You work for the Transportation Security Administration, manning the x-ray machine at a local airport. Your day begins easily enough, quickly scanning passengers’ luggage and bodies and waving them through. But after a few minutes, you get an alert—shirts are now contraband. OK, fine, you dutifully strip people of their T-shirts as they pass through the metal detector. Then another alert: Mobile phones are prohibited, too. Wait, now coffee isn’t allowed either, but cell phones are OK again. As you struggle to keep the new rules straight, the line of cranky passengers gets longer. Wait, snakes and turbans have just been outlawed. Oh, and shirts are allowed now, but you didn’t realize that until you’d already stripped down another passenger. That’s one strike against you. Now native headdresses are forbidden, turbans are OK, but shoes must be removed. You get confused and let a snake through—another black mark. The line of passengers begins to stretch across the room even as new regulations keep coming in faster than you can process them. Before long, you are fired—not because you’ve endangered anyone’s safety, but because you failed to cope with the illogical edicts of a capricious bureaucracy.

The larger man spoke. He gestured while doing so. “You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.

Kein Gebiet ist vor der Wissenschaft sicher und natürlich macht sie auch vor der menschlichen Verhaltensweisen nicht halt. Nur ist dieses Gebiet über die Jahre immer besser erforscht worden und neue Forschungsfelder sind schwer zu finden. Professor Joseph Santamaria von der Pennsylvania State University gelang es aber eine Lücke zu finden.

“To the best of our knowledge, this everyday behavior has not been systematically studied before…”

Das besagte Verhalten ist “die Tür für jemand anderen aufzuhalten“.

Mittels einer Videokamera untersuchten sie das Verhalten von fast 150 Menschen an einer Tür der Universität: Wer hielt sie auf und für wie lange?

Despite a huge backlog of games trying to get my attention, I found myself playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) lately. This is in part because of the loot system, which drops random items –mainly hats or weapons– for you to use in customizing your avatar.1 This system has been in TF2 for a while, and it used to be that the only way of getting the gear you wanted was by getting it from a drop or by crafting it from raw materials (which also essentially came from drops). Many players rejoiced and were very proud of their silly hats and weapons.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

So, look closely: Option 3 gives you the most stuff, but it’s the same price as Option 2. Why would anyone buy Option 2 when for only an additional $0 they can get more? Or, more to the point, why isn’t Mode 7 Games charging more for Option 3?

Well, for the same reason that I wrote about here. In case clicking on links isn’t allowed in your house, here’s the short version: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely noticed3 when The Economist magazine did something very similar to the above with their print and online subscription packages:

Christmas is usually pretty fun in our family, and I do my best to add to the flavor of the season. I still make weird faces for the group picture (my hope is that my family will not have any “normal” photos for my funeral collage and instead will have to put pictures of me with my finger up my nose while they weep and say, “We will miss him!”), and I still come up with bizarre wish lists.

Playing video games is a time-consuming business. Even the shortest games can take upwards of four hours to complete.

Time, by contrast, is limited; and spare time is an even dearer commodity.

Why then should I prefer to spend time playing games over other activities? I’m not suggesting that I shouldn’t, but there must be a very good reason to justify spending a precious resource.

Exactly how much fun is it possible for someone have playing a game? My game design philosophy has always been that games create an Experience. For the vast majority of games that are made, I would say around 99%, the core experience that companies, student developers, and indie developers are shooting for is for the game to be fun.

Werewolf is a simple game for a large group of people (seven or more.) It requires no equipment besides some bits of paper; you can play it just sitting in a circle. I'd call it a party game, except that it's a game of accusations, lying, bluffing, second-guessing, assassination, and mob hysteria.
I really like it. But then I go to some strange parties.

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference entitled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the "?". Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be "fair and balanced", I delved into what the data show and what they don't show.

Clearly defined goals and fair, incremental rewards are two game design techniques that could motivate the 'gamer generation' in the workforce, according to a US academic.

Lee Sheldon of the Indiana University believes managers may have to rethink how they engage the next generation entering the mainstream workforce.

If I were to compile a list of frequently asked questions people send me, the first would be, “Hey, I have this awesome idea. WRITE AN ARTICLE ABOUT IT!” The answer to this question is, “Uh, okay. I’ll put it on the list. Stop yelling.”

It’s an MMO designer classic: stick some giant horrific monster into an area to keep players on their toes. If the players refuse to run away from said monster, they get killed. But they always have plenty of warning. “The earth shakes when the giant walks,” says the designer — “they can’t help but notice that! So it’s not unfair. It’s just something to keep them on their toes.” Or how about the old “random firetraps in the middle of a raid dungeon” trick? Spices things up without being unfair, right?

Last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or “E3” if you’re in a hurry) the two big stories for console makers were 3D1 and new motion controllers. As I watched Sony’s press conference where they pitched the Playstation Move2 something struck me about the way that they presented the pricing for the product.