The therapeutic potential of video games deserves more exploration. In addition to games specifically designed to help deal with mental illness, games can provide safe ways for us to experiment with and overcome challenges that are harder to tackle directly in real life (as I’ve touchedonbefore).
In this insightful and deeply personal video, ShayMay discusses The Binding of Isaac within the context of his own difficulties with anxiety and how it served as a safe way to practice - and even learn to enjoy - not being in full control.
As satisfying as it is to dunk on esports pros for essentially complaining that they can’t play on easy mode (especially given the short-sightedness and lack of empathy on display in their desire to freely stomp on less-skilled players - everyone has a better time when skills are more closely matched), there’s also some fascinating psychology beyond that here.
While the article doesn’t provide citations for this beyond quoting Halo 2’s multiplayer lead, it claims that “every major multiplayer shooter since Halo 2” has had skill-based matchmaking in both ranked and unranked playlists, with the different lists existing to lure the hyper-competitive or more-toxic players to ranked and leave supposedly-unranked play more enjoyable for other players.
This writeup discusses a study showing the unsurprising result that group dynamics make people care more about others, whether they are real or fictional - we want good things to happen to our allies and bad things to happen to our enemies. This is relevant to game design because caring more about a game’s characters is a recipe for improved engagement. But what I found particularly interesting about the study was that it implies that a good way to make players care even more about their allies is to have them suffer setbacks and losses together, and a good way to make players care even more about their enemies is to make their rivalries as evenly-matched as possible.
The effects of violent video games have been the subject of debate for decades, but most discussions miss a key factor: the context of the violence. This write-up summaries a 2013 study finding that playing as a villainous character makes players more likely to perceive violence in neutral faces (suggesting an aggressive mindset) and less likely to return a planted lost letter than playing as a heroic character, even when both characters behave violently - and that these differences were magnified when players were prepped with articles on the characters’ backstories that made them more sympathetic.
What we do in games may matter less than why we do it and who we are.
The broad appeal of The Sims has always been fascinating, but it’s always had a lurid undertone as well. This 2007 article by Kieron Gillen unpacks that, examining how The Sims functions as a particularly effective safe space to explore, experiment with, and work through interpersonal issues, especially in the fraught areas of romance and sexuality. (It’s also one of a small handful of classic articles that demonstrated to me that it is interesting and worthwhile to write about games and which inspired me to start Pixel Poppers.)
Holly Gramazio takes a detailed look at player creativity and expression - why it’s valuable, what gets in the way, and how to get around the barriers and encourage it.
A long time ago, I wrote about how games can present fake achievement which can be abused by players in unhealthy ways. Someday I’d like to revisit this topic and discuss how fake achievement can be used in healthy ways.
For example, here’s an article about experiments showing that “meaningless rituals” can improve feelings of self-discipline and thereby improve actual self-control. Sometimes, going through defined steps and completing goals - even empty ones that accomplish nothing - make us feel like we can do things and we can then bring that motivation to our actual real-life goals.
An in-depth and wide-ranging look at coziness in games - what its value is and how you encourage it. As a fan of cozy games, I found myself nodding vigorously at many parts of it.
Imagine you’re a kid at a new school deciding where to sit for lunch. Another kid sees you and offers you some candy, saying they have some extra they don’t want. You eagerly accept the candy and sit with the kid. The next day, you run into the same kid and they offer you candy again, explaining that their parents keep packing their lunch with this candy they don’t like. This keeps happening every day - when you sit with this kid at lunch, they give you candy.
Then one day you go to the candy store and see that same kid buying lots of the candy they supposedly don’t like. You realize they are deliberately getting this candy to give to other kids to try to make friends.
What might you say to this kid if you confronted them? Would you explain that their actions are not only clearly manipulative but also counterproductive in the long run - that they may have an easier time making new friends right now, but these people are likely to be put off when they realize what’s going on, even if they had actually enjoyed spending time together? Might you suggest that the kid should focus instead on being genuinely enjoyable to spend time with and seek out people with compatible personalities and shared interests who actually like spending time with them?
This is basically how I feel about games with log-in bonuses.
A quick look at what the research says about how to avoid overwhelming players with too many options and turning them off of mechanics or entire games. See also Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice and there’s room for more analysis on option categorization and its relationship to chunking or the way it turns one overwhelming decision into a short series of manageable ones.
It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s my summary: Deciding which games can be sold on Steam is a hard problem that Steam has struggled with for years. There’s a long list of controversial topics and kinds of content - and for each one, many people in Valve’s huge multinational audience feel strongly that it should be allowed on the store and many people feel strongly that it shouldn’t. Many of these topics are also controversial among Valve’s own employees. So rather than continue to struggle with the increasingly impossible goal of consistent curation, Valve is scaling back to block only games that are illegal or “straight up trolling” (later clarified somewhat to mean “designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict”). Valve’s efforts will instead go toward creating tools to allow people to control what content they see - customers will be able to block specific kinds of games from their own slice of Steam and creators will be able to avoid harassment if they release something controversial.
We’ll have to wait and see the filtering and anti-harassment tools to know whether this plan will succeed, but the reasoning and intent seem solid and likely to lead to a vast improvement over the current unpredictable mess. So I was shocked to see that the reaction from the game journalism community featured widespread rage and contempt.
When Grand Theft Auto III came out, it introduced a new interaction to the series: players could now solicit prostitutes and then kill them to get their money back.
“To engage with prostitutes in the game, all the player had to do was pull up to certain scantily clad women, who would enter the vehicle in exchange for a sum of money. . . . Disturbingly, players found they could reclaim their cash by simply killing the prostitute with their car after she’d exited.”
—Samantha Leichtamer, The 5 Most Shocking Grand Theft Auto Moments
This capability persisted in later games in the series and gave rise to a lot of discussion. Much of the commentary was careful to point out that murdering prostitutes isnotrequired at any point. But of course Grand Theft Auto games are exactly that: games. You don’t have to play them at all. And they’re known as games where a lot of the fun comes from messing around in the sandbox, going on murder sprees that are also thoroughly unrequired. So is there a meaningful distinction to be made here?
I think there is. Merely pointing out that you can do something in a game is incomplete. It treats it as a binary, with the action either allowed or disallowed. But game design is much more subtle than that. There’s a wide range of how allowed an action can be.
One of the more famous psychology lessons from World of Warcraft - framing is everything. Players hated the “rest” system when it was seen as a penalty for playing too long; they loved it when it was seen as a reward for spending time not playing.
It’s not news that many groups of people have poor representation in game avatars, but this autobiographical writeup brings an angle I hadn’t heard before - games not including the option to play as someone like you sends the message that nobody wants to be like you.
Clever application of real-world user psychology lessons to game design - and a reminder that what people complain about is not usually the true problem, and what they ask for is not usually the best solution.
I could feel it coming on yesterday, and it sent me early to bed, but today it is full-blown. I’m not gonna lie - I’ve always kind of liked being just a little bit sick. Sick enough to guiltlessly stay in bed playing video games all day (punctuated by naps and plenty of fluids) but not so sick that I can’t enjoy it.
I could play Prototype - the game I’m lately live-tweeting. But when I’m sick, I want a game that takes me to a happy place. Prototype may be a hell of a lot of fun, but it is sure not happy. Alex Mercer’s New York is a hellhole and his life is horrible. I may have a great time behind the controller, but he’s having a terrible one on the screen.
The whole point of escapism is that you escape to a better situation, not a worse one. Prototype is great for blowing off steam, but if I want to bury myself in another existence for a while, to forget about this one and the runny noses that come along with it, I play a game like Star Ocean.
A while back, I discussed my experiences with the dangers of fake achievement and its potential for abuse. I’d become addicted, and regularly played RPGs to feel good about myself - I allowed myself to glow in the praise directed at my characters for their world-saving heroics, when all I’d really done is hit the right buttons enough times. Once I figured this out, and realized it was preventing me from accomplishing anything real, I set about the lengthy task of recovery. Step one was a game accomplishment that required skill rather than patience - collecting all the emblems in Sonic Adventure DX.
The response to this essay was… mixed, to say the least.
There was one comment in particular that raised an interesting question, which I would like to address today.
When I was old enough to care whether I won or lost at games, but still too young to be any good at them, I decided RPGs were better than action games. After all, I could play Contra for hours and still be terrible at it - while if I played Dragon Warrior III for the same amount of time, my characters would gain levels and be much more capable of standing up to whatever threats they encountered. To progress in an action game, the player has to improve, which is by no means guaranteed - but to progress in an RPG, the characters have to improve, which is inevitable.
As I grew older, this conclusion lay dormant and unexamined in my mind. RPGs continued to be my favorite genre. I relished the opportunity to watch interesting, lovable characters develop and interact in epic storylines. (Comparatively interesting and lovable, anyway - say what you will about Cecil, but his quest for redemption revealed a lot more depth than Mega Man’s quest to shoot up some robots.) And I loved feeling like a hero. I saved the world in Final Fantasy IV, again in Lufia II, then again in Chrono Trigger.
Difficulty in games is a popular and thorny subject. Are games easier than they used to be? Does easier mean worse? Are games being “dumbed down”? And how do the dreaded “casual players” fit in?
The problem with these questions is that it is not productive to discuss difficulty as a single quantity. The term “difficulty” as it is commonly used encompasses two almost completely separate phenomena, with profoundly different effects on the player:
