Psychology Of Video Games Podcast

Welcome to part two of this two part miniseries on Psychology of Games summer reading. In this episode I talk with author and consultant Nir Eyal about how to use psychology and other methods to avoid being distracted by video games and other technology when you don't want to be. It's all in his new book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, available now.Nir discusses the psychology behind distraction and its opposite, which he calls "traction." Along with this, we talk about specific strategies for getting more traction and when it's okay to be distracted by video games, social media, and other technology.

Psychology of Games Summer Book Club begins with an interview with Dr. Pete Etchells, author of the newly released Lost in a Good Game.

My guest experts and I discuss how moral choices in video games are different from other media and what makes them so difficult. We also discuss some of our favorite and most compelling choices from games.

Empathy --the ability to understand and share the emotions of others-- is a powerful tool for those wanting to create games where the goal is to get players to think differently and have powerful emotional experiences. It can be used to great effect and probably plays a big part in more games than you realize. But leveraging empathy in games has its own risks and pitfalls. Designers who do so need to be aware of these so that they can successfully create the outcomes they want and so that players aren't abused or exposed to undue distress. Fortunately, my guest expert on this episode, Kelli Dunlap PsyD, is here to help us explore and understand this psychological concept.

Special ALL HAWAII EDITION! To give me a little breathing room after finishing up my book manuscript, here are two complete interviews I did while researching the recent loot box podcast episode. One is the full interview with Representative Chris Lee, and the other is with Ed White, who has provided testimony during hearings on the topic.

What is the relationship between loot boxes and problematic gambling? Should loot boxes be considered a form of gambling? In this episode I talk with Chris Lee, a politician, and David Zendle, a researcher, who are both very interested in the answers to those questions.

How do game developers make virtual items as collectible as physical objects?

I talk with Dr. Anthony Bean and several of his collaborators on a book about psychology and the Legend of Zelda.

I talk with Dr. Richard Landers, an expert researcher on gamification and game-based assessments. We discuss some of the psychology behind why gamification does (and does not) work, as well as why it's so difficult to do it well. We also talk about the use of actual games to assess people's skills and abilities. Is it possible to create, for example, a game that measures people' general mental ability? 

I talk in this episode with my guest expert, Megan Connell PsyD, who uses Dungeons & Dragons in group therapy with remarkable results and runs a weekly D&D game with psychology nerds on Twitch. We also discuss what lessons psychology has for helping other people at the table --possibly including yourself-- and how to find and get along with a new gaming group.

Say it's time to download a new game for your phone or tablet. What, out of the billions of choices out there, will you choose? Psychology pretty consistently tells us that when we have too many choices we look for strategies and heuristics for making those decisions easier. And what's more, much of this might happen with little to no conscious thought. Our brains have evolved to become really good at applying these kinds of decision-making rules and we tend to apply them automatically or let them be guided by gut instinct and emotion. In short, we develop an affinity for certain types of mobile games, and then we let that affinity drive our decision about what to play next.But how does this process work, and what are the different aspects of games that we develop affinity for? Can game designers measure these kinds of stated or internal preferences and use that information to market games to us or even decide what kinds of games to make? What are the potential costs and benefits of this kind of approach to t

Video games often get kind of a short shrift when it comes to how valuable they are considered, versus a being a waste of time. Yet an argument can be made that they teach and reinforce valuable skills that psychologists have found to be important for success in work and life in general. Games can teach you how to persist through obstacles, for example, or how to cooperate with people towards a common goal. They can drive learning and creative thinking.These are the kinds of topics I will discuss with this week's guest expert, Jonathan D. Harrison.SHOW NOTES:http://classicallytrained.net/Jon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CT_blogMastering the Game on Amazon  

Think about the last avatar you controlled in a video game. What did he, she, or it mean to you? Was it just a tool that you used to get from one end of a maze to another? Was it a richly detailed character that might have been pulled from any given movie, television show, or novel? Or was it something that you created, tweaked, and customized from whole cloth –well, digital whole cloth– to look just how you wanted and behave exactly as you thought appropriate?Among different kinds of media, video games are unique in how they allow us to interact with and develop something approaching real interpersonal relationships with characters. So it’s an interesting question for those in the realms of psychology and communications research to ask how exactly this works. What determines what kind of relationship you will have with your avatar? What characterizes those relationships? And what effects do they have on our enjoyment of the games or other outcomes?These are the kinds of questions that I will tackle with the

I'm at PAX West participating in panels and making new friends, but that doesn't mean you don't get a new podcast. Enjoy this audio presentation of a lecture I gave about 30 things I wish researchers would study (or study more) about the psychology of video games. And why it would be great if they did.

It may shock you to hear this, but not everyone is intimately familiar with video games. I know, right? Despite the fact that video games continue to become more mainstream and cut across all kinds of demographic groups, some aspects of games and gaming culture continue to be misunderstood or, worse yet, maligned. In this episode my guest and I are going to examine yet another group that may need some evidence-based information about video games: mental health therapists and similar professionals. That is, those working with kids, adults, and families who may not only be incorporating video games and play into their therapy, but who may be asked specifically about behaviors and habits related to video games.

Basic psychological phenomena like memory, perception, and emotions have huge implications for the design of products or experiences, from nutritional labels to phone apps to voting registration forms to video games. And people who study those kinds of user experiences need to be aware of some of the very basic ways that squishy human brains can be expected to operate as they set out to test and measure how people interact with their products and make sense of their media. If they don't take those things into account, they lose one of their most important guideposts to improving user experiences and helping the designers or directors of the world execute on their visions.These are the kinds of things I'll be talking about with this episode's guest expert, Dr. Celia Hodent. We will also talk about the challenges and pleasures of being a user experience consultant, and we'll even talk a little about the runaway success of Fortnite: Battle Royale.

In a way, classic adventure games were the precursors to the escape rooms that are popping up in strip malls and warehouses all over the country. But unlike adventure games, escape rooms take place in physical space with tangible objects. But just like with video games, people who design escape rooms and other kinds of live, narrative experiences can benefit from an understanding of human psychology. What kinds of boundaries do typical human perception and information processing place on how an escape room can be designed? How can the well worn mental shortcuts that people use to make decisions and understand the world be used to advance a narrative or provide clues for a puzzle? And then how can these concepts be looped back around to lessons that can be applied to video game design or even how to play a video game and interact with other players while trying to solve some challenge?

In this episode of the podcast, I talk to one veteran game designer Jason Vandenberghe, who has tackled the issue of understanding what kinds of experiences gamers want with the aid of psychology and psychological theories. He aims to avoid false consensus and advocate for what he calls "player empathy." That is, using a framework of personality and motivation psychology to break out of our false consensus and talk about what kinds of gaming experiences that players may want and how to give it to them. Jason Vandenberghe's blogGDC 2012 Talk GDC 2013 Talk GDC 2016 Talk  Audio Credits "Robot Motivation" by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3."Industrious Ferret" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Many universities and other institutions are offering degrees in video game design and other careers in the gaming industry like art, coding, and user experience design. Some of them are also incorporating courses on psychology because it helps make better games. I talk about this trend with this week's guest expert, Vanessa Hemovich.  

Modern video games are complicated and require a lot of learning, problem solving, memory, planning, and other things that psychologists might identify as executive functions of the brain. There's a lot going on between our ears whenever we play.And wouldn't it be great if some of those mental gymnastics helped us with dealing with more mundane but probably more important tasks outside of games. Stuff like school, work, and interacting with other people? Can you connect game-based learning and practice of these skills with "real life" skills? Might this be especially useful for certain people, like kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or who are on the autism spectrum? But even if so, can parents and other caregivers go too far and neglect other types of play that are also important?These are the types of questions that I'm going to talk about with this episode's guest expert, Dr. Randy Kulman of Learningworksforkids.com.