Michael Gugel

Cognitive Dissonance & Gaming

Posted on Feb 11, 2011 by Michael Gugel in Gaming, Psychology

Cognitive dissonance is the mental distress you feel when you hold 2 conflicting ideas.

Cognitive dissonance is a fancy term psychologists use to describe the mental distress you feel when you hold two conflicting ideas.  It’s an extremely powerful way for game designers to attract users, keep them engaged, and increase perceived enjoyment.

The classic example of cognitive dissonance is Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Grapes.  In the fable, a fox sees some grapes, realizes he can’t get them, and rationalizes that the grapes were probably sour anyway.  Almost the same thing happened to me last month when I played Assassin’s Creed 2.  I failed the first mission 20 TIMES and I found myself thinking:

“This game is probably isn’t that great anyway.”

I don’t give up easily though.  I spent 45 minutes plowing through the first stage until I figured it out.  And good thing I did too because I ended up really enjoying the rest of the game.  Don’t make the same mistake as Assassin’s Creed 2.  Prevent your users from experiencing SOUR GRAPES by making the initial immersion process STUPID-EASY.

The second key insight of cognitive dissonance research is that the harder it is to get something, the more we tend to value it.  The more embarrassing, painful, time-consuming shit we have to go through, the more we end up valuing the end-product.

Take any Facebook game.

• You think people will like your game less because you force them to post it on their wall?
  NOPE, it’s the opposite – they’ll like your game more.
• You think people will like your game less because you force them to spend a ton of time checking leveling up?
  NOPE, they’ll like your game more.

Millions of users gladly spend hundreds of hours leveling up their characters in MMORPGs.  Hell, I do it too…and I like it.

A quote from a psychological study done by Elliot Aronson and Judson Mills sums it up nicely:

“It is a frequent observation that persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”