Take any decent Psychology 101 course and you’ll realize that people are hardwired in ways that can be used against us. This has lots of social implications, and has been used profitably in many fields (my current favorite is behavioral finance – helps remind me that markets aren’t always rational.) I don’t know whether game and application designers have been paying more attention to psychology these days, or whether they’ve just been incrementally improving on what they see working for others, but I think they’re getting better at taking advantage of our all-too-human foibles. Some key, recent posts:
- Tom Coates, “On things that aren’t fun, and fun that is bad.” On World of Warcraft. “Perhaps adult gaming is nothing more than an opiate, designed to provide satisfactions and a sense of development or progress that the real world is unable to provide for most people, or that people are too nervous to fight for.” [...] “…while my relationship with the game is merely grudging at the moment, I can imagine coming to hate the game and yet still wanting to play it.”
- Machine Chicago’s “Massively Multiplayer Shiny Balls of Mud.” Associates a time-consuming, unfun, but status-enhancing activity of Japanese schoolchildren with multiplayer online games. “The phenomenon reminded me of World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game into which I’ve sunk many hours. None of them have been particularly fun.” [...] “It’s not about winning so much as it is about obtaining a massive, glowing, meat cleaver of a sword. A sword visible to everyone else playing the game.” (I can personally speak to the pleasures of tearing around Ironforge on my Dreadsteed while wearing my epic garb – I particularly like my spiky Felheart Shoulder Pads.)
- Danah Boyd’s “Number Games and Social Software.” “And then I was thinking about the people on Yahoo! Answers who spend hours every day answering questions to get high ranks. [...] There’s no real gain from getting points but still, it’s like a mouse in a cage determined to do well just cuz they can.” [...] “I started wondering about these number games… They’re all over social software – Neopets, friends on social network sites, blog visitors, etc. Who is motivated by what number games? Who is demotivated? Does it make a difference if the number game is about the group vs. the individual, about one’s self directly vs. about some abstract capability? Are there some number games that work better than others in attracting a broader audience?”
- Tara Hunt, “It’s all a farce, anyway.” In which Tara discovers that the bulk of the people who ‘digg’ an article on digg.com don’t actually bother to read the article, allowing the system to be easily gamed. Instead, “once you get past a certain number of diggs, people just hit digg if they are remotely interested in the topic.”
I’m not fully convinced yet, but I’m increasingly thinking that successful social software is nothing more than an online Skinner box. Positional, status-conveying goods (like a spot on digg’s leaderboard, or a bulked-up ‘friends’ list on MySpace) entice people to contribute their valuable content for free. The need to maintain this status keeps people actively participating long after the activity has stopped being fun. (I call bullshit on anyone who claims mindlessly checking ‘digg’ all day is fun.) Cognitive dissonance then leads people to defend their time-wasters rather than admit to themselves that they’ve been wasting time.
I don’t know what to think yet about the ethics of creating a service that plays upon our desire for social status to induce complusive value-generating behavior for the service itself. It’s one thing to stumble across such a service by accident; it’s another to design one deliberately. If you could build a service that psychologically compelled people to continue participating and creating value for your company, even as they begrudged the unhealthy amount of time they spent on it, would you? Is it permissable to use what we know about humanity to transform other’s leisure time into a second, unpaid job?
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