Transcript for Podcast 71 - Video Game Engagement (Patreon)

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Hi everybody. This is Dr. Jamie Madigan, and this is the psychology of games podcast. Welcome. In every episode of this podcast, I look at something at the intersection of psychology and video games. This is the episode about video game engagement. Normally I do these podcasts with the help of a guest. But in this case, I've got something a little bit different, a little bit special for you.

This is a version of a lecture that I have done for geek therapeutics. You can find them over therapeutics.com, dealing with some of the psychology around how games create engagement in players. So I hope you enjoy. If you are a Patrion supporter@patrion.com slash. You can't access a video version of this lecture has video components and slides.

And if you're interested in becoming a Patriot supporter and getting access to that, now the great stuff you can do. So, as I said, at patrion.com/p G. Thanks. And let's get on with it.

all right. Welcome to this. Talk about the psychology of video game engagement. My name is Dr. Jamie Madigan. I'm an author, a podcaster, an IO psychologist, and I talk about the overlap between psychology and video games. Mostly over@psychologyofgames.com. You can find more information there about hundreds of other articles that I've.

A little bit about this talk though, you know, I love video games. I am a video game booster and a psychology booster. So nothing in this talk is going to be around, you know, panicky or morally. Sensationalists talking about how games get people addicted or how there's a secret weapon that they use against you and your children.

I'm not going to talk about, you know, engagement versus addiction or any of that sort of stuff. That's not what the focus of this lecture is. But I do want people to kind of understand what's going on when they become very engaged with games and how games have certain that you certain design principles do that so that you can approach them on your own terms.

So let's talk about this concept of engagement at the top of this talk and kind of get an idea of what that is anyway. And as a, as a good example, Let's talk about an older game called SIM city 3000 and the city of Magna Santee. There some city games, if you don't, if you're not familiar with them, they're the empire building or city building types of games where you don't necessarily like place buildings here or there, or decide what's going to happen exactly in the city.

But. Manipulate the rule set by which cities grow. So you can say, I'm going to zone this area for residential or commercial, and I'm going to set these tax policies and I'm going to lay transportation and roads, and I'm going to lay utilities and so forth. And you kind of get the city to grow up like a garden, uh, in, in that way through sort of manipulating the underlying rules of the game.

It's not a game that you can traditionally. Typically, except that one person actually kind of did. He was at a 22 year old architect student named Vincent oh Khosla. And he spent like four years and SimCity 3000 experimenting to maximize population density in his city of Magna Sati. And he started out using graph paper, trial, and error and engaging in that theory, crafting process.

I'm trying to figure out what are the underlying rules of the game? How can I sort of use them to get the game, to do what I want? What's like the optimal perfect way to do things. So spent four years sort of like trial and error. And then he actually took two years to build the actual city of Magna Sati in the game, over the process of two years and got it to sort of like peg all of the population density couldn't possibly improve it anymore.

If you want to go look up a video on YouTube, you can search for like SIM city, 3000 Magna Sati. There's actually an amazing YouTube video out there that sort of combines like this choir and it's background music and it's, you know, overlay. Uh, shots of SimCity 3000 with like alarming Latin phrases and, and all these statistics.

And it is kind of amazing, and it is kind of a great illustration of what can happen when somebody is like wholly and fully engaged with a game. And they spend all of their passion and their time and their energy to play that game and sort of really master it. So when we talk about engagement, this is sort of a good example to keep in mind.

And the definition that I like, which comes from the industrial organizational psychology literature, looking at people at work is engagement is focusing completely on, you know, a game or a task using great energy, enthusiasm, passion, and effort. And it sorta has, uh, three things that coincide with that.

And one is vigor, which connotates high level of energy and effort and resilience to setbacks and persistence in the face of obstacle. It involves dedication, which is marked by taking a task or an activity personally, acting with great enthusiasm, even when cynicism seems reasonable and then taking pride in that task or activity.

And then finally it involves absorption which refers to becoming so immersed in your tasks that you stop thinking about the technology and tools that you're using. You know, you feel like you're in the zone and you're losing track of time as days sort of speed. And this is a concept that's similar to the concept of spatial presence or immersion, which I've talked to length about elsewhere, including on psychology games.com.

So engagement sort of in these terms and in these definitions is generally seen as a good thing. It's something that, you know, employees enjoy experiencing in their work students enjoy experiencing in their, uh, in their studies and so forth and other hobbies. It leads to good outcomes. Like enjoy the thing more.

We do better. We perform better and so forth. And it is usually a goal of game designers, right? They want players who are engaged with their games along these lines. So then the larger question for the balance of this talk becomes well, how do games get players engaged then? Like, what are some of the, can I psychological levers that people can lever to create more engagement in the game?

And there's a bunch of them. There's a bunch of possible different ways to go about it, but I'm going to focus on four of the biggest ones and the rest of this talk. And they are goal setting, feedback, social information, and fostering what's called a growth mindset. So you probably encountered all four of these things, goal setting, feedback, social information, and growth mindset in your school or your work.

These are common sort of managerial techniques. And ways to engage with people. And that's kind of the point. This stuff exists in other spirits besides video games. And we can take the psychological theories that have been developed and the ways of creating these things and using these levers in order to create engagement, we can take that research and apply it to game design and understanding games that we're playing.

So let's talk about the first. Which is goal-setting doing the thing. It's one of the most well-researched areas in psychology, particularly industrial organizational psychology, psychology applied to the workplace, been studying it since like the 1960s. There've been models of goal setting and understanding how goal setting affects performance and what are the optimal types of goal setting to use when to use it?

What types of tasks to use, what types of goal setting with, and the short version. Of all that research is that if you give someone a challenging, specific goal, they'll do better than if you told them just to do something like, yeah. Do your best. So give somebody a specific, challenging goal. It will increase their performance.

In most cases that relative to just saying, well, you know, do well or do your best in this task. There are exceptions and nuance depending on the type of task and a person's ability. For example, like if they're trying to do very simple task that doesn't require stretching themselves or expanding a particular, particular amount of effort, then there's better ways to do, go to go about goal setting.

But in the context of the video games, especially this idea is pretty well-established and has stood the test of time and it shows up in video games all the time. So you look at like a typical quest log, for example, from, from video games, it's almost an. Feature, especially in role-playing games where you're basically looking at a list of your objectives, a list of your goals that the game has set for you.

So you may need to go kill the dragon, retrieve the treasure, um, deliver the family, heirloom fine. 20 of these mushrooms, kill 20 of these monsters. Go talk to so-and-so. You know, these are all typical things that might show up in a. And you also see variations of this idea in the form of challenges or objectives and other types of games or lists of badges or achievements to be earned.

So land so many headshots and you know, this game and you'll unlock this achievement or go visit all of these different areas in the game. And that will unlock an achievement or check off some sort of challenge or objective open five treasures. And it's a general truth that most gamers would rather see something checked off of a list like this.

Once it's added to the list, they don't like long quest logs. People tend to prefer short ones or ones that have been checked off and things have been moved to completed status and not have these kind of giant sprawling things. And you see behavior result from this where people won't move on from a certain area until they've done all the side quests.

They won't, you know, move off of a map until every house or every building. And the map has been checked off as, uh, like explored. So they'll, they'll grind and they'll play in order to make that happen. In other words, they'll stay engaged with the game. And so the interesting, or the natural question beyond that is like, well, why, why does that happen?

And psychology has some answers to that question. So that research that I was talking about on the psychology around goals, Says that goals tend to work for, you know, for basic reasons. One is that they direct attention towards a goal. So people are focusing on the activities needed to achieve that goal.

The other is they require more effort, you know, challenging goals require more effort by definition in order to reach the goal, you've got to increase your effort. Challenging goals typically require effort over time. You have to maintain that effort over a period of time. And then they require developing better strategies for doing something.

So you try something, it doesn't work or it doesn't get you the result that you need. What else could you do? And then even more specifically, we can talk about what I think of as, as moderators or amplifiers of goals. So like, what are some specific characteristics of goals that make them more effective in this context and that make them do those four things that I just discussed more effective.

And we can talk specifically about goal specificity and clarity. So how specific and how clear are the goals that you're giving people, you know, are they detailed? Are they specific? Do people know exactly what they need to do relative to just saying something like defeat five waves of goblins is better than improve the number of goblin corpses on the battlefield, for example, cause it's a more specific and it's a more clear goal.

And that's why you see a lot of goals in video games of the collect X of Y versus. You know, collect 10 gore tusk livers, for example, self-efficacy is another major amplifier of goal-setting. And this means that the person believes that they have the ability to reach the goal game. Developers try really hard not to give you goals that you can't hit given enough time, practice or effort.

So they don't typically challenge you to do things that are practically impossible or only possible for extremely skilled or dedicated players. Those types of ridiculous goals do exist. You know, like there's achievements in games for doing like a no hit run or people will adopt those and like a speed run community or something, but those aren't there to motivate most players.

They're there for that very specific sub suit, subset of players who want to pursue those kinds of goals for the rest of us goals tend to be something that we think that we can do given enough effort and practice and time. Third amplifier we'll talk about is feedback on performance. Games are really good at this.

Right. They track feedback and progress towards goals very effectively and very clearly. So they'll give you information about like, yeah. Okay. You're trying to get 15 headshots. You've gotten 11 so far and here comes the 12 they'll fill up progress bars. Uh, as you increase, say faction reputation or, uh, experience points awarded towards getting to the next level games are better.

And we'll talk a lot more detail about feedback in a few minutes, but they're better than almost anything else in this. Uh, fourth amplifier is commitment to reaching the goal or goal commitment. And this refers to the determination that somebody uses to pursue a goal. Once they've sort of accepted it, then decided to go to it higher, the goal commitment, the more likely it is to increase performance.

This is admittedly harder to manipulate in video games. But you can sort of see it in the form of emotional attachment or pursuits for reward. So we won't talk as much about this one because it's kind of not as relevant as some of the others, but it does show up sometimes. And then finally, task complexity is the last amplifier that we'll talk about and the complexity of the tasks needed, you know, if it gets too high, then the goal performance relationship suffers for really highly complex tasks that involves say multiple sub tasks or multiple sub steps.

And if you have something like that, then that relationship between goal setting and performance tends to drop and get weaker, which is why most tasks of this type and most video games we'll break big complex goals into smaller sub goals and sub steps and things that you build towards. So you won't have, you know, a major goal of like save the kingdom.

It will be complete these 12 sub quests to get you on the way. So one example that I'll talk about that kind of highlights. A lot of this is the, what what's known as the Zeigarnik effect and the 1920s, there was a Russian psychologist named bomas, a garnish working in Berlin. And one day when she was out with some of her colleagues at a cafe, she noticed that waiters who were taking everybody's order in this very busy cafe were able to remember complex.

Have them deliver to the tables, but then immediately forgot the order. So after the food was delivered, you know, you could say, what did we order 10 minutes ago? And the waiter would have like no idea. They promptly forgot them, but they knew exactly up to the point when the food was delivered. So she decided to kind of study this in a little.

And she brought people back to her lab and had them sort of start to do tasks and then interrupted some of them for, they complete the tasks and then let other groups complete the tasks. And she found that people remembered who she found that people remembered when they left tasks, unfinished, what it was that they were doing, what it was that they needed to do.

And people who were allowed to finish those tasks tended to forget about them and forget the details. So the idea is. Unfinished tasks or unreached goals creates sort of an internal, psychological tension that preoccupies us with the task. Know we remember it, we keep it at the top of our head. It's easier for us to recall things about that incomplete goal or incomplete tasks for memory completing that task releases.

The tension makes us happy and dismisses the information. We no longer have need to recall it from memory. And so. In video games, you see the Zeigarnik effect show up in quest logs and progression indicators towards badges achievements, and similar things. You know, you'll have literal progress bars and I'll show you percentages tore, you know, of collectibles completed or goal areas explored, or what have you.

Anyone who's trying to gather 14 gore tusk, livers, and world of Warcraft in order to complete. Quest is not going to quit grinding when they have 12 or 13, they're going to go through the extra effort needed to get that 14 more likely at any rate. And we love just checking things off of our quest logs.

In that way. You also see the Zeigarnik effect show up in the, you know, just sort of just one more turn types of games like civilization or something. Where you want to just take one more turn, because that means you'll complete building a complete, a building you'll complete research on a technology.

You will move an army into position, especially once you get further into those games, like every turn practically is checking off something from your to-do list and your quest log. And that's why people find it so difficult to just kind of stop in the middle of things in those types of. And it could even be argued that Tetris one of the most famous video games of all time relies on this effect, because you're literally trying to complete rows on the bottom of the screen at which point they disappear.

And then you have the next set of rows that you're trying to complete. And so it is like the most literal manifestation of the Zeigarnik effect that you could think of. There's also the related phenomenon where as we get closer to completing a task, we're more likely to have it dominate our attention and think about it.

Lots of studies. I've looked at this kind of thing. You know, if you're 5% towards the completion of. You're less likely to be preoccupied as you are when you're 95 or 98% towards finishing something. But what's really sort of interesting about this whole thing around goal setting is that video game designers can be sort of sneaky and they can like kickstart things and get us to feel like we are further along to completing a task and so trigger.

There's a garnish effect in that progress principle. So one of my favorite studies along this line, Invites you to imagine two people who decide to get their cars washed, you know, Kevin, Carlos, let's say two people, both of them go to one of those automated car wash, places that give out these little, you know, buy so many washes, get one free cards like loyalty or progress cards.

Kim gets a car that requires 10 stamps to get a free carwash, but the nice person behind the counter gives her two stamps to get her started. So Kim just needs eight more stamps to get her free. Carlos on the other hand gets a card that only requires eight return visits, but the person doesn't give him any free starter stamps.

He says, here's the card. Come back eight times, get a free carwash. So both of them need eight stamps, right? Both of them need eight return visits to get a free wash. But who do you think is more likely to come back eight times and fill up their card for. Well, we don't have to guess because it's Kim who needs 10 total punches, but got enough freebies to get her 20% of the way there off the bat.

So some researchers actually did this experiment and coined the phenomenon called the endowed progress effect, and it holds that we're more likely to try harder and longer to reach a goal. If we think we've started progress towards it, video games, do this all the time with questions for getting people start.

You free two prisoners from a camp, and then that triggers the quest and it says this, you need to rescue a total of 10 and you've got two already. Here are a hundred experience points. You need 900 to reach level two and completing the tutorial. For example, freed up a block of territory on the control map.

Just claim two more to open up the whole region and check off this achievement. So the idea here is that they're giving you the quest at the same time that they. Giving you credit for progress towards the quest and it makes you more likely to then want to check that thing off and continue. So that's a lot about goal setting.

Let's talk about the second lever, which is feedback. So that's paid, you did the thing in my book, the engagement game, I talked about feedback in the terms of a program called wow analyzer and world of Warcraft Martin Holz was a Dutch software developer and a world of Warcraft super. And he did what a lot of hardcore world of Warcraft players did.

He joined a Guild. He tried to optimize his holy pallet in character, uh, to be able to play it more effectively and to have the, you know, the optimal build and so forth. And so, you know, he joined discords and chat rooms and message boards and so forth and got some feedback from expert players, which was good, but he sort of lacked some good data on how well he was performing.

So a lot of it was about. You know, going on to a boss raid and then being able to time your abilities correctly and manage your cooldowns and coordinate with other players and so forth. So it's not just like, what is your build? What gear do you have? There's actually literally like, how do you use your abilities?

How do you position yourself? How much damage do you take? How much damage do you mitigate? That kind of stuff didn't have good data for that. Uh, just because it wasn't available, you could get combat logs from world of Warcraft, but they didn't really. Allow you to compare those logs with something that told you what you were supposed to be doing.

So being a software developer, he wrote a program that would look at those combat logs, compare what he did to ideal behavior, and then give him very concrete. So, you know, it might say, Hey, try to cast fireball more often. If you were not, not for a holy Peloton warrior or for a different kind of class, they might say, you know, you only cast it 41 times when you should have had enough time to cast it.

51. During this encounter, you kept on a cool-down for 83% of the time when you should be having more frequently than that, you should be managing your cooldowns better, for example. So all this different kinds of information. And it worked great. He was able to increase his performance and he created the software and a lot of other people to use it as well.

And it's, you know, a popular and useful tool for people to get feedback on their performance in this game. And video games are really, really good at feedback. When you play a video game, you usually know you succeeded or you failed at a task or a goal, and you know, why you succeeded or failed. And this is really, really engaging when you play a game, you know, you gotta have.

Because it gave you like a different sound than a different damage indicator. And maybe like the enemies had exploded, you know, that you're attacked it damage versus missing because you get visual and audio feedback, you know, when you try to do a speech check and a role-playing game that you succeeded and so forth and so on.

And then the interesting thing is then contrast this with the kind of feedback that you get in school or work it's way better and way more motivating the type of feedback that we get in video games and what we typically do. In school or work the world of work, you might wait months, or might only get once a year, sort of some performance feedback from your manager or some other source in school.

You might, you get a grade every semester and then you might even wait between tests or papers or assignments might have to wait weeks to get scores back on those kinds of things. So video games do feedback. Which again, leads to the natural question of like, well, why is this kind of feedback engaging?

One theory from psychology is the control theory of feedback. And it says that there's a, a few different ways. There's five ways that you can react to feedback. You could sort of abandon your goal and say like, well, okay, I'm not going to, I'm not going to even try anymore. Based on this feedback, you know, I can't do it.

You could reject the feedback and say, well, this is bogus. This person doesn't know what they're talking about. This data is flawed. Um, this isn't capturing my real performance. It's not doing me any good. And so you're just going to reject the feedback. You could try to alter the goal so that you say, well, okay, clearly I'm not going to be able to hit that goal, but what if I scale it back a little bit?

Or what if I do something that's a little easier and fourth, you could develop better strategies for your performance. Well, based on that feedback, what I did, wasn't working it didn't get me there. So let me try something different. Let me develop better strategies for reaching my goal. Or you could increase your effort.

You just try harder, put in more effort. So number four and five, they're developing better strategies. Increasing your effort are generally what game developers want. And it's also generally what teachers, managers, coworkers, et cetera. I want from you. Like those are the ideal ways to react to feedback, you know, altering the goal of rejecting the feedback or Bannon and goal are not great.

If the goal is to increase performance. So how do video games give feedback in ways that increase the likelihood that you'll develop better strategies or increase your effort? Good question. I think I've got some answers for you. So generally video games will be specific, not general. So they present players with lots of checklists, timers, specific victory conditions.

And not just sort of general vague, like, Hey, you did, you did pretty well there, buddy. They give you information that helps you improve, give very specific information. And other is that they focus on specific player behaviors and not the player. So they don't say, Hey, you're the very best at this. Yay. Nor do they say, wow, you're terrible.

I'm embarrassed for you. Instead, they give data on what you did think back about the example that I gave with the wow analyzer for world of work. It said you didn't manage your pull-downs for fireball very well. Or you stood in the toxic stuff or you didn't cast this spell after casting this other debop spell in order to maximize your.

And it'll give you very specific information about the behaviors that you did, and it won't necessarily attack the players, uh, you know, and their sense of self or their ego. Uh, thirdly, video games give information and feedback that is immediate and they give it frequently. So, as I mentioned in school or in work, you'll have to generally wait for days, weeks or months to get feedback on your performance and get grades, that kind of stuff at work.

You'd be lucky if you get annual performance reviews, but games give you feedback. Like immediately and frequently, it's a very tight loop that they will, they will do that sort of feedback. And you don't have to wait around and you don't have to sort of not be able to remember what you did or what the context was.

You get it immediately. And then finally video games are masters of feedback because they give information about progress. So we want to know about our progress towards goals and video games tend to give us concrete data and information about how you're doing. To close that gap between where you are and where you want to be, how much you're closing the gap makes players happy and engaged when they know about it.

Um, there's was a famous set of studies in a book called the progress principle by a couple of researchers. And they asked people at work sort of like what were the best days at work for you? Like when you were most engaged, when you were most motivated, what was going on this. And they interviewed tons of people and did lots of survey data.

And essentially they found that people's best days were the ones where they made some sort of measurable progress towards a goal. So it was like, they felt like by the end of the day, they were closer to our goal than they were in the beginning of the day. And then conversely, their worst days were when they had some sort of setback or obstacle that they couldn't get around and they either didn't make any progress towards their goals.

Or they actually back slid and had setbacks that they had to deal with. And those were generally reported to be their worst days. They're at least engaging. They're at least motivating. It's called the progress principle by Teresa. Amabile a, but the progress principle is something that video games make very good use of.

They'll always strive to sort of tell you where you are in that, that goal, current performance gap, where have you made progress? Where have you moved? And that is motivating and that is. So the third lever that video games can sort of use to increase engagement is proper use of social information. So, you know, saying that person did more things than you or fewer things or the same number of things they're getting gamers.

I tell a story about a, what I call the McKayla. Maroney is not impressed effect when there's probably a more psychology sounding name for this, but I like it. I think the name works better. McKayla Maroney is a better gymnast than you. Anyone, you know, and probably anyone that you can name without doing a Google search at age 16, she and her team of fellow athletes won gold medals in the 20 12, 11.

Bar for gymnastics yet. She's best known as the girl who was disappointed with winning second place. In one particular event, she was doing, I think it was a pommel horse event and she choked and just a little bit, and she ended up like falling down and that error cost her the gold medal in that event.

And she sort of made this famous expression or she's like scrunching her face kind of to the side. Uh, as she's up there on the metal stand and all eyes in the world are upon her. And she's kind of looking like unimpressed with winning second place in this competition. And so it sort of spawned the whole McKayla is not impressed me.

Uh, and you know, people would Photoshop her and to being unimpressed with various normally impressive things. And it was a meme and it was funny and she sort of leaned into it and, and owned it. And she even took a very famous picture with president Barack Obama, sort of where they were. Trying to make that make that face.

But I think the McKayla is not impressed. Effect is a, is a great example of the fact that, you know, Moroni may have been happier with a third place, bronze metal than she was with a silver. So she got silver and she might've been happier at least in the moment with winning bronze instead of. And some researchers from Cornell university wants actually rated the facial expressions of winners of the 1992 summer Olympics.

They're not the ones that Maroney competed in, but earlier ones where they watched videos of, uh, metalists getting up on the, on the, the platform. And they were trained on like how to rate their facial expressions and so forth. And they did it in a way where they tended to have agreement. And the researchers found that bronze medal winners actually looked happy.

Then silver medal winners on average and their conclusion was that because silver medal winners like Maroney made upward comparisons, like they were almost the best. They were almost a gold medal Olympian, which is in a category by, by itself, the best in the world. They were almost there. Maybe in some cases it was hundreds of a second tenths of a second or minor variations in their performance that costs them from being in that category by.

But the bronze medal winners on the other hand tended to make downward comparisons. So they weren't looking necessarily at silver and gold medal winners, they were looking out into the audience at all the people who they competed against that didn't metal at all and got nothing. So the bronze medal winners were making those downward social comparison.

Maroney's presumed reaction there and the reaction of the other bronze medal winners and silver matter winners is sort of emblematic of the fact that not all rungs on a tournament ladder are equally spaced. And the key takeaway point here is that the difference between first and second place is bigger than any other two rankings.

Second, third, third, and fourth. That's more psychologically meaning than any other two differences except dead last. And second to last, it's a lot worse to be dead last than it is to be second to last, relative to being third to last, et cetera. So this is often also called the big fish little pond effect where you're a big fish in a small pond.

I think frogs are cuter than, than fish. So I'm gonna go with the, a variation on this theme that talks about the frog pond. This effect describes how people ranked near the top of a badly performing group, feel better about their performance and about themselves. Then people who are ranked near the bottom of a high performing group, the effect is how people ranked near the top of a badly performing group.

Feel better than those ranked near the bottom of a high-performing group. Sometimes in other words, all you need to do to make yourself feel like the smartest person in the room is to step into a closet full of it. And the point is that we tend not to make comparisons to the larger world when given a chance, we like to make them with sort of smaller, more meaningful groups, especially if those comparisons let us fool ourselves about our performance or feel better, sort of protect our ego.

And this is true. Even if the performance earned you last place in a high-performing group is higher than the person sitting at the top of a pile of. So one study that looked at this was in 2010, a study by Ethan Zell and mark from Ohio university. And what they did was they split people into two teams of five.

So they brought 10 people in, split them into two teams of five, and then they task them with like watching these video recordings of people saying various things into the camera. And the task was for them to decide which of the statements was a lie and which was the truth. So. Kind of a made-up task kind of, um, meaningless, because in effect, the psychologists were the ones who are lying because they gave these different people like bogus feedback.

So what they said is that everybody is ranked fifth out of all 10 people across both teams. So regardless of your actual performance, they said, Hey, good job. You scored fifth in this task of the texting line. Out of all people that we brought in to do this across both teams, but then they were also, some of them at least were also told that they were the worst out of their team of five.

So out of all 10 people, you were fifth, but out of the, your team of five people, you were also fifth, you were like five out of five, the worst of those five people. There's also the experiment where the sods who were sort of told, and you were worst on your team of five, where. Sater they had lower self-esteem they felt better.

They felt worse about themselves. Yet. The only thing is that how was about how their rankings were framed, whether they were discussed as being overall across all 10 people or within their group of five people that they were last. So framing matters and framing of feedback and how you give people social information about their performance.

You see the show up in video games. Leaderboards, uh, of some kind are very common in video games. You know, Fortnite, for example, has lots of leaderboards. There are third-party websites for online competitive shooters that will show you your place in specific cuts of data, whatever sort of slice of the leaderboard you want.

You can look by region, look by what character you play, et cetera, et cetera. So why might these kinds of leaderboards work, um, social information as we discussed as part of it, especially if the leaderboard gives you information about people like. That you think you can measure up to, it will motivate you.

But some of the current research that I've looked at also says that leaderboards actually work via goal-setting. This is increasingly important when you have a gamification in the workplace, for example, which puts people on leaderboards against each other. And the idea is simply that showing someone a leaderboard has the same effect as setting a specific difficult goal for them, you know, say, well, okay, I'm I'm fourth, but I bet I could be third or second or first.

And people will actually adopt that as a goal implicitly when they, when they are showing their rankings on a leaderboard. So you set a goal to get your performance where it needs to be to beat so-and-so. And then everything that we talked about, vis-a-vis goal setting kicks in at that point. So the final and fourth lever that we'll talk about for increasing engagement in games is a growth mindset and fostering what we call growth mindset.

So, you know, you can learn to do the thing that. So, let me set this topic up by telling you a little story about how video games made me be a better parent. A few years ago, my daughter at the time was nervous and unsure about the competitive swim team that she was about to sign up for in high school.

So she was going from middle school to high school and she wanted to join the swim team, but she was worried that the other kids were too good and she wouldn't be able to hang with them. I wouldn't be able to compete at the same time. And to be fair, like the swim practices were early frequent, demanding.

Um, they were designed to make her a better swimmer and a better competitor. So this was like getting up at 4:35 AM to go swim before school and afterschool. And then, you know, though the coach gave the swimmers very specific feedback and one of them to get better. So I wanted to encourage her to join the swim teams.

I thought it would have a bunch of great benefit. But I almost said something that would have undermined that I almost said, well, you're good at swimming, so you should join the team. But then I sort of caught myself and remembered some research that I've read about this kind of thing. And then I remembered that she's actually a gamer.

She plays a lot of games and I said something different. I remembered about growth mindsets and Dr. Carol Dweck has done a lot of research in this area and she describes people. With a growth mindset, as someone who sees ability is malleable and something that can be developed and improved an effort is the means for improvement.

So those with a fixed mindset on the other hand, see ability is something innate and present in only fixed amounts. So effort in that case, if you have a fixed mindset means that you lack the talent to do something effortlessly and maybe you should find something else. So growth mindsets are often desirable and lead to higher performance and higher satisfaction with your performance and whatever it is you're trying to do.

And video games keep us engaged by encouraging these kinds of growth mindsets in the game, dark souls, three, it kind of kicks off with a bang and the boss of the tutorial area is notoriously, punishing and difficult to play through. Especially if you're not familiar with the souls games you can. Bash your head against this guy 20 times are more.

And I bet a lot of players just sort of, can't get past this and can't move on with the rest of the game. But the stark souls games are sort of designed for people with a growth mindset to where if you, if you stick with it, if you continue the effort, if you try to learn from your mistakes, if you try to pay attention to what the game is trying to tell you.

You'll figure it out and you'll, you'll develop the skills that you need to beat the boss. And it's not like a trick there's you have to actually develop your skills and improve your ability in order to beat these bosses and progress through the rest of the game. So dark souls is a great example of, of what a growth mindset in a video game looks like.

So let's talk about the difference between growth and fixed mindsets, a little more, and sort of how they think about different. Ideas that they might encounter when they're trying to perform a task or play a game. So when it comes to challenge and challenges, people with a fixed mindset say that, you know, you should stick to things that are not challenging for you or not challenging for me.

Like I should do the things that I'm good at the things that come easily to me, whereas people with a growth mindset seek to grow through being challenged. So they'll actually seek out things that they're not very good at as a way to get better at them when it comes to obstacles and your. People with a fixed mindset and want to avoid obstacles, or they quit trying.

When obstacles are encountered people with a growth mindset, push through obstacles and setbacks and find ways through, around, or under them. When it comes to effort people with a fixed mindset, see effort as evidence of lack of talent. Whereas people with a growth mindset see effort as required for success and required for growth and development.

When they encounter criticism. People with a fixed mindset, tend to ignore or deflect the criticism they'll criticize the criticisms, say that's that's wrong. It's not relevant to me. It's focusing on the wrong thing. Whereas people with a growth mindset will lean into criticism and try to use it to learn and improve.

They're grateful to get critiques and feedback about what they're doing because they can use it to do better when it comes to the success of others and sort of observing others are doing. People with a fixed mindset, tend to get defensive or competitive. And people with a growth mindset tend to learn from others and draw inspiration from others.

And they like seeing other people succeed because it helps them figure out how to succeed as well. So many games encourage or reward or require this kind of growth mindset and may actually punish people for having a fixed mindset. One of my favorite examples of this is the game darkest. There's also a darkest engine to that at the time that I'm speaking into this microphone is in early access.

And they're both great examples because darkest dungeon requires you to learn why you're failing, and then it requires you to experiment in light of that failure. In order to succeed, the penalties for failure are not necessarily extreme and they're sort of built into the experience similar to the way they are in the dark souls.

So you have a party, Y you can generally look and see like what you did wrong, you know? Oh, okay. I didn't come with these skills equip. They would have been handy. And I wasn't using trinkets that gave me resistance to bleed or poison or whatever status effects was, were common in this area. And it gives you the tools for understanding that and experimenting and learning and allows you to sort of iterate on that and repeat, and it rewards, effort and persistence.

Okay. When you do do that, when you have a growth mindset, it rewards it. Games are just great in the way that they give us a safe way to practice and fail in the name of learning and develop. And that's motivating. We want to keep playing when we feel like we're getting better and growing, and that's sort of a universal Axiom of motivation, both in games and other spheres of life is that yeah, we need to feel like we're improving.

We need to feel competent at something that's important to. Circling back to the story about my daughter, instead of telling her you're a good swimmer. I instead told her, well, you've improved it swimming a lot since you started, you've been doing it for years now. And so I then told her about the dark souls games and sort of what that meant, and the fact that it wasn't important that she was as good as some of the other swimmers on the team.

What was important is that she has improved. And she's aware of what's needs to be done in order to keep improving. And she ended up joining the team. She did great. After her first year of high school, she was one of just two freshmen that were invited to join the high school varsity swim team. And she got up at 5:00 AM to practice.

She listened to her coach. She took the feedback to heart and she practices, she almost always showed up for practice, even the optional ones and find ways to improve and did really, really well on the team. She gets it because she's a.

So, thanks so much for listening. You can find more information much just like this psychology of games.com. I hope you enjoyed this little experiment with the podcast. Um, let me know. You can reach out to me on Twitter at tap JV, Madigan, where you can find out how to contact me@psychologyofgames.com.

Thanks. And I will talk to you next time.