Understanding The Player Brain, Pt. 1: Loss Avoidance
If you want to manipulate a player's brain, you must first understand it.
I got a lot of good feedback from my last article on design tips and theory, so I want to do that more.
This is my single favorite anecdote/principle of game design. Understanding it will teach you a huge amount, not just about games, but people in general.
After all, video games are the tools we use to manipulate the mental and emotional states of human brains, so it is very important that we understand how those brains work.
The World Of Warcraft Rest System
World of Warcraft was the most successful MMORPG (pronounced Mamamorpagah). The way you play is: You log into a remote server and play a fantasy dude. You kill monsters again and again. The more you do it, the stronger you get. This is called “grinding”, which is the word elite, profitable game designers use to mean “fun.”
To keep people from grinding too long in World of Warcraft (WoW for short), they designed in a fatigue mechanic. After you played two hours, you got smaller rewards for your efforts.
Early players hated this. HATED it.
So they fixed the system. They didn’t actually change anything about the numbers of the system. Just the labels. Instead of saying when you played too long you were tired, they said that if you logged out for a while you became “rested.” So the higher amount of reward you got after not playing for a while was a bonus!!!
Everyone LOVED it.
Seriously. When WoW came out, my gamer group had played a lot of its highly influential predecessor game, Everquest. That game was merciless about how much grinding it required to get anywhere. So the idea of “rest bonuses” was like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day.
A feature got turned from hated to loved with a tiny tweak of terminology. No design. Just semantics.
Ponder this and be enlightened.
Human Beings Are Loss Averse
Human brains like gaining things. But they HATE losing things.
If I find a $10 bill in the street, I feel good. Yay. Two free coffees. But if I lose a $10 bill? I feel AWFUL. I’m such an IDIOT.
This phenomenon has been very heavily studied by economists and psychologists for obvious reasons. It’s fun reading.
Don’t look down your nose at research in psychology and economics. What they learn about the brain is the rocket fuel that gives casinos (and the iPhone app store) untold billions in profits. You may not care about the researchers, but the researchers are very interested in you.
What Does This Mean For Game Design?
If you want players to feel happy about things you give them, you have to lard it on. And you have to keep larding it on, more and more, as they get used to and bored with the rewards you have given so far. (The discussion of the Hedonic Treadmill will have to wait for another day.)
But if a player loses something? Even something seemingly small and insignificant? Instant fear and revulsion. As in, if a part of your design requires a player to give something up permanently to access it, a lot of players will never interact with that part of your design. Ever. Unless you force them. In which case they will be very stressed and angry.
The Classic Consumables Problem
The best example of this phenomenon is consumables in role-playing games. As in potions, scrolls, anything that you use once and then it’s gone.
Anyone who designs RPGs knows: Players will never use consumables unless they ABSOLUTELY have to. And when they do, they hate it.
It is pretty much expected that anyone who plays Baldur’s Gate 3 will have, at the end, a backpack bulging with hundreds of potions and scrolls. Some not useful. Some very useful. All hoarded.
When a beta tester of mine says they are stuck at a fight and have died at it a dozen times, I always ask to see their saved game. When I get and load it, I invariably find a mountain of unused powerful consumables. I suggest they try the fight again and use 2 or 3 scrolls. Invariably, I hear back that they won the fight. And then, the next day, they complain about another fight they lost ten times, and so on.
How To Mitigate This?
Suppose your game has this situation. What do you do about it? Well, the main rule is that you can’t rewire a player’s brain. You just have to work with it. So, some options ...
Option 1 - Don’t worry about it! As long as they’re having fun, who cares if they keep 500 healing potions as a security blanket.
Option 2 - Ratchet up the difficulty until they need to use their consumables. This is a solid solution, but you should reserve it for higher difficulty levels. It is reasonable to expect someone playing on Hard to engage with all parts of the game system.
Option 3 - Remove consumables entirely. In my Queen’s Wish games, you don’t craft potions. You make potion bottles that automatically refill when you get back to town. Then I balance the dungeons so you need to use them. This does not remove the loss aversion (some players hated using even refillable potions), but it does massively mitigate it.
It’s Not Really A Problem
You don’t get to design games for the brains you wish people had. You can only design games for the brains they actually have.
I get frustrated sometimes when people don’t play my games the way I want them to. I think every game designer experiences this feeling sometimes. My job, at this point, is to get over it and meet my players where they are standing.
This is the first of these basic principles articles I want to write. I really hope these simple principles inspire you to make a game of your own. Indie games these days are basically a license to print money, and you’ll be farting through silk in no time.
Spiderweb Software has been creating turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games since 1994. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good stories and fun.
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Halfway through my second play through of Avernum: Greed and Glory, I realized that I always had a ton of wands that I was carrying around. So I started using them, lavishly. And still had a half-ton of wands that I was carrying around by the end. Although I usually had way too many Ensnaring and Terror Wands, so started selling some, and not enough Crystalline Wands, which then got hoarded. Same for scrolls, I found that I usually had a big pile of ones that I found not terribly useful, and hoarded the ones I found made a real difference (examples: ton of Vulnerability that I never used, and never enough Speed Burst, so that I had to ration them by expected major battles). Potions I use, much as with scrolls; the useful ones like Healing tend to accumulate simply because they aren't needed as often on Casual, and the ones that really make a difference, like Invulnerability, I end up rationing by expected boss battles. I do play on Casual the first time or three, though. I will have to make it a point to see if my consumables use changes on a higher difficulty level.
I recall in the Dragon Age games I would often dump my consumables onto my party members so they would make sure they didn’t go to waste. Sometimes consumable build up is less a goblinoid hoarding instinct problem, and more a “I’ve got too much to do as it is!” problem. Still, “wait, the 𝙍𝙊𝘽𝙊𝙏 is going to 𝙒𝘼𝙎𝙏𝙀 all 𝙈𝙔 precious resources!?!?!?!1111” can absolutely be a worst possible answer to the issue.
Still, I will say Queen’s Wish probably leaned into the impulse to hoard resources more effectively than anything I can remember playing. Maybe not item resources, but 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳 resources. Do it all in one go, no running back to mommy to go get healed back up to full without consequence so make every move count... Queen’s Wish looked at the weird shape of the hoarder mindset and, instead of just dumping it in a pile of packing peanuts and hucking it in a mailbox, it precision cut foam to that shape to make sure the experience was delivered safely.
I’m not sure if it’s the best possible answer, but it 𝙞𝙨 an answer, which is more than I can say other games can be bothered to give. And I’m in no way better than any of this - I too wind up with enough unused scrolls to wallpaper a small castle, and wands enough to construct a truly apocalyptic kindling pile by Avernum’s end. If potions were regulated, my adventurers would be arrested for illicit elixir trafficking.
I praise Queen’s Wish, and yet I am utterly terrible at efficient resource usage. At least an ill-timed or unoptimal use of a resource is a 𝘶𝘴𝘦 of it. If you revised Avernum’s loot tables to reflect how I play, 90% of all consumables would be better off as just more gold or static loot to sell for the same. Which would be boring, so not a great answer.
All I can think of is maybe highlighting the usefulness of consumables by giving them to enemies. The Wand of Uberpocalypse burning a hole in your back pocket becomes easier to remember when there’s some snot goblin waggling a fire stick at you. Spite can be a powerful motivation, and turning a fight into a potion drinking contest at least gets those potions drank. And, if enemies are already going to be pulling out weird abilities and powers as it is, you may as well do it in a way that prompts the player to remember and use their own external powers.