The Psychology of Knowing Something is Sus | Extra Credits Gaming

There's a famous psychological experiment called the Iowa gambling task. In it, researchers give participants four decks of cards and on each card is written a reward or a penalty in terms of dollars. Participants are then told that their goal is to win as much money as possible by flipping over one card at a time and they can flip a card from any of the decks each round. Now, the secret to this experiment is it's not actually about getting money at all. You see, the decks are not built evenly and the cards not distributed randomly. Two of the decks have higher rewards but even higher penalties, while the other two decks are much more mild and are actually a net positive if you keep pulling from them. The true goal of this experiment to figure out how long it takes the participants to discover this. And the results that they found were not only shocking, but also affected how game designers think about player psychology. And real quick, speaking of player psychology, you can check out how I think in the new road trip game show of social strategy and deception called The

Getaway that I'm in that is live right now over on Nebula. More on that after the episode. If you know, you know. But then again, sometimes you don't know. And if you know that you know you don't always know, then how do you know you know, you know? Wait, hold on. We are getting way ahead of ourselves. Before discussing the psychology behind all of this, let's talk about the results of the Iowa gambling task. Overall, it took about 70 cards out of the total 208 cards for participants to say with certainty that they knew what was going on. But it took them only 50 cards to have an inkling, you know, to feel like they knew that certain decks were better or worse, but not be able to say with absolute certainty. But then here is where the real shocker comes in. It actually only took them 10 cards to know. Okay, what do I mean by this? Well, participants were also hooked up to electrodes and other monitoring devices. And by the 10th card, their body would exhibit all the signs of nervousness and stress whenever they reached for one of the bad decks. What's more, analysis of participants' pull patterns show that healthy participants started to pull from the bad decks less

starting around the 10th pick, way before they knew or even thought they knew consciously. And this fact has caused game designers no end of pain. Because, you see, our brains are pattern-making machines. We are built through and through to be able to suss out patterns. The bad side of this is apophenia. It's the tendency to force patterns onto random events. This is where things like conspiracy theories come from and why people say things like, "I just rolled two ones in a row, so the next roll's got to be good." On the other hand, the positive side is often referred to as type one thinking, or more evocatively, thin slicing. The idea behind thin slicing is that our brain can take in a small set of data, process it incredibly randomly, and draw meaningful conclusions from it. So, like, if you've ever been in a situation that just sort of feels sus, but you couldn't say exactly why, that's what your brain is doing. If you ever make a move in a game from instinct, or perhaps draft a card in Magic on a hunch, only to realize four cards later that that's

the open lane, it's because you're thin slicing and your conscious mind has yet to catch up. Now, studies have shown that thin slicing is far more accurate than you'd expect. But the big downside to it is that because these are judgments that you haven't come to logically or rationally, you really don't have anything to fall back on when they're wrong. So, when they happen to be wrong, they can sometimes be disastrously wrong. Now, thin slicing affects game design twofold. First is the obvious way, the fact that we look for patterns in randomness. If you ever hear people complain about the shuffler in a card game, or about the to hit chance in something like XCOM, it's because we have a hard time not leaping to conclusions. All the time you can see players miss two 75% chance to hit shots in a row and then exclaim that something is broken and the random generator cheats, when actually you have about a 6% chance to miss both of those shots, which is better odds than rolling a crit on a D20. So, as designers, we actually have to cheat all the time in the player's favor to make a games feel fair, because that's how human brains

work. And while this is a huge hassle for designers, there's actually a much tougher problem here. And that is when players get thin slicing right. Because the truth is, very often, part of you knows how to do something in a game way before you can explain how to do it. You might just intuit how blocking or dodging works, or you might have a gut sense that one of the weapons is better than another without being able to say why. And man, oh man, is that a pain in the neck. Because as designers, we still have to teach you the why behind these things. We've got to get you to the point where you can be making decisions consciously, to the point where you're making informed choices throughout the game, even if those choices are occurring on the second-to-second level. But if you already sort of know the answer, being taught how to do something is no fun. I'm betting there are some of you out there that used to skip all of the steps in math class, still get the answers right, but then found the class itself a slog. This is the problem game designers face, and we're providing an activity that you're free to turn off. This problem is even tougher when it comes to veteran players, because they're coming in with a ton of knowledge from other games. A veteran

FPS player might start adjusting for bullet drop way before they even ask the question, "Does this game have bullet drop?" Or a fighting game player will begin to feel the block and counter timing almost from the first punch. Which means as designers, we have to try to adjust for this, especially on the more subtle aspects of the game. Because flat-out telling you will feel slow and heavy-handed, but then not telling you will often lead to confusion due to gaps in your intuitive understanding. This means that after we've taught you the basics, we have to do two things. First, allow you to opt into full explanation-type tutorials of the game's deeper mechanics. And second, create gameplay situations that hone your understanding of these mechanics and make you interface with it on a conscious level. For example, using the idea of bullet drop above, I might give you a sniping level to play and give you the player a scope with very distinct chevrons on it. By the time you are through that level, as the designer, I will know that you have an understanding that there is bullet drop, and between having to compensate for it time and time again, and having the chevrons on

the scope, you'll probably even have a good sense of how severe that bullet drop is. So, when designing games, we have to be aware that the players may just sort of know what your tutorial is going to teach them before it ever begins, which is just a really hard thing to square with teaching players who don't make that thin slicing leap. Seriously, this is one of the toughest challenges as a game designer to walk, and something that I just actually had a really interesting experience with IRL. So, a few months ago, I got this ominous text from Dave, the CEO of Nebula, that read, "Nebula is casting for a new game show. You in?" Now, I don't know about y'all, but when I get a text like that, I immediately say yes. Then, jump cut to now, and guess what I get to finally tell you all about today. The show is called The Getaway, and it's a road trip game show of social strategy and deception, where I got to take all of the game theory and psychology I've learned from show running Extra Credits and try to put it into actual practice, and you get to see how I fared through all of the craziness that only the minds

that brought you Jetlag: The Game could craft, starting today, exclusively on Nebula using this link right here. And I don't know if you can tell from the excitement in my voice, but I am just so pumped you all finally get to see it, because it's been top secret for such a long time. Of course, Nebula's also home to tons of other creator-owned prestigious originals, awesome stuff like the psychological sci-fi film Identities from Jessie Gender, starring Maggie May Fish, Abigail Thorn, and John de Lancie, aka Q from Star Trek. Sorry for my fanboying there. Plus, you get so many videos from your favorite creators early and ad-free, like TierZoo, Georgia Dow, Dan Toomey of Morning Brew, Foreign Man in a Foreign Land, and Steven Bridges, whose channel can help you beat the odds. All of whom I now know a whole lot better after we competed on The Getaway. Not to mention all of our main series Extra History videos are available a whole week earlier than they are on YouTube, meaning that also right now you can see the first episode of our new Invasion of Quebec series before anyone else does. Again, all ad-free like every video is on Nebula. Now, when you use our link in the description, you

can get everything Nebula has to offer for just $2.50 a month when you sign up for an annual plan, aka half the price of a latte because the world is out of whack. Or right now, Nebula is also offering gift cards and even lifetime memberships that will last for as long as you and Nebula both exist. No tricks, no gimmicks, just $300 one time and you get access to Nebula forever. Seriously, these lifetime subscriptions are a great way for us to remain independent while also raising capital for all the amazing creator-owned projects Nebula is green-lighting like The Getaway. So, please use our link nebula.tv/extracredits or you won't get the discount or be supporting our channel. And we would very much appreciate it if you did. You can get Nebula and watch me on The Getaway right here or stay on the YouTube machine and check out another of our videos here. That one will have ads, though. Wait, you're telling me you didn't know that Angela Valenciana, Arclight Games, Dominic Valenciana, Hunter Z, Izzy Coin, Joseph Flame, and Kuya Koi were the best legendary patrons? Well, now you do.