rpg

As another entry in my series about the commonalities between RPG design patterns (an RPG’s system is the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play) and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (certain human behavior patterns can be leveraged to get people to agree to things), I next want to talk about authority. Humans have an innate predisposition to obey authority figures. The extent to which people will set aside their own judgment in deference to authority figures can be amazing, such as in the famous Milgram experiments. It can be tempting to jump to disparaging conclusions about people’s response to authority (“Those sheeple are so weak-minded!”) but I think it’s more useful to try to understand behavior patterns without trying to saddle them with value judgments. After all, as with many human behavior patterns, deference to authority figures is often the right thing to do (people in a burning building should listen to the firefighter, people in a courtroom should listen to the judge) but it also means that clever manipulators can leverage the tendency to get people to do things. Authority is obviously a big deal in RPG design circles – many innovative games have come from examining how authority can be parceled out.

In addition to actual authority, people have a tendency to respond to the appearance of authority, which is often much easier to manipulate. Having a prestigious title, for example, can cause people to agree to what you want. For example, researchers have found an alarmingly high willingness for nurses to carry out medical orders from people who say they are doctors (even if the person is unfamiliar to the nurse, and even if the orders seem to be self-evidently inappropriate or dangerous for patients). Con artists frequently portray themselves as people with prestigious titles in order to get their marks to comply. RPGs, of course, have a long history of given certain players titles like Game Master, Storyteller, or Keeper. These players are often the ones who generate fiction that the other players might be inclined to reject (“a monster attacks you!”), so the special title helps get the rest of the players to accept their contributions.

Compliance professionals often use clothing to give themselves the appearance of authority. Con artists love things like uniforms or doctor’s coats, for example. Researchers have demonstrated the people are more likely to obey requests coming from someone dressed like a security guard than from someone in normal clothes, regardless of the type of request. They’ve also shown that people waiting on a crosswalk are more likely to follow a pedestrian crossing against the light if he’s wearing a business suit than if he’s wearing work clothes. I’m not aware of any tabletop RPGs that explicitly ask the players to dress in a particular way, but costumes are common in LARPs, and dressing in something genre-appropriate is sometimes recommended as a GMing technique for gaming conventions.

The trappings of authority can also get people to be more compliant. In an interesting experiment, researchers tested how long it would take people to honk their horns at cars in front of them that stayed stopped at a green light. The delay before honking was much longer if the stopped car was a luxury car than for an older economy model. Many games provide special GM-only accoutrements like GM screens or specialized rulebooks, which may help make the GM’s contributions more acceptable to the other players.

As a type of authority figure, people tend to defer to experts. Although it’s usually not formalized, rules expertise frequently confers increased ability to have one’s contributions accepted in RPGs. For example, many players of traditional games expect GMs (who need to have lots of their contributions accepted for many of these game to function) to also have the greatest rules expertise. Researchers have also found that a perception of impartiality increases people’s tendency to accept the word of experts. In an RPG context, that may mean that games that place players in an impartial role more likely to have their fictional contributions accepted than in actively adversarial roles. In Rob Bohl’s Misspent Youth, for example, the Authority player doesn’t make any mechanical choices at the expense of the other players (the game system dictates them), but roleplays the embodiment of the things that the actual human players hate about real-world authority. The impartiality of the role (and the title of Authority) helps the other players accept these otherwise unwelcome elements into the fiction of the game.

Although a lot of my examples have been about GMs, I think that’s simply an artifact of there being a longer history of RPGs that use GMs from which I’ve drawn the examples. Understanding the human responses to authority ought to have plenty of applications in designing many player interactions, not just across the common GM/player divide.

Continuing my series about the commonalities between RPG design patterns (an RPG’s system is the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play) and the ideas presented in Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (certain human behavior patterns can be leveraged to get people to agree to things), I next want to talk about liking. Cialdini talks about the seemingly uncontroversial idea that we most prefer to say “yes” to the requests of someone we know and like. Most games are played with friends, so all RPGs probably rely on this general principle to some degree.

“Compliance professionals” have figured out some interesting ways to leverage this idea even when they don’t start as the target’s friends. For example, Tupperware has built an entire business model that leverages existing relationships: at a Tupperware party people buy because they know that the hostess – a friend! – gets a cut of the take. Another example is an effective sales strategy: a salesperson gets prospect X to admit to liking a product and then gets X to offer up name of a friend, Y. The salesperson says to Y, “X suggested I talk to you about this product.” Y finds it hard to turn the salesperson away, since it would feel like rejecting friend X, even though X might not care at all if Y buys the product.

Several factors contribute to liking someone. One factor, whether we like to admit it or not, is that we tend to like people who are physically attractive. Researchers have found that physical attractiveness has a halo effect: we automatically assign to good-looking individuals positive traits like talent, kindness, honesty, and intelligence. Most of us aren’t aware that this is happening – even in experiments where physical attractiveness has a measurable effect most of the subjects deny that physical appearance has much impact on their decisions. RPG designers can’t generally control for the physical appearance of the participants (although it does potentially raise some interesting questions about LARP design), but I would guess that having attractive game components like miniatures can play a similar role in increasing players’ willingness to accept things into the fiction. Although the research presented in the book tends to focus on the visually appealing, I imagine that any “attractive” feature ought to have a similar effect. Good in-character acting or the “funny voices” school of GMing, for example, may have halo effects – if a player is regarded as a talented performer they may also have other positive traits unconsciously assigned to them like sound storytelling sensibilities. Games that encourage acting in character may be using this effect.

Another element that contributes to liking is similarity. For example, researchers have demonstrated that we are more likely to agree to do things for people who dress similarly to us. When examining trade-ins, car salesmen often try to find evidence of the customer’s interests or background to be able to claim similar interests or background because this makes customers more likely to agree to the salesman’s offer. RPGs that define particular character traits as choices from limited lists may be (unwittingly?) benefiting by offering easy points of similarity – players may be more inclined to accept contributions from “the other elf” or “the other lawful character”.

Cialdini points out that we tend to like people who seem to like us. Compliments, even when coming from someone who obviously has something to gain by flattering us, seem to improve our reactions to the complimenter. Although sometimes maligned, many RPGs feature “good roleplaying awards”, which are essentially mechanized compliments. One interesting peer-based “I liked that” system which is widely praised is the fan-mail system in Primetime Adventures. While most people focus on the overt “do more of that” message of fan-mail, the recipient of fan-mail almost certainly also experiences appreciation for the giver, and is therefore more likely to accept the giver’s future contributions.

Even without some other feature that makes someone especially likeable, continued contact with anybody seems to have an effect. The more frequently we encounter someone the more we like them, and the more we are likely to agree with what they want. Many RPGs stress long-term campaign play, perhaps leveraging this effect. There is a caveat, however: continued exposure to a person or object under unpleasant conditions such as frustration, conflict, or competition leads to less liking. Cooperative interactions seem to be the key. As an example from the “compliance professional” world, police officers who use the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine are relying on the seemingly cooperative relationship formed between the suspect and the Good Cop in order to get the suspect to offer the confession the Good Cop wants. It’s probably not a coincidence that the most popular long-term RPGs are strongly cooperative.

Since humans, like Pavlov’s dogs, are also subject to the principles of conditioning and association it turns out you don’t even need to like the people asking you for something as long as they can associate themselves with something you do like. For example, researchers have demonstrated that people tend to become fonder of the people, things, and ideas they experience while eating (there are a few games out there that put the idea of eating while playing directly into the rules). Licensed RPGs almost certainly leverage this effect – being attacked by a monster you remember from your favorite novel series is usually far more palatable that being attacked by a monster you’ve never heard of before. Cthulhu RPG players, for example, seem content to have all manner of horrible things afflict their characters in the process of celebrating their mythos fandom.

Cialdini also explains that feelings of association tend to be strongest when the association is with something positive. For example, when sports fans discuss the performance of their favorite teams they’ll often characterize a victory as “we won” but a defeat as “they lost”. In RPGs, this association-with-positivity effect might have an impact on Burning Wheel‘s helping dice mechanic: success is more likely when you are helped, so you are likely to build positive associations with those that help you. Researchers have also shown that the desire to “bask in reflected glory” is strongest when prestige (public and private) is low, because we feel a need to help restore our image. This might explain why players can resent “kill-stealing” when their character is doing well but will cheer with delight when another player strikes the killing blow in a hard-fought combat.

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.