Someone asked about loot boxes in video games, I'm fascinated by the psychology and marketing ploys that manages to constantly get people to buy the product despite the lack of positive reinforcement in the end result (as you know the items that are mostly desired tend to have a 1% or less chance).
Right now a game I frequent has discovered through their research that losing increases more playing. They've used this information to artificially alter a player's matches to increase the likelihood of defeat. Despite the amount of frustration this causes a player, when presented with this information and proof (the official patent practically verbatim says this in the abstract itself), it doesn't seem to change their desire to play. Are habitual behaviors that much stronger than removing frustration? This is not something like having a messy room where the mess may not bother the self, thus the cleaning doesn't really remove any undesired feelings.
My real question though is what are some concepts, theories, etc. that are employed by this gaming companies to play on the psychology of their players especially with monetization? I know of concepts like anchoring, conditioning, sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion to name a few but have no idea where I could find more.
Another thing that's pretty fascinating, games these days are designed where at least 5 years worth of basic content is stripped from the base game and drip fed for years to come at a price. Even with evidence from predecessor games that had these features in their base game, players rejoice at a company releasing it two years later in the new game for a price. That's fascinating!
Aesthete184 karma
Might be a little late but worth a try.
Someone asked about loot boxes in video games, I'm fascinated by the psychology and marketing ploys that manages to constantly get people to buy the product despite the lack of positive reinforcement in the end result (as you know the items that are mostly desired tend to have a 1% or less chance).
Right now a game I frequent has discovered through their research that losing increases more playing. They've used this information to artificially alter a player's matches to increase the likelihood of defeat. Despite the amount of frustration this causes a player, when presented with this information and proof (the official patent practically verbatim says this in the abstract itself), it doesn't seem to change their desire to play. Are habitual behaviors that much stronger than removing frustration? This is not something like having a messy room where the mess may not bother the self, thus the cleaning doesn't really remove any undesired feelings.
My real question though is what are some concepts, theories, etc. that are employed by this gaming companies to play on the psychology of their players especially with monetization? I know of concepts like anchoring, conditioning, sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion to name a few but have no idea where I could find more.
Another thing that's pretty fascinating, games these days are designed where at least 5 years worth of basic content is stripped from the base game and drip fed for years to come at a price. Even with evidence from predecessor games that had these features in their base game, players rejoice at a company releasing it two years later in the new game for a price. That's fascinating!
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