC-- would be more interested in getting some additional revenue than getting some bad forum flak about it.

@Tim Randall: Hrm, I was actually thinking of it in terms of a credit on the subscription, but your idea of "store credit" is interesting too. And you're probably right, but even funny money would have some value (or "valance" in psychological gobbletygook) and research has shown that losing money is about THREE times as painful as gaining the same amount of money is pleasurable. So if the funny money has less than a third of the value of real money, you may be on to something.