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基于心理学视角论述游戏排行榜设计

发布时间:2012-07-31 17:29:51 Tags:,,

在投币式街机电子游戏的全盛时期,没有什么比看到我们的名字出现在游戏高分榜单上更令人雀跃。看到名字掉出榜尾位置,自己被不过是积分多些的用户角色取代,是个郁闷过程。友善对手促使我们持续在《打气人》、《大金刚》及《顶尖车手》之类的作品中投币,这样我们就能够提供充分证据证明,我们的技能超越对手。证据就在屏幕上——至少直到街机服务员在夜晚结束时间拔掉机箱。

自那时起,游戏就获得显著发展,但将我们的表现同他人进行比较的想法依然保持不变。但目前,排行榜通常会取代高分表单,我们可以通过成就和战利品进行更细微的比较。此外,随着游戏变得越来越具社交性,这类比较的重要性日益突出。爱达荷大学心理学教授Kenneth Locke(游戏邦注:他主要研究人际关系)表示,“我们是社交动物,我们所有行为的意义都源自于我们同他人的关系。社会比较无处不在。测试或游戏中的分数鲜少具有客观意义。相反,他们的意义源自于,我们的分数同他人分数所存在的关联性。”

high score from edge-online.com

high score from edge-online.com

换而言之,不是所有比较都是平等的。我们鲜少在观看《街头霸王》高级竞赛的YouTube视频时因心生沮丧而咬牙切齿,因为我们的技能还没有那般突出。在MMOG游戏中,若我们发现某人获得强大设备是因为他们终日无所事事,纯粹专攻于此,我们很快就会摆脱无助感。那么为什么有些社会比较会促使我们做出更努力的尝试,或是比其他人在游戏中投入更多?

答案存在于众所周知的“社会比较理论”。这最初由社会心理学家Leon Festinger于1954年提出,他对于团体动态如何影响人类行为非常感兴趣。Festinger首先提出,想要获得自身技能的准确信息是人类的本性,但相比没有这些信息,我们更宁愿它们来源不完整。即便是获得硬数据,若没有语境这些通常也毫无意义。Festinger表示,在这些情况下,我们转向将自己同其他人进行比较。

此外,他还发现,我们对于选择比较对象存在系统性偏见(游戏邦注:这旨在维持我们的自我价值)。例如,我们倾向与在某些方面同我们存在类似之处的对象进行比较,倾向避免同能力比我们高很多或低很多的对象进行比较。

自50年代以来,这一模式就获得显著发展,研究人员填充其中空隙,发现若干影响我们如何看待自身能力的额外社会对比元素。他们还探究我们的认知如何有组织地被掌握我们相关信息的人士所操控。由于如今游戏融入各种排行榜、成就、积分和重新比赛模式,它们提供运用社会比较理论的绝佳背景,在后续内容中,我们将谈论3种供开发者操控比较信息,提高内容竞争性的方式。广泛来说,这些主要是通过向你呈现不同比较目标,改变比较群体的规模及目标。

首先,从很多方面来看,比较对象才是关键所在。排行榜效果最显著,它们显示相比好友而言,你所处的位置(游戏邦注:而不是同陌生人进行比较)。但若我们查看自己的排名,然后发现自己的名字备注有不熟悉的玩家代号,我们会着手寻找自己和这些玩家的共同点。就如我们前面谈到的,将自己同我们认为与自己存在类似之处的对象进行比较涉及明显的心理偏见。

Ethan Zell (left) & Kenneth Locke from edge-online.com

Ethan Zell (left) & Kenneth Locke from edge-online.com

格林斯波罗的北卡罗莱纳州大学助理教授Ethan Zell(他主要研究社会比较)表示,“关键变量自身与目标对象及任务重要性的感知相似性。我们更容易受到类似群体的激发,更容易在任务被认为在某种程度上与我们相关或具有重要性时受到激励。”

这支撑Locke在爱达荷大学的研究结果。在某研究中,他将问卷调查送至刚完成竞争激烈铁人三项运动的159位运动员手中,发现,受调查对象更倾向于着眼于在比赛过程中,自己和周围比赛选手存在哪些类似之处,因为他们无法充分了解其他竞争者的情况。

许多研究人员认为,我们之所以同熟悉对象进行比较是因为,我们通过他们判断自己是否能够获得某些技艺或成就。若他人完成复杂任务,我们对于自己完成此任务的信心也会同自身同此成功者在相关属性的相似性联系起来。和我们认识的对象(游戏邦注:即便这只是通过在线互动)建立联系显然要比陌生人容易许多。你打进砖石联赛,角逐《星际争霸II》的排名赛?我们似乎不相上下,所以我觉得自己也可以做到。你解决《幻想战记》中的所有谜题?通过学校的共处时间,我觉得自己至少和你一样聪明,所以如果我进行尝试的话,也能够做到。

游戏设计师有效促使你更满意于自身及自身表现的第二个举措是,让你觉得自己是小池塘里的大鱼。这是因为,在表现不佳群体中的靠前玩家倾向比那些在优秀群体的滞后玩家自我感觉更好,虽然以绝对值计算,后者也许比前者表现更突出。有时要让你觉得自己是此处最优秀的玩家只需让你进入到遍布愚蠢之人的空间中。

事实上,这一所谓的“大鱼小池塘效应”已在其他领域得到广泛研究,尤其是教育领域,这有效作用于全球40个国家的各级别学校中。其重要性非常突出,因为在更小团体背景中查看你的表现倾向推翻你同较大世界所进行的任何比较。例如,Zell同其在爱达荷大学的同事Mark Alicke和Dorian Bloom将10位大学生划分成2个5人小组,尝试让他们辨别谁在系列录像中说谎。研究人员随后向各学生提供他们在此任务表现情况的虚假反馈,称他们在10个人中位列第5或第6。但有些学生得到额外信息,他们是小组中表现最突出或最糟糕的成员。研究人员发现,虽然对象在此任务中比房间内的多数人员表现突出,但若他们在团队中排名最低,他们的自尊心也极大降低。

Zell解释表示,“当成员在团队排名靠前,他们倾向自我感觉良好——即便团队整体表现糟糕。”从根本来说,当人们进行自我评价时,他们倾向根据自己在小团队(游戏邦注:朋友、家庭成员和团队成员)中的表现,而忽略团队相比其他团队的表现情况。在排行榜和高分世界中,这意味着,提供我们在好友圈或小团体中排名情况的游戏比那些只是提供总体排名情况的游戏更能够吸引我们。你在1万1092名玩家中排名6458?这不像知道你在Steam的45位好友玩家中排名12那般有趣或富有激励性——或是知道自己排名44那般沮丧。

最高效的排行榜和排名是,能够让你进行过滤,只呈现你好友列表中的玩家。更理想的情况是,它们能够默认显示好友,允许你指定自己同他人的亲密程度,进而扩宽你的比较基础。将亲密个人好友或亲属竞争对手同泛泛之交区分开来能够激发你的竞争意识。

聪明开发者会采取进一步举措,让你能够自己分解信息,创建对你来说意义重大的比较组合。他们并非现呈现整体排名,而是展现你同本国、本城镇或者甚至是本社区用户的比较情况。手机游戏可以通过GPS信息告诉你,你同过去1个月里来过你所处位置的用户的排名比较情况,这样你就能够清楚自己在同学或同事中的位置。

聪明设计师会利用另一心理学技巧“折射荣誉效应”来促使玩家争取更杰出的表现。悉尼麦考瑞大学心理学教授Ladd Wheeler表示,“折射荣誉出现在我们因自身未投入于此技能而与目标比较对象不处在竞争关系的情况下。当我们的朋友表现突出时,我们会因拥有这样的朋友而沾光。”

感知相似性在此似乎非常重要,但我们通常很容易就能让自己觉得我们是某团队的一员,前提是我们的自我意识融入其中。Locke表示,“向上比较多半会强化而非打击我们的自我意识,如果我们认为自己同优秀人员存在相似性或关联性的话。例如,若我们同对象存在密切关系,我们更可能感受到折射荣耀,或和他们共享若干独特品质——稀有或奇怪优点,或者是同天生日。”

Ladd Wheeler (left) & Jerry Suls from edge-online.com

Ladd Wheeler (left) & Jerry Suls from edge-online.com

因此,游戏只需通过指出我们和精英团队的成就共性就能够让我们感觉自己很特别。发布“你已进行100次爆头—–这是90%高排名玩家所达到的标准”之类的消息能够让我们觉得自己属于上等群体。

但不仅只是置于顶部位置很重要。其他研究人员发现,包括密歇根大学的Stephen Garcia及其同事,不要成为拖后腿的讨厌家伙也很重要。事实上,任何有意义的目标都会促使我们做出完善和竞争,只要我们彼此水平相当。在2006年发布于《个性与社会心理学公报》中的调查中,Garcia假设称,我们和竞争对手越接近——例如,在某团队中排名第2和第3,我们就越发表现出竞争性(游戏邦注:或是非合作性)。为验证这一假设,他和他的合著者让试验对象假扮公司高管或扑克牌玩家,决定是要同对手建立竞争还是合作关系。具体情境已经设定,这样和潜在对手合作能够最大化总资金收益,但也会给调查对象的竞争对手带来众多益处,致使他们赶超调查对象的排名。Garcia发现,若合作意味着将从第1的位置退到第2,我们通常会因太过求胜心切而放弃这么做——尽管他们最终收获较少收益。相反,试验者通常会很高兴进行合作,如果这只会令他们从 排名第202掉到203。但研究人员还发现,若这是脱离最后排名的竞争,此效应也会显现出来。

同样,位置对玩家来说意义重大。例如若我们是MMOG公会的一流PvP成员,我们多半不会牺牲装置或时间来帮助我们的公会成员,因为这可能意味着自己要被逐出首席位置。爱达荷大学教授Jerry Suls表示,“若干试验证据表明,同具体个人比较比平均表现标准更加强有力,即便后者更具判断性。我们受到个人比较的影响不亚于平均分数。”

若竞争是开发者期望的游戏基调,那么他们应该同时提供排名信息和置身各榜单前列位置的机会——PvP第一、财富第一、装置第一等。

所以作为玩家,下次你查看《Trials Evolution》排行榜或是《暗黑破坏神III》中积极获取高级战利品的其他玩家角色时记住,人类不是你想象中的逻辑动物。这主要围绕视角和比较,游戏开发者向我们呈现许多过滤选择。若角逐和沉迷于排名是游戏的有趣之处,那就太棒了!若不是如此,那你就该想想这一影响模式背后的科学。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,拒绝任何不保留版权的转载,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

The psychology of… High scores

We look at the science of competition and consider how our brains are naturally programmed to compare ourselves against others.

During the heyday of the coin-operated videogame arcade, there was little better than seeing our name – well, our initials at least – in lights on a game’s high score list. And it was agonising to see it fall off the bottom, replaced by smug strings of characters representing those who had often accrued mere handfuls of points more. Friendly rivalries led us to feed coin after coin into machines such as Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and Pole Position just so that we could provide incontrovertible evidence that our skills trumped those of our friends. The proof was right there on the screen – at least until the arcade attendant unplugged the cabinet at the end of the night.

Games have evolved a lot since then, but the concept of comparing our performance against others has remained. These days, however, leaderboards often replace high score tables, and we can make even more granular comparisons via achievements and trophies. Plus, as games have become more social, the importance of such comparisons has grown. “We are social creatures,” says Kenneth Locke, a professor of psychology at the University Of Idaho, who studies interpersonal relationships. “The meaning of almost all our endeavours derives from our relationships with others. Thus social comparisons are pervasive. Scores, such as on a test or in a game, rarely have objective meaning. Instead, their meaning derives from where our scores stand relative to the scores of others.”

In other words, not all comparisons are equal. It’s rare to gnash our teeth in frustration when we watch YouTube videos of high-level play in Street Fighter tournaments because we’re not as good. And we can pretty easily shrug off any feelings of inadequacy in an MMOG if we see the powerful equipment someone got because they had nothing else to do all day but grind for it. So why do some social comparisons drive us to try harder or invest more in a game than others?

The answer lies with what has become known as ‘social comparison theory’. This was originally pioneered back in 1954 by social psychologist Leon Festinger, who was interested in how group dynamics affect human behaviour. Festinger was one of the first researchers to propose that it is human nature to want accurate information about our abilities, but that we’d rather get it from imperfect sources than not have it at all. Even when hard data is available, it’s often meaningless without context. In such cases, Festinger argued, we turn to comparing ourselves with other people.

Furthermore, he identified some systematic biases we have in whom we choose to compare ourselves with in order to preserve our sense of self worth. We prefer, for example, comparisons to people who are like us in certain respects, and tend not to compare ourselves to people whose ability is way above or far below our own.

Since the 1950s, the model has progressed quite a bit, and researchers have filled in the blanks by identifying some additional aspects of social comparisons that affect how we view our abilities. They’ve also studied how our perceptions can be systematically manipulated by those in control of information about us. And since today’s games are full of leaderboards, achievements, scores and replays, they provide a great context in which to apply social comparison theory. Over the coming pages, we’ll look at three ways developers can manipulate comparison information to promote competition. Broadly, these are by presenting you with different comparison targets, altering the size of your comparison group, and moving the goalposts.

Firstly, in many ways it’s who you’re comparing yourself to that matters the most. Leaderboards are most effective when they highlight your standing relative to your friends rather than strangers. But if we do look at our ranking and find our name bracketed by unfamiliar gamertags, we’ll tend to start looking for the things we have in common with those people. And, as we’ve already touched on, there’s a distinct psychological bias towards comparing ourselves to people that we think are fairly similar to us.

“The key variables are perceived similarity with the target person and importance of the task,” explains Ethan Zell, an assistant professor at the University Of North Carolina At Greensboro, who studies social comparisons. “We are more inspired by similar others, and are more motivated when the task is seen as self-relevant or important in some way.”

This supports the research done by Locke at the University Of Idaho. In one study, he sent a questionnaire to 159 athletes who had just finished a highly competitive triathlon and found that those studied were likely to focus on how they were similar to the racers around them during the event, given that they were unlikely to know the other competitors well.

Many researchers think that the reason we seek out comparisons with people we’re familiar with is that we use them as proxies for guessing if we’re capable of some feat or accomplishment. If another person achieves something tricky, our confidence in our ability to do it as well is linked to our opinion of how we’re similar to the achiever in relevant attributes. This is obviously easier to do with people we know (even if it’s just from online interactions) than total strangers. You broke into the diamond league for ranked StarCraft II matches? We seemed to be cut from the same cloth when I played you last, so I think I could do that too. You figured out all the puzzles in Fez? I know from our time at school together that I’m at least as smart as you, so I could do that too if I tried.

The second thing game designers can do to help you feel more pleased with yourself and your performance is to make you feel like a big fish in a small pond. This is because people who are ranked near the top of a badly performing group tend to feel better about themselves than those ranked near the bottom of a well-performing group, even though the latter may be doing better than the former in absolute terms. Sometimes all it takes to make you feel like the smartest person in the room is to step into a building full of dullards.

In fact, this so-called ‘big-fish-little-pond effect’ has been studied extensively in other areas, notably education, where it has been found to hold true in schools of all levels across 40 different countries. Its importance is huge, because simply looking at your performance in the context of a smaller group tends to override any comparisons you may make with the world at large. For example, Zell and his colleagues Mark Alicke and Dorian Bloom at Ohio University split groups of 10 college students into two five-person teams and had them try to identify who was lying in a series of videotaped statements. The researchers then provided each student with bogus feedback about their performance in this task, indicating that they were ranked fifth or sixth out of the 10 people in the room. Some students, however, were given the additional information that they were either the best- or worst-performing member on their team of five. The researchers found that even if subjects were better than most people in the room at the task, they had lower self-esteem if they were ranked lowest on their team.

“When people have high ranks in groups, they tend to feel good about themselves – even if the group is poor overall,” explains Zell. In essence, when people rate themselves they think about how good they are in small groups (friends, family members, team members), but neglect to consider how good the group is in comparison to other groups. In the world of leaderboards and high scores, this means that games that give us a ranking among our friends or some other smaller group are much more likely to engage us than those that simply provide global rankings. You’re ranked as the 6,458 player out of 11,092? That’s not nearly as interesting or motivating as knowing that you’re 12th out of the 45 people on your Steam friends list – or as depressing as knowing that you’re 44th.

The most effective leaderboards and rankings, then, are the ones that allow you to filter them to show the people on your friends list. Even better would be if they were set up to display friends by default, and allowed you to specify levels of closeness with others to broaden your base for comparison. Tracking close personal friends or sibling rivalries separately from the people you vaguely know from a message board would really help to arouse your competitive spirit.

Smart developers will take this even further by enabling you to dice up the data yourself and establish the comparison groups that are important to you. Instead of global rankings, they could show how you compare to people in your country, your town, or even your neighbourhood. And mobile games could make use of GPS information to show you how you rank against the people who visited your location within the last month, so that you can get an idea of your standing among your schoolmates or coworkers.

Exceptionally clever designers could take advantage of another psychological quirk called ‘the reflected glory effect’ to keep players striving for better performance. “Reflected glory occurs when we are not in competition with the [target of our] comparison because we aren’t ego-invested in that ability,” says Ladd Wheeler, a professor of psychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “If our friend does well, it reflects glory on us for having such a friend.”

Perceived similarity seems to be important here, but it often doesn’t take much work to trick ourselves into feeling like part of a group if our ego is involved. “Upward comparisons are most likely to enhance rather than deflate our ego if we construe ourselves as similar to, or connected to, the superior others,” notes Locke. “For example, we are likely to experience reflected glory if we share a very close relationship with them, or share some distinctive quality with them – a rare or quirky trait, or sharing the same birthday.”

Thus, game developers could make us feel special simply by pointing out accomplishments that we have in common with the cream of the crop. Getting a notification along the lines of ‘You’ve scored 1,000 headshots – something that 90 per cent of top-ranked players have done’ would go a long way towards making us feel like we’re part of the upper echelon as well.

It’s not just being at the top that matters, though. Other researchers, including Stephen Garcia from the University Of Michigan and his colleagues, have found that it’s just as important not to be the rotten egg that comes in last place. In fact, any meaningful goalpost will motivate us to improve and compete once things come down to the line. In a 2006 study published in the Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin, Garcia hypothesised that people were more likely to act competitively (or not act cooperatively) the closer they and a rival were to a meaningful standard – being ranked number two and number three out of a group, say. To test this hunch, he and his co-authors had subjects pretend to be company executives or poker players deciding whether they should compete or cooperate with rivals. The scenarios were structured so that cooperation with would-be opponents maximised total financial payoffs, but would also benefit the subjects’ rivals enough that subjects would be surpassed in the rankings. Garcia found that people were often too competitive to cooperate if doing so meant sliding from first position to second – despite the fact that they ended up with less money. Conversely, subjects would generally be happy to cooperate if it was only a matter of going from being 202nd to 203rd. But the researchers also found the effect present when it was a competition to stay out of last place.

Similarly, standing means a lot to gamers. If we’re the top-ranked PvP member of our MMOG guild, for example, we’re generally less likely to sacrifice gear or time to help out guildmates if it means being dislodged from the top spot. “There is some empirical evidence that comparison with a concrete single person is more potent than norms about average performance, even if the latter should be more diagnostic,” says professor Jerry Suls from the University Of Iowa. “People seem to be swayed equally by the comparison with a single concrete person as by an average score.”

If competition is the tune to which game developers want their players to dance, they should provide lots of information about not just rankings, but also opportunities for being at the top of different rankings – first in PvP, first in wealth, first in gear, and so forth.

So, as a gamer, the next time that you take a peek at the leaderboard in Trials Evolution or inspect another player’s character for high-level loot in Diablo III, keep in mind that humans aren’t the kind of logical creatures that you may think we are. It’s all about perspective and comparison, and game developers have a lot of filters they can present for us to look through. If competition and obsession over rankings is what makes games fun for you, then great! If it’s not, now you know a little bit more about the science behind how it affects others.(Source:edge-online


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