History Shaping Design: Inequality and Player Behavior

[Music] hi so just a few things before we get started please remember to fill out your evaluation forms at the end of this session and other sessions you attend it's really helpful for speakers to improve and learn about their speaking and if you have cell phones just make sure they're on silent and will most likely be using the wrap-up room I don't know my talk is going on pretty long so I don't know if I'll get to any questions so but there'll be a wrap-up room after after this you guys can just come in we can continue the discussion all right so hi my name is Julia and ATAR and I am a game designer at on time my talk is called history shaping design inequality and player behavior before we get started though I do have a few disclaimers so this is a series of talks

I've given called history shaping design and usually I look at game systems from the past and try to understand their context the time period that they were made in their culture in order to understand those relationships and the design decisions made around that game and again like what we can learn as designers now about our own time period in our own culture and how its you know influencing our designs but this time I'm sort of focusing more on recent events so this is not so much about looking at the past or comparison you know comparing with the past and in particular I'm looking at in unequal systems and how they shape people's behavior and I'll be comparing game systems and economic systems both of which are very complex and very different and also for this talk I'm going over and covering a lot of different psychology studies but psychology research tends to be very muddy because they're trying to analyze the complexity of human nature and there's lots of variables and so you

know their variables are hard to isolate and analyze so just take you know some of the conclusions with a grain of salt right this is not a very hard or fast science this is this is some that's sometimes very hard to predict also just due to time I'm not going to go into too much of the studies that I've included but I am gonna reference them on my slides so you can look them up and read more information on your own time if you're interested also I'm using a lot of economic data and cultural references coming out of the u.s. in particular part of this is because I live in the u.s. so I'm most comfortable talking about you know the the country that I grew up in but I also believe that the u.s. does have sort of an accelerated pace of particularly income and wealth inequality that seems to be going faster than other developed countries so it makes for an interesting test case all right so we evolved two

forms of thinking one logical and energy heavy that we use sparingly and one fast and effortless that we use a lot heuristics is the understanding of how the our fast brains work and how it explains some of the seemingly illogical ways we process information make decisions and navigate complex systems now as does game designers we use tricks and tools to help our fast brain understand our games an example is the use of visual elements that draw players to certain places in our world giving them a sense of direction without forcing them through a series of instructions they sort of already kind of you know an interesting thing catches their eye and they want to gravitate to that thing we don't need to tell them where to go necessarily heuristics in economics is called behavioral economics and economic designers and marketers can use similar tools to control how we think about purchasing things in this example I'm giving a list price which is usually at a higher price point than people would usually buy that item at but it gives the illusion of a really great discount off of that item so one

of the ways this is achieved is through something called priming or framing priming or framing describes the fact that we are always making comparisons and we tend to use the most recent things we were thinking about or information in our immediate environment to influence our choices and actions even if they are seemingly unrelated and even if we're not even aware we're doing so so for example if I were to show you a picture of it dustpan and then asked you to fill in the blank most people will jump to the word soap sort of connecting the dustpan to cleaning this might be you know I might have triggered a different outcome if I had changed up the image now priming is used in a lot of UI UX and game design right by using players ingrained knowledge of how the world works designers can quickly communicate how elements should behave and sort of you know using that knowledge we can prevent players from feeling frustrated because they sort of understand right away how something would would look so for example like I will probably know

jumping on something with spikes is not a good idea but jumping on something that looks soft and mushroomy is probably fine apart from just using visual elements planning levels so players are kind of equipped with the right tools or in the right frame of mind before ramping up on a challenge or offering a series of more difficult puzzles can help them understand what they need to know know next easily and again minimizing frustration so in this example this is Zelda breath of the wild and in this room there were lots of buried treasures and usually when players come across those buried treasures they know they need to use the magnet to land under an order to unearth them but the magnet will also just happens to be the tool you need to use to unlock the secret door and move on to the next series of challenges so priming here is the use of the buried treasures to get players to be equipping with the right tool in order to move on to more difficult actions now this effect of priming can also show some seemingly illogical purchasing behaviors that we might have so for example if there was a

discount on a new flat-screen TV maybe there's $100 off of a flat-screen TV this might you know make people think that this is a really good deal good enough to maybe drive across town to go to that particular store that has that deal or maybe to wait in a long line in order to you know get that coupon or that limited time offer in order to to secure that savings however when presented with like the sale of a new car most people won't apply the same amount of time to save that hundred dollars now traditionally in economics this is sort of weird because economists are like where your logical being and we should sort of apply the same effort to save that hundred dollars it shouldn't matter if it comes from a flat-screen TV or if it comes from a brand new car but it we do have different behaviors right we're not as motivated and why is this well it's because we're being primed by the actual purchase price of the item right it feels really good to save a hundred dollars off of something that's only a honey few hundred dollars because the relationship is much bigger right it

seems like a much bigger discount versus something that's a few thousand dollars so Dan Gilbert a psychologist from Harvard said this is why a lot of people will spend a lot of time and effort cutting two dollar coupons off a four dollar toothpaste but they don't spend the same amount of effort looking through fees and their retirement funds now according to this USA Today chart the difference between 1% and 2% of like an active managed fee and your retirement fund over the course of like 30 years is the difference between 100 and 300 thousand dollars so it's really thicken but because it's abstract and 1% in 2% just don't seem like they should be that different people kind of glaze over it and they don't exert the same amount of energy saving something that it is much more significant priming can also change how we perceive the people around us especially those who have less or more than us and how much inequality we're willing to put up with according to this study done they looked at you

know how people's framing changes when confronted with different people so for example if I were thinking of a series of choices it could be something as mundane as going to the grocery store and figuring out what things I'm going to buy at the grocery store and I'm I were to come across somebody asking for money I'm much more likely to frame that interaction in terms of a series of choices so what did this person do to land themselves in this situation that was that would be different if I were some if I were thinking beforehand about a series of chance events maybe somebody I knew got into a car accident or maybe someone a new one a scratch-off ticket were like a couple hundred bucks right and then I were to pass that same person I'm more likely to think of that person in terms of chance events so like what kind of you know bad luck did that person have that now in the situation where they're asking for money and this is important because it can change our behavior right I'm much more likely to give to a person where I'm thinking about the events that may be outside of that person's control that led them into this situation and

the reason for this is if we see something that's unfair we try to explain it in our mind and if we can't do that that can cause some discomfort or it can cause us to try to rectify that that difference another aspect of priming or framing is something called the stereotype threat or boost now this is if someone associates with a group that has either a positive or negative stereotype they might reflect that outcome on the results of an action that are related to that stereotype so this is a study done by the World Bank where they took people from a high caste group in India and a low caste group of India they gave them logic puzzles to solve and when solved individually there's no distinction between the two groups you couldn't tell who was who their performance was completely identical however when they put the people together to solve the puzzles in front of each other and it was obvious like who belonged to what caste the differences started to divert with a higher caste group performing slightly better than the lower caste group now the researchers were trying to think

about why that could happen and they sort of concluded that if a person is associated with a group that has a positive stereotype this might give them just enough confidence in the action to kind of boost their performance slightly people who identify with groups with like nay a negative stereotype might have the stress and disproving that stereotype particularly when they feel like they're interacting with people who might hold those beliefs so you know in their mind you know having to be twice as good or twice as smart to kind of overcome that perceived stereotype and even the mental space of paying attention to those negative stereotypes might be enough to impact that person's performance compared to a person who just wouldn't even be thinking about it because their identity affords them the privilege of assuming those stereotypes don't apply to them right they just they wouldn't even be thinking about it now again psychology research is very muddy and there has been different studies that show you know various effect amounts of this effect and has actually been studies that show the opposite which is that the pressure of having to

overcome that NER negative stereotype is going to motivate people to work hard enough and that will actually boost their performance making them perform slightly better but I brought this up because when I was reading these studies I was thinking about all the times that I was like as a player confronted with various difficulty selections before I even get to a puzzle and I'm wondering if that can somehow pry me to you know change my performance slightly if I select easy for example is that going to give me enough confidence that I'll you know assume that I'll be able to solve those puzzles or overcome those challenges or will it impact my performance negatively because maybe I won't be you know as activated or I won't be as challenged if I think that they're going to be easy so some priming takeaways we're always making comparisons we use the most recent and immediate or well-known data available to shape our choices and thoughts and perceptions can perpetuate

okay so loss aversion is another bias that can explain some of the behavioral changes that happen in unequal systems so this is the bias that makes the loss of something twice as painful as the gain of the same thing as shown in this graph this is called a loss aversion curve as you can see the about the the curve is steeper when the losses are negative right or versus the gains so in games loss aversion is used in lots of different ways from making players feel motivated feeling a sense of loss when playing and amplifying punishments or bad situations now Jeff angle Steen had a great GDC talk last year where he talked in depth about loss aversion and in particular board game design but I'll be giving two examples of how he used a loss aversion differently in the games he's worked on so this one is called the expanse and here currency and victory points are the same unit so in order to set an action or plan a strategy players are actually consuming their winning

points so this makes players like slow down and pay attention to the actions that they're going to be doing in this game to make sure that they're going to compensate for that that loss of points that they have to spend on this is in contrast to his pit crew game here he wanted to encourage players to take risks and also this T this game is team-based so teams are kind of competing against each other so here it was important for the the losses when penalty points were triggered by players to not feel so bad so instead of a team's car moving back a step when a penalty point is triggered everyone else moves up now again and logically it shouldn't matter right it's the same as if you move back one or everyone else moves up but it feels different to players and because it feels different to players it doesn't feel so bad therefore you know there's not so much of a sense of loss when those points are triggered and the teams will kind of stick together because there won't be so much infighting if somebody triggers a point because there won't be necessarily that same impact of loss another place

loss aversion can be found is in branching narratives because of the limitations of Tekken content most branching narratives need a funnel at some point however players can be very aware of the loss of their choice base and narrative outcomes they could imagine there are characters going in one direction or following a certain sort of storyline in their head and if it like starts to diverge into another area they can be they can really notice that and that can feel very impactful to them inventory systems are also where loss of vision can happen right how much I'll value something I have in my possession then picking something else up unless it's you know obvious that the thing I'm gonna pick up is better or the thing that I have is damaged in some way and inventories also show this another aspect of loss aversion right losses need to be proportional in order to have an effect right if I have 10 units of wood and I have 15 units in my inventory I'm gonna really think about that

transit and weigh it like is it going to be worthy for me to spend that 10 units of wood however if I have 500 units of wood I'm not probably gonna pay this same amount of attention right I might not even think about spending 10 units of wood so there's you know many reasons for that drive inventory hoarding but this aspect of loss aversion is is one of now many free-to-play games use loss aversion as a player hook the most common examples the use of lives or moves or time in order to continue playing and preventing the loss of progress and daily combo bonuses also use loss aversion to motivate players to log in every day now interestingly enough even though the person hasn't actually logged in for the fifth day to get that really awesome reward because they're being promised that by missing out it's the same thing as if they had had that thing and now are losing it right because they're thinking about how cool it would be to have it it's sort of in their mental space that they already have it and then missing out means that

they've somehow lost it so failed expectation of future gains is the same thing as losing them it's the same effect another aspect of loss aversion is that many losses are more painful than a single big loss even if the big loss is more in absolute terms than the sum of all the small losses and all of these explanations of loss aversion can maybe explain why the game Monopoly can have such a painful losing experience for players it sort of uses all these different types of loss aversion really well kind of compounding it to being this like really unpleasant experience right you're constantly losing little bits every turn as you start the game you have you know a certain amount of resources but those resources start to dwindle over time as you slowly become more and more broke making each little loss more and more amplified and then just thinking about how painful it is to flip over cars right there's like all these little actions you do to sort of add insult to injury when you're when you're losing money in this game so loss

aversion also affects all different types of economics we tend to hold on to a stock for too long if we feel like it's losing value instead of relying on the fundamentals behind the company in terms of like their profit or loss margin or how healthy that company is instead we try to hold on to a stock hoping that it'll rebound to prevent that loss and what will usually happen is will will hold on to it for longer and longer to lose more and more value and will we'll sell it at a even greater loss there's a reverse effect this we might be too scared to buy stocks at all because we will think that they'll lose value so we'll take that money and maybe shove it under our mattress but the problem with that is like that money in ten years isn't gonna buy same amount just due to inflation but because we don't think about that in those terms right it's not like we're actually losing money coming out of our mattress we won't like think about inflation right and and its effects on it and therefore we might be too conservative and in our strategies for

investing in the long term we also tend to over value assets we have so if we putting like a house on the market or we're trying to sell something that we have we're framing that thing or that transaction in terms of losing that house or losing that thing that we're putting on the market instead of like the money we're gonna get for that thing and so there's usually a mismatch between the price somebody is willing to buy Ford versus our you know desire or our tendency to to be scared of losing that that object and actually we're not alone in this so monkeys have the same loss aversion that humans do researchers were able to teach monkeys a currency system and the monkeys could use their coin to buy from various different researchers and one of the options they could do is buy from a researcher that would offer one fruit and then give another fruit for a total of two fruits for one monkey coin or buy from a researcher who would offer three fruits

and then take one foot away for a total of two fruits for one monkey coin right logically again it's the same thing you're getting two fruits for one coin but monkeys really did not like seeing that fruit being taken away so they avoided buying from that researcher all right so what does this mean with a society with like growing income inequality right we talked about how loss aversion affects game systems and how loss aversion can affect economics but what about in society well so I think maybe some of the different aspects of loss aversion might sound familiar particularly the expectation of future gains not being met so right if you're thinking that you're going to do better than your parents maybe or if you have like a certain set standard of living that might be your mind and somehow you're not making it or maybe your children aren't making it that can trigger that kind of loss aversion and this can show up in well-being and health standards so this is a study where researchers looked at thousands of households in the in the UK and Germany and they tried to analyze or

control for all different types of variables but what they found was that the same loss aversion curve shows up in terms of income so when somebody loses a certain amount of income the impact for well-being is negative by twice the amount as that same gain in income and well-being here is characterized by different mental and physical health outcomes so this is pretty big because a lot of times economists will explain like oh you know when there's a you know hollowing out of the middle you yeah yes you have people falling behind but you also have people going up and that's really good right but the problem with that thinking is that you have like a two to one ratio right if somebody goes up that's great but it's not compensating for the damage done by somebody falling out into the bottom another interesting aspect of this study was showing how incomes or jobs that have very fluctuating amounts of revenue

or income to an individual has the same sort of damaging effect than someone who has a more stable steady stream of income even if maybe that you know person in that variable like freelance job makes more in absolute terms it can stay could still like have a more negative impact just because we're always making comparisons and if we like have a lot of variable of income the differences between the the really good times and maybe the okay times is going to have that negative effect all right so some loss aversion takeaways a loss is twice as painful as the joy of gaining the same thing bosses need to be proportional in order to have an effect many small losses are more painful than one big loss and and unrealized future gain is the same thing as losing that game alright so hindsight bias this bias makes us want to point to reasons for

something that just happened right things that just happened they seem to be really predictable or inevitable and we'll claim that we knew all along that they would happen one of the reasons for hindsight bias is the world is filled with so much messy data that it's really hard to understand why complex things happen so our fast brains try to make that easier for us by pointing to a few different things that could lead to an outcome so that we can learn from it and then use it in the future the problem is we tend to oversimplify the reasons we usually don't account for luck or randomness and sometimes we get those reasons wrong way if we have strong assumptions or intuitions before that thing happens and then we point to those assumptions or intuitions that could lead us astray so hindsight bias is stronger when the event is negative or unfavorable here's a sight from trader HQ where they're like oh the five indicator is that we're told the 2008 crash right this is a really complex sort of Black Swan event that you know is very complex and

involved like you know global markets and deflationary housing prices and all this stuff but you can see that it's really easy after the fact of sort of point to a few things and be like oh see we could have totally known it would happen by just looking at these things we can see hindsight bias play out when someone or something is successful sort of attributing steps or actions take it and again town playing randomness or luck I think we've all seen talks or articles about like the five things you need to know to be successful on X platform the problem again with this tendency is that it reinforces priming of choices and as I mentioned earlier that can you know perpetuate the increasing amount of inequality we're willing to put up with right it's sort of over blows actions taken now in particular the US has a sort of culture stressing Mitaka see right there's this sort of image of like the self-made man or the rags to riches kind of mythos that goes with being in the US and this can make policies around minimizing inequality harder because there's an

assumption that if anyone can become Elfi they can you know anyone could become wealthy if they just apply themselves right now this isn't to say that like the choices we make aren't important or that successful people didn't work really really hard to earn their success but it can make us forget things like luck and inheritance it also compounds and ignores systemic discrimination against minorities and women that go hand in hand with income inequality particularly in the u.s. so this is a screenshot from Pew Charitable Trusts where they looked at intergenerational mobility so how likely a child born in one quintile will move to the other as an adult and as we can see there is mobility right there and there's a color for every column on this chart but there's also stickiness right 43 percent of people born in the bottom are gonna stay there as adults and 40 percent of people born in the top are gonna stay there so that that doesn't look like a you know system of pure Mitaka see and you know this focus on choices and strategy and actions kind of downplays this this reality so another

interesting aspect of hindsight bias is how strongly effect can have on seemingly unchangeable views and value systems so this study is a study that looks at choice blindness choice blindness is when making a choice we might be not be a hundred percent sure of our decision when we make it but after we make it we sort of look retro actively with this understanding of assurance like we always knew all along that we wanted to make that choice and that's the choice we made so in this study participants would rate charged policy questions questions like how four are against you for the government looking over your emails to prevent terror attacks questions like that so they would rate those questions and then afterward the researchers would collect the results they actually swapped out the questions so they taped over a new set of questions that would change some of the policy questions and kind of flip them in reverse and then they would hand

them back to the participants and they asked the participants to explain their choices and almost seventy percent of the participants failed to notice all the changes ending up arguing against their original position on at least one occasion so this strong tendency to assume choices made we're done for a reason might be what's so powerful behind the use of games to make effective tutorial systems right by collapsing the choice space provided to players to ensure that they either get it right away or fail fast and then succeed players can feel like the decisions they made were because they wanted to and knew all along with the outcomes would be this makes learning more impactful and players more likely to retain the information than if they were just told or shown what to do and this is an example of plants vs. zombies tutorial system where the choice spaces greatly reduced so people can understand peashooters hindsight bias though can be really challenging for designers it can

lead players to group think if one strategy was successful and another not so players might question the person who like had the faulty strategy because they should have known all along that they you know it wouldn't work it could lead to players repeating the same tested strategy so if something works but maybe it's not optimal it's really hard to get users to challenge that they'll just keep making that same strategy over and over again now there's no solution to completely eliminate hindsight bias and its totality but there are ways to reduce it so some of those are too can you like consider alternate explanations or opening one's mind to different perspectives so I think games that use kill or death camps do this to prevent the players from feeling discouraged in games with lots of instant kills you know being shown how much luck or randomness was involved in a player's death can prevent this idea of like oh I keep dying all the time I'm just not very good at this game right instead they can see how much luck was involved and instead be like oh I want to play again because maybe next time I'll be lucky and I'll survive

longer so hindsight bias takeaways hindsight bias can increase confidence but decrease rational thinking it can be stronger when there are negative impacts or perceived limited set of explanations and having people think about other possible outcomes or effects can minimize the bias okay so last place aversion this bias I actually didn't know about until I started researching for this talk but I think many of us have probably experienced this particularly when we're going to check out at the grocery store and we're confronted with a series of long lines maybe we're at the end of one line and then we realize maybe there's you know this line is moving faster so we move to this line and then maybe we move to another line because that seems to be moving faster and then we realized if we just stayed put we'd probably be further along so there is research to back this up and when people know that they're at the end of a line they're twice as likely to swap cues and four times as likely to

exit that cue altogether than if they know that just somebody else is behind them in kiel all right so as soon as somebody steps in line behind you that kind of that fear is minimized in terms of needing to swap cues last place aversion shows up in various economic situations so here's a chart from a study showing how likely people are for supporting an increase in minimum wage policies broken down by income and the people who are the least likely to support minimum wage policies are actually those people making just above minimum wage right so the idea of like if it's increased then all of a sudden now I'm kind of in the same group making minimum wage that doesn't feel as nice to me even though maybe it could benefit people on the lower end of the earning spectrum so in games you know there's not too many game systems that consistently trigger last-place aversion at least that I studied but I mean I think that it shows up in various situations especially for things like

leaderboards and endgame ranking systems right you're always trying to make sure you're not coming in last place there are systems that kind of collapse the extremes of the leaderboards if there are a lot of people and I think the addition of AI players and competitive games can also kind of inflate the the rank between the human players right this can amplify the pressure to need to you know make sure you're not coming in last maybe more so than competitive games without those AI players and ranking leads us back to again thinking about unequal systems now most game systems they're unequal right weight this drives competition engagement challenge and suspense you know if game systems were equal like no one would win even co-op games are you know players playing against a system right there needs to be a challenge to overcome there needs to be some sort of unequal 'no sin order to engage players and when there's not

they're just there's not a lot of motivation or it just doesn't feel as challenging or interesting so this is the landlord's game this was one of the original versions of Monopoly and Lizzie McGee when she made this she wanted to compare a very like you know hard capitalist system against a more egalitarian system so she had to rule sets and the second rule set was like showing the merits of a more equal world but it lacks the appeal of the competitive first system right there like nobody really enjoyed playing the game where you go around the board and you redistribute wealth to everyone else so people took that first rule system and kind of iterated on it and sort of made it into the sort of unbalanced game system that we know today as monopoly now an unbalanced game system has the same sort of problems right and no longer provides a challenge to the winner and losers might feel like they have no control prompting frustration and a sense of helplessness so you know

most games we try to limit this by rubber-banding now sometimes rubber-banding is social this usually happens when rank is obvious and there's a clear ending like in sorry or munchkin almost always someone at some point will gang up on the winner when they have the agency to target other players like knocking players home and sorry or attacking players in munchkin sometimes the game systems can reward the players who fall behind probably the most common example is Mario Kart right if someone's falling behind they get better boosts that they can then set up against people in the lead but the problem with this is that the game system can feel like it's kind of putting its thumb on the scales and the can make the system feel unfair to players and if it done too much it can also make the you know unexpected last-minute wins that just feel unrealistic right and this ends up dulling you know winners sense of accomplishment when they win or raises suspicions when they lose so games that

end up turning where we're banning into an explicit and clear game mechanic often become more palatable to players just because it's really obvious and clear that it's there and who can use it and when it can be triggered and this is especially true in systems with AI players right because people are always sort of assuming AI players are cheating anyway so again being as clear as possible with these kind of mechanics is important so a great example is the robber in Catan and another great thing about this is that it also forces players to use it right if you roll a seven you have to use it and this can remove some of the social pressure that players might have whether or not to punish somebody else so you know this is all good but what about an economy when Michael Norton and Dan Ariely surveyed people in the US they asked people what they thought their ideal distribution of wealth would be what would create a system that would again motivate people to work really hard and innovate stuff

but also wouldn't be so unbalanced as to create some negative feedback loops and surprisingly across ideology wealth education and other factors more or less this is the amount of distribution people wanted again surprisingly to me I had assumed that people who are more conservative would want a lot of income inequality people who are more liberal and maybe want more equality but actually it's around the same amount they then asked what they you know those people what they thought the actual distribution was and again across differences people reported similar answers this is what they think the distribution is and this was the actual distribution of wealth in the u.s. again from 2010 so about eight years ago so what does this mean for an economy right again like when things are unbalanced they have negative impacts part of what could drive when you have such inequality is that

you have a lot of companies with a lot of capital and this can drive things like mergers and acquisitions so instead of coming up with really cool products and innovative systems if a company has a lot of money you just sort of buy out other smaller companies right and this kin like suppress research and development spending and can suppress different types of innovation also when there's a lot of unbalance between labor and capital you can actually have people disengage from the labor force right if they think that if they're going to be working a lot and they're just not going to be able to earn like a living wage that might you know not drive them to like earn an extra degree or try to go into different types of work because they might not think it's it's worth the effort now again this is a u.s. distribution but inequality is growing for other countries as well so just another thing to think about and you

know like leaderboard ranking in games as an economy grows more unequal status is emphasized so here's a study where researchers wanted to know what the difference is in search terms through Google for people who live in a more equal state like Colorado compared to a highly unequal state like Louisiana or New York and they found that about 70% of those differences had to do with positional items things like searching for luxury brand sneakers jewelry handbags those kind of things and another study from MIT wanted to see if they could find out the impact on u.s. savings rate going to things called trickle-down consumption as the economy becomes more unequal there's more pressure to spend on goods to sort of keep up with the Joneses right and they found that about between 2 to 3% of the savings rate was lost to this increased consumption now for those who might not know Americans are not very good savers we save around 5% so 2 to 3 percent is is quite significant so you know a lot

of personal finance people are always like why do people spend so much money on these you know positional items or it doesn't make any sense you should you know save that money and that'll help you build up an emergency fund or try to get you out of financial trouble but I think people who have that assumption they're not in the mindset of having to defend you know perceived stereotypes against them right particularly in the US wealth can still signal positive attributes right we have this sort of subconscious culture that if we see somebody that's successful we assume that that person's worked hard or as smarter is innovative right and if you don't display that wealth you might think people might not you know think that you work that harder or that you're that smart so there's pressure to offset that with positional items and you know this is another way that inequality can perpetuate them so inequality promotes the need to show outward signs of status leading to increased consumption and decrease savings so this is a study

Michael Norton and Katherine gist cells conducted where they try to look at five years of flight data to see if they could find ways to predict the chances of a flight having to land because of air rage now air age is when there's a dispute on the flight so severe enough that they actually have to land like not at their destination but wherever the nearest airport is so these events are very rare but they found that planes design where people have to pass through first class where twice as likely to experience air age than planes where first class is either above the cabin or where people enter within the middle you know I there's you know some some problems with this study mostly because you know again sample sizes and and other things but I bring this up because designers they weren't and they weren't trying to cause any disturbance within their their passengers right it's sort of set up this way as an upsell and I

wonder if something you know we might be creating the same unintended consequences when we advertise something really cool that can be bought in our game now there is a best practice of trying to induce introduce players slowly to different types of in-game purchases but there are lots of games that have like weekly specials where like the first thing you see is this really cool thing or open stores where a new player could go to and like an in-game purchase for a lot of money and I wonder if this might be causing a similar attention in our player group because they can maybe think oh I can just you know buy a lot of money or maybe this game is kind of rigged toward you know people who have money to get these really cool things so Paul picked he's a researcher at Berkeley and he wanted to find out how people react to other people around them when they experience fluctuating status changes so one in this study he had people come into a lab where they played

a rigged game of Monopoly so a coin toss would determine who was the rich player and who was the poor player the rich player got twice the starting money the poor player only got to roll one die and was only able to pass go with $100 instead of 200 so was clearly rigged however within 15 to 20 minutes of playing the game the behavior of the two people started to diverge the poor person was more hunched over and quieter the rich person took up more space they started to pound their piece on the board with more force as the game progressed and most interestingly at the end of the game players were given a questionnaire and one of the questions was what they thought led to their winner loss and rich players were much more likely to mention a series of choices or purchases they made early on as the reason for their success very few would mention the coin flip which is of course the real reason why they won charity is another thing that changes as a person's status changes so while the

wealthy give more in absolute terms if you look at contribution rates compared to income they give less with the bottom quintile giving about 10% of their total income versus the top quintile giving between 2 and 4 percent now some of this is explained by large numbers right if you're writing $500,000 checks that just feels like a huge amount of money but if you're making several million it doesn't actually end up being a lot if you're making less than 20,000 a year 20 bucks here and a hundred bucks there can add up really quickly to a bigger percentage of your income but the people at the chronicle of philanthropy which puts out studies about charity trends they point to a different factor they think that as someone becomes more wealthy they tend to look at their safety net in terms of assets so if you have a savings account and then you get into a bind you can draw down on that savings right to to kind of tide you over but if you don't have a savings account you're much more likely to invest in the connections with the people around you right if you give 20 bucks to your neighbor and then you have

car trouble maybe your neighbor will give you a ride to work so this tendency to focus on social connections versus assets can create an empathy gap among wealthier individuals this can also be amplified again by other cultural tendencies particularly in the u.s. to think that wealthier people are smarter or more skilled than others of less means right so wealthier individuals can be primed not to pay attention to the others you know other people around them or and at least not think about their input quite as much so in another study that Paul piff conducted he wanted to see if a car status could predict whether or not it would notice and stop for a pedestrian trying to cross the road and he was able to see a correlation again with the car status a higher status cars is least likely to stop for a pedestrian so higher status people are less dependent on others this leads to cooperation and observation of the people around them and this could be important for game designers as well right if one of your

players is is acquiring a lot of power a lot of resources and you're you know they're they're relying on a team you can have this sort of Miss bet and this mismatch of behavior however you know just like other kinds of priming this empathy gap is made again because of information around people right what's in their immediate space if they're focused on not as much on social connections then they're just sort of in this mindset and Paul pift actually found that you know just priming people are being reminded of the benefits of cooperation community and compassion we're enough to remove this empathy gap right just sort of reminding people how important their team members are or enough to be like oh yeah my team members are important I should pay attention to them Effects of status takeaways the more unequal system is the stronger the desire to show and compete for status as people climb up in status they rely less

on social group for help and closing the empathy gap caused by debt status can be done with a reminder of the importance of community and teamwork alright so what about income inequality in your games well now there's a lot of pressure to find different revenue streams right in our games and one way is to add in-game purchases now lots of casual games were early experimenting grounds with various and game purchase ideas one of the most common standards to come out where this there was this two currency system right hard currency which you pay for actual money and soft currency earned while playing the game this allows the games to offer really cool items for sale to get additional revenue but also gives the chance for people who might not have that money the shot at buying or accessing those those same really cool items but to make sure that the hard currency is more valuable players usually need to sync a lot of time into the game in order to earn those items I think one of the problems

that's starting to emerge is in-game purchases move to any many other types of games and genres is that this focus on earning currency can change how players perceive the game Chris hacker had a really great 2010 GDC talk called achievements considered harmful where he talked about how extrinsic motivations can undermine people's natural desire to want to explore and experience challenges by shifting the focus of you know a game system and playing that game system because it's fun or because it's challenging to having the player think about how many things they need to do to earn exit number of currencies so they can get this really cool item that they saw on the store can switch how they frame that game from fun to work now this is probably really hard to discover because player's engagement is probably just the same or maybe even more so if they're thinking about having to earn stuff in order to get cool things they want and removing this currency system my end induce that feeling of unfairness that's

sort of air rage or that rage that you know can present itself when you're trying to upsell and people don't have access so if those items can only be purchased right that could be problematic so it's a really hard challenge but I do think it's something we're thinking about as we're implementing these currency systems in many different games adding multiple currencies can easily obscure the value of items right making it hard to calculate how something is worth so if a player thinks that an item is worth X amount and then they use it and they feel like there's a mismatch they could regret that purchase right they might regret that and even more important is not changing the value of things already in existence again going back to all the different types of loss aversion if a player spends time or money or effort buying or customizing something they put a lot of value into it they have a strong value association with it and any kind of change that happens that

can you know diminish that sense of value can can upset players right so it's really important to think about if there's is a challenge that needs to be made because you know we as game designers are always constantly using getting player feedback in order to adjust our systems trying to give as much time as possible for people to process that that change is really important and then taking even a further step back thinking about you know what does this mean for all of us as designers you know we're working on balancing unequal systems and understanding how people's behavior in those systems can change as they grow more powerful or as they obtain more or less status in a system is really important so that we can craft those systems we want our players to feel and to have but we're also in an interesting point in time for most of us in the US and maybe other developed countries I think inequality is starting to shape

some of the changes in our civic and social life and trying to understand these current events in light of some of this research this is yes me trying to be affected by hindsight bias right I'm trying to understand this complex thing but I think it might drive us to ask like are the things we're developing are they you know reflecting this shift that's happening will historians years from now kind of analyze the game systems that you guys are making and maybe point to some of these changes for example Eric Zimmerman and Naomi Clark gave a 2011 GDC talk where they identified a new genre called fantasy of labor games these are games based on grinding where the main mechanic is time and unlike skill games fantasy of labor games have little learned skill right the appeal of these games is that any player can just jump in and move up the ranks if they invest enough time into these games right a classic example is probably farmville you know you plant a seed and then come back 15 minutes later and you get money for your pumpkins but

historians might point to the fact that these games rose to prominence when productivity was decoupled from earnings meaning as you know people made more and more things their wages sort of stayed the same they kind of flatlined and these games might have been so popular because they provided this sort of escapist world reinforcing this myth of like the harder you work the more you earn a world looking less likely than the ones players were actually living in another important aspect I think we all need to pay attention to as the datasets we're using in building many of these datasets are preserving systems of inequality not because they were designed to necessarily but because they rely on data that reflects biases we humans have built in over the years an example is using credit scores in the u.s. to determine who can get hired who can start a business who could buy a home right and these these systems are perpetuating racial and gender discrimination and even something as

seemingly innocent as facial recognition software can have these biases built-in as shown by their research done by joy joy bull Imani so and even further step back you know usually my talks and with like ok now that we've learned about history you know how can we be more aware about making sure we're crafting areas that we want our players to have but I'm sort of kind of flipping it back now on you guys because you know there's you guys are very very smart and and we're all trained to sort of look at balancing a game system and now balancing an economy is completely different but I do think that maybe you guys have some fresh ideas and proposals and maybe thinking about how to share that data with people who can actually influence things that will make the you know growing unequal miss and unbalanced miss that we see in our economies maybe less so so can game designers save the world

so thank you that was a lot to unpack I just want to spend a couple of times moments thanking people so Soren Johnson was my mentor Jeff Engel Stan who has luda City podcast which is amazing and project horseshoe if you guys worked and contributed on that awesome you guys are amazing if you don't know what a project horseshoe is it's basically a game jam where designers write up what white papers around different design problems and they have amazing resources so you should check it out thanks everyone I don't know how much time we have for questions oh here's some additional meetings if you are interested in income inequality there's a I did a lot of research and a lot of reading and so here's some books all right thanks guys [Applause]

Wow five minutes Jesus all right I'm gonna talk to best can I ask a question yeah okay cool so I guess it's not a question of maybe if you had an observation on it so a lot of I've been really researching a lot of collectible games especially collectible card games and some of the collectible card games in terms of play mechanics players tend to dumb down or play for other players in order for them to like you know even the playing field so were there any studies or sort of moments in those studies where they saw like their their research like turn and be like this is unfair or this is bad because there are a lot of games in this fear that I'm researching that dirty just let that behavior happen and it is dependent by play group and it really like affects the whole format as a whole so I just wanted to yeah I was looking at so when

I was trying to find games that have or caused a lot like last place of version I was like drawn to left4dead urn I'm sorry the dead of winter board game because like that game is just so interesting because it's like that you know you have people who whose job it is to take that game but also because of how it's structured so like you have the goal and then you have your own goal if your own goal isn't met then there's some drive to take the game without that being like your goal but and so that's sort of I mean it's not last-place aversion but it's kind of like this idea that like if I can't have it all but no one can kind of thing that maybe the designers were thinking about but was interesting but in my studies in particular most of it was just again on like social relationships in terms of Finance so I didn't really see

too much of that yeah I don't know but definitely it's interesting to think about because you definitely see that a lot in games ah so my question is to what extent have you seen in studies or research in this did different lace styles that arise from socio-economic strata because it was like particularly in terms of the the status stuff you talked about I wondered whether you see that carryover into actual gameplay styles from players I think that there are definitely examples where that like the relationship of like people with a lot of status or a lot of power are not necessarily as cooperative with other people of lesser means and you know I think different I mean I don't know I I

don't really have I guess that much knowledge so I can just pull out of my head about about gameplay examples but I'm sure it shows up in in those kind of situations have you ever encountered any developers gaming loss last place of version by for example like say when you're in queue to get into a server instead of showing how many spots away you are getting in showing how many people are behind you and all the people who are worse off than you any sort of attention I haven't in games but the research for the last play subversion looked at queues for telecommunications so when you're in line for someone if if somehow you instead they can focus on like how many people are you are out of how many

people then that makes people like stay in line or on the phone longer if they know that they're like other people in the queue behind them that was what the the study is we're looking at I don't really know again how in depth like that would work for games but maybe it's something worth considering I am so given the like that the Delta of utility in a game where one person wins and everybody else loses obviously like the net happiness I don't know the words for that is is like seriously negative do you have any thoughts on designing games where even though maybe they're still like a winner because yeah it's fun to win people don't necessarily feel that sense of negativity in the same way or I mean I think that when it's balanced so that people feel like they almost won or they could have won or

they were close to winning definitely helps and then you have like I mean it's the same with co-op like if you're being the system in pandemic and you get only so far and then the game destroys you that just doesn't feel very good but if you get pretty far and you feel like you could have maybe one that or you if you only did a few things you could have passed it or maybe beat it then you have that sense of like happiness or at least engagement in terms of the like next time I go in it I can totally beat this kind of sense yeah missus tend to feel better yeah and I think that's part of the thing when I was trying to talk about the balancing right you don't want it it's so unequal where like one person just blows everybody else out of the water because then it's like well you know is it's also for entertainment too if you're watching a soccer match and it's like ten to zero it's no longer fun to watch the soccer match there's nothing engaging about it alright well thank you guys [Applause]