Results tagged “games”
Some interesting research on the value of near-misses in gambling:
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an improvement in performance and spur the player to try again. But gambling is a game of chance, which distorts gamblers' thought processes - near misses cause them gambler to overestimate both the level of skill involved and their chances of winning. This spurs them to continue gambling.
Interesting to think about the implications of this sort of stuff on the "gamification" movement currently going on. The article also highlights that manufacturers of gambling machines have been smart to this effect for awhile: "Using a technique called clustering, they create a high number of failures that are close to wins, so that what the player sees is a misrepresentation of the probabilities and randomness that the game involves."
[Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]
Tags: gambling, games, psychology, research
The Economist Free Exchange points to a very interesting point about the side effects of consuming organic/environmentally friendly products:
Consumer choices not only reflect price and quality preferences but also social and moral values as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products. Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, we find that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of them lead to markedly different behavioral consequences. In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products. Together, the studies show that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and ethical behaviors in directions and domains other than previously thought.
I love this. One of the things I thought about a lot at SXSW were the side effects of turning everything into a game. Every incentive disincentivizes another behavior.
Tags: consumerism, economics, games, green
Reading about the Honda Insight's game-like interface design reminded me quite a bit of this article about the user experience of the Prius:
You quickly learn that fast acceleration is bad: the engine always comes on, and your MPG drops like a stone. But coasting to a gentle stop is good, because you can see the car reclaim almost all that energy. It's especially fun to climb hills: to watch the numbers drop and the engine kick on (red arrows) as you start climbing, and then to see the engine shut off, the regenerative braking start (green arrows), and the MPG go to 99.9 (whoo-hoo!) as you zoom down the hill. As an early hybrid owner put it, feedback screens turn ordinary driving into "an eternal battle between Red and Green. Red is bad, because you're burning fuel. Green is good. I encourage green."
Though the Insight seems to be embracing this, I'm curious when one of these companies will take it a step further, adding an online application that allows you to track and learn from your habits.
Tags: cars, games, interface, ux
Those wacky economists are at it again. This time by reworking the rules of scrabble to allow for tile bidding:
At the beginning of the game tiles are turned over in sequence and the players bid on them in a fixed order. The high bidder gets the tile and subtracts his bid from his total score. (We started with a score of 100 and ruled out going negative, but this was never binding. An alternative is to start at zero and allow negative scores.) After all players have 7 tiles the game begins. In each round, each player takes a turn but does not draw any tiles at the end of his turn. At the end of the round, tiles are again turned over in sequence and bidding works just as at the beginning until all players have 7 tiles again, and the next round begins. Apart from this, the rules are essentially the standard scrabble rules.
The discoveries from the game are pretty interesting, especially around the scores of tiles. Blanks should actually make you lose points (they commanded 20 points on average in the bidding), 's' scores too high, 'u' and 'v' too low. Interesting.
Tags: economics, games, scrabble
(YAAFG = Yet Another Addictive Flash Game)
This one involves watching little bubbles floating around a screen and trying to pop them, creating a chain reaction. It's more fun/addictive than it sounds, I promise. I got to 55/60.
Here are the two previous YAAFGs.
Tags: flash, games
YAAFG: Yet Another Addictive Flash Game.
Update (2/12/08): Looks like the game is no more . . . sad. Anyone know what happened to it?
Update (2/12/08): Evan found a new link.
Tags: flash, games
Sorry for another addictive game, but I can't help myself. This one apparently comes from the guys at area/code. The basic idea is to clear as much of the board as possible by dropping a numbered disc into a row or column with that number of total discs in it. Sounds confusing, but it's really not (though there's certainly more nuance to it than that).
Update (12/20/07): Just got 286,511 points . . .
Tags: flash, games
The basic idea of the game is to locate a city as quickly as possible. A few lessons I've learned in about 10 minutes of playing: My China geography is seriously lacking, I have no idea where Uruguay is (now I do) and African geography is not my specialty. Be careful, it can be quite addictive.
Tags: games, geography
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