Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

I just finished reading a book recently called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz that has some interesting psychological statistics that I thought might have some relevance to what we do in the game industry.

The basic thesis of the book is that too much choice leads to unhappiness. The author states that choice gives freedom, a core American value, but as the number of choices build freedom decreases as the amount of analysis required to make a choice increases. Especially for people with a psychological profile focused on maximizing the benefit out of every decision.

The book then references a number of different psychological studies that analyze the effect of making decisions. One simple one was presented to people as “choose one of the options below:”

1. Receive $100 in cash right now
2. Flip a coin (just representing an exact 50-50 random chance), if it is heads you get $200, if it is tails you get $0

The large majority of people take the $100. The author postulates that this is due people reacting more harshly to loss than gain. The negative delta change of happiness caused by getting nothing in the coin flip, thinking “I could have had $100”, is greater than the happiness gained by winning the flip, “woot, I got $200 instead of $100”.

When I think about that in terms of game design it is a reminder that taking things away from a player has more psychologically impact than giving them new toys. Taking away has its place but requires great care to not put off players to quit your game. It also makes me put my salesmanship cap on and think of features that could help sell games when someone is playing the demo version of a game with achievements. For example, “hey buddy, you would have just gotten an achievement right now if you had the full version (click here to buy), if you don’t buy now you will lose this achievement and have to earn it again if you buy later.”

The book goes on to analyze a number of other factors that go into decision making and the results of choices such as regret, opportunity cost, psychological effect of comparisons, and counterfactual thought to name a few. I found it pretty interesting.

In Japan, among my non-game industry friends, I’d say about 90% are using the R4 piracy device for their DS to steal all their games. These are people who are a typical average consumer, perhaps buying one game title every one or two months. Not the type of people you would expect to see pirating but here they are.

On an international flight from Tokyo to San Francisco I witnessed a four year old girl playing the DS version of Mario 64. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary there until I saw her change the game she was playing to something new. Not by changing cartridges but instead by firing up the menu for her R4 that was loaded with games. Clearly a parent set this up but it was still a bit of a shock.

Now Ubisoft have just announced that their DS sales for the year are down 67% and blamed that in large part on DS ROM piracy.

Surely, it is more convenient to have many games on a single cartridge and the R4 (and its friends) does provide that. In this day and age this can be fixed easily with local storage on the device. The new DSi model is starting to address this. Nintendo is always slow with these things but they would likely satisfy the customer’s desire for convenience by moving to a fully downloadable game model with no cartridges, where many games could be stored on the system at one time and be purchased directly from the device.

Nintendo must do something to secure their system better. High levels of piracy directly leads to less financial incentives for developers to build for that platform and thus dropping revenues for Nintendo themselves. Not just directly by having their own games pirated but also because third parties no longer look to release software on their system.

Zombie Apocalypse, a game by Nihilistic Software and soon to be published by Konami that I contributed a lot of gameplay code to, was nominated for Game Trailers’ Best of E3 Awards. Woot! Unfortunately it did not win but it is great seeing the game receive positive coverage in the lead up to its release.

Thanks for the heads up on this Jean.

While browsing a Japanese iPhone blog I ran across a video of Indicator Maniacs, an app I programmed recently for Mission-One. It was cool to see someone post about it. Check it out in motion below: