In most games featuring a collection and/or leaderboard system, a small group of hardcore players - also known in the industry as “whales” - forgo sleep for days and spend the majority of their income on in-game purchases just to get an edge on their competition. What motivates and drives these people? ADK Corporation’s planning director, Yukikatsu Hashimoto offered an expert explanation using behavioral economics.
Hashimoto began the presentation with a surprising factoid: on average, we make 6,200 more decisions (35,000) than we blink (28,800) on a given day. It seems only natural that our judgment is prone to error and often irrational, especially when considering we make most of our choices with a painfully limited amount of information.
Behavioral economists say that in social games, the ‘frame effect’ - decision making being heavily affected by the way the choices are presented - comes into prominence. Players are eager to accept risk when facing a small chance of gain but shy away from risk when facing a small chance of loss; it is our irrational nature and limited experience that lead us to flip-flop as such.
Another principle of behavioral economics easily observable in social gaming is the sunk cost fallacy. Not wanting to leave behind their already spent resources, players often fail to consider the opportunity cost of moving to a more enjoyable game and continue to log onto something they no longer appreciate as much.
There's also the endowment effect (people ascribing more value to things they own, and thus being more sensitive to losses than to gains) and herd behavior (people feeling compelled to stay together with a crowd). Both play into this phenomenon of players irrationally sticking to games for longer than they should.
These behavioral economic theories help us understand the massive success of Niantic’s Pokemon Go. The sunk cost fallacy causes players to keep walking for rare Pokemon as they have invested much time and effort already; the endowment effect makes them bestow more-than-reasonable values to the Pokemon already caught; and herd behavior works to pull new players in and lead existing players to stay.
Closing, Hashimoto emphasized that understanding human psychology is imperative for good game design, adding that developers should aim to ultimately better society through their games by growing together with and giving back to it.
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