| Title | : | Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 026204353X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780262043533 |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 152 |
| Publication | : | Published February 18, 2020 |
Getting something makes you feel good, and losing something makes you feel bad. But losing something makes you feel worse than getting the same thing makes you feel good. So finding $10 is a thrill; losing $10 is a tragedy. On an "intensity of feeling" scale, loss is more intense than gain. This is the core psychological concept of loss aversion, and in this book game creator Geoffrey Engelstein explains, with examples from both tabletop and video games, how it can be a tool in game design.
Loss aversion is a profound aspect of human psychology, and directly relevant to game design; it is a tool the game designer can use to elicit particular emotions in players. Engelstein connects the psychology of loss aversion to a range of phenomena related to games, exploring, for example, the endowment effect--why, when an object is ours, it gains value over an equivalent object that is not ours--as seen in the Weighted Companion Cube in the game Portal; the framing of gains and losses to manipulate player emotions; Deal or No Deal's use of the utility theory; and regret and competence as motivations, seen in the context of legacy games. Finally, Engelstein examines the approach to Loss Aversion in three games by Uwe Rosenberg, charting the designer's increasing mastery.
Achievement Relocked: Loss Aversion and Game Design Reviews
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I read this for my consulting job at Latitude, as I'm having to make a lot of game design choices and I want more theory to guide me. This is a surprisingly in-depth examination of one principle of game design-- that most people really dislike losing something they already had, even if functionally it is the same as not getting the thing in the first place or there is a higher expected value on a gamble they could trade it for. He teases out a lot of consequences of this and shows how it plays out in a lot of games.
It made me do some introspection about why I dislike competitive games so much. I wonder if my strong irrational aversion to losing games has held me back from taking some risks in my life that I would actually have had a pretty good chance of coming out ahead on. -
Loss aversion is one of the closest things that psychology has to a law. The idea is that people feel more pain from a loss than they do pleasure from a comparable gain. And they tend to do all kinds of irrational things to avoid losses.
It's a great little book if you're a game designer and want to be aware of how this feature of human nature can be leveraged to make better games. Or worse ones, if you're into that. Each chapter covers a sub-topic of the larger concept: loss aversion, endowment effect, framing, utility theory, endowed progress, and regret. For each of these, Englestein shares some supporting research and then provides several illustrations of how the topic shows up in the design of board and/or video games. It's fun to see it laid bare and made so plainly understood what's going on when we play these games. -
Great quick read about human psychology through examples of video games and board games. The examples are fun to read. It feels even better if you are familiar with the games. I would love to read more about other aspects of psychology through more game design.
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engaging writing and clear/explicit explanations of how to use behavioral psychology to get your players to fuck around and find out. found it more informative of some slightly more novel concepts re: design choices, or at least the reasoning behind those concepts was novel to me. loved how the monetary game examples were so simple, that helped them stick
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Very intresting and well laid out. Reads like a Textbook but in a way that anyone can read and enjoy. I enjoyed connecting my own experiences with the games mentioned within to the concepts presented. Would recommend to anyone looking to design a game.
