designing

Building on my previous post about commonalities between RPG design patterns and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, I next want to talk about commitment and consistency.

According to Cialdini’s research, if I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand. Once a person has said something, they don’t like to go back on what they’ve said – they will instead adjust their future behavior to keep in synch with their newly committed “self image” rather than backtrack. Once a person agrees that they believe in a particular point of view, for example, they are more likely to provide time or money to support an activity consistent with that point of view than if they had simply been asked for the time or money point-blank – refusing the request would feel like a violation of the “self image” they’ve established for themselves as a believer.

A “compliance professional” example of this is a technique sometimes seen in car dealerships: A prospective customer is presented with a very attractive price as a special deal. The salesman starts working up the paperwork, financing, etc., but then before the deal is closed a “mistake” is discovered in the price and the salesman says he’s only allowed to complete the sale at a “correct” higher price. Since the customer has already committed to wanting to purchase this particular car they are unlikely to call off the deal, even if they wouldn’t have originally agreed to purchase at that price.

An excellent example of this in RPGs is the conflict mechanic in Dogs in the Vineyard. Before the conflict mechanic can be engaged, the players and GM need to agree on “what’s at stake” in the conflict and the opening “arena of conflict” – talking, physical, fighting, or gunfighting. Players will often quickly agree to verbally argue with an NPC over disagreements. Once the mechanical conflict mechanism begins, the GM uses game-mechanical resources to resist the player, requiring the player to use resources of their own to push for their side. Since the resources get used up, the two sides always have the option of “escalating” (moving to a new arena of conflict) to get more resources to push for their position. Throwing a punch instead of an insult, for example, would escalate from talking to fighting. In this way, the game encourages players to have their characters perform actions that seem extreme in retrospect relative to what was at stake in the conflict. The “did we really do the right thing when we shot that woman for cheating on her husband?” feeling is a really compelling feature of the DITV experience, and it’s achieved by getting players to commit to wanting a goal when the cost is low (“just talking”) and then getting them to stay consistent with that goal rather than admit they don’t really want it as the price of staying in the conflict goes up.

A further nuance to this commitment phenomenon is that putting the commitment on paper seems to deepen the commitment. Writing things down makes them feel more “official” to us, and can also apply social pressure when we realize that others can read our words (we are all strongly averse to seeming inconsistent to our peers). One “compliance professional” method of leveraging this is that door-to-door sales organizations find that cancellations drop dramatically when the customer, rather than the salesperson, physically fills out the order form. An obvious example of this in RPGs is writing Beliefs in Burning Wheel – having written Beliefs seems to be a much stronger motivator for character action than simply keeping a nebulous “character concept” in the player’s head, even though Beliefs can be changed at virtually any time.

Another aspect of commitment is that people tend to value something extremely highly if they’ve gone through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain it. Rites of passage in cultures around the world, or even fraternity hazing, demonstrate this. Anyone who makes it through the ordeal finds it much easier to believe that being a member of the organization is very important (otherwise they wouldn’t have gone through the ordeal, right?). A potential RPG example of this might be groups who value system mastery in complex, crunchy systems but during actual play will skip using the rules in favor of freeform roleplaying – rather than being used as procedures for play, mastering the complex rules can serve as a signaling mechanism to the rest of the group that you’re the kind of “serious gamer” that they want to freeform with, someone who’s not going to flake out or introduce fiction that will “ruin” the story that they are invested in.

The way that outside pressures can impact commitments is really interesting:

“Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.”

When dealing with children, for example, it’s been shown that strong threats of punishment are less effective at achieving long-term behavioral changes than milder urging (the old “I’ll be disappointed ” approach).

This interaction between pressure and commitment may be related to the dissatisfaction that many people feel when FATE‘s compel mechanic is used to try to steer characters to make particular moral choices, or when a player feels obligated to use a suboptimal skill in a situation because “that’s what my character would do”. By connecting a too-strong mechanical reward or punishment to the choice, the player is unable to feel committed to it.

Update: One huge RPG example of written commitment that I want to revisit in the future is GM prep.