The Game Industry and Psychology

Lately I have noticed a lot of recent articles, conferences, calls for papers, etc. about games and psychology. It has left me wondering - "Why the recent interest in the intersection of psychology & games?"

The way I see it game designers have always tried to take psychology into account. However, when doing so they seem to have thought things like - "How can we make this psychologically interesting, fun, enjoyable?" A few games have even taken this to the next level (making money), using psychological tools that marketers have long known about. I think Magic the Gathering & Warhammer fit this mold. What made Magic and Warhammer unique was that they took advantage of human psychology to make money (booster packs, army expansions, new rules sets every 3 months). Recently, (The last 5 years) business models for digital distribution have become tractable. Digital distribution really lets developers take advantage of human psychology. Imagine if your random loot drops in WoW were microtransactions? What if every transaction cost a penny or 30 seconds. How tempting would it be to just save yourself 5 minutes and spend 10 cents? Its So cheap and easy. Its classical conditioning at its best, your reward pathways keep firing when the payout is random. (This is because your reward pathways fire in order to help you predict when you will receive a reward, not when you get the reward.)

In Dragon Age it really pissed me off that they had in game NPCs offering to sell you digital content. There are a couple great penny arcade comics about it (SPOILER ALERT) here and here. It really does ruin the suspension of disbelief, but worse when I buy a 60 dollar game I want all the content! I don't want to be running around just having spent 60 dollars to find out I can get 10 more dollars worth of game play the day the game is released. WoW recently made some 25 million dollars selling Celestial Steeds - Celestial Steed probably cost them 1000 bucks to make? No wonder game publishers/designers are interested in psychology.

Anyway, now that I think about it there is one place that has lots of games and is very concerned about psychology.

Vegas.