Board Game Design Day: Board Game Design and the Psychology of Loss Aversion

Really good talk, but at the questions segment I perked up because "wait a minute? Was that Pip from SUSD podcasts?"

Really great talk. Thanks!

This is very interesting.

Jeff!!!!!

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." ~ useful adage
.....Saying that taking the 80% chance to get $4,000 or nothing is in our "financial interest", over getting $3,000 for sure, is a bit of a slippery slope. Let's say you choose to roll the dice and you get the $4,000, what about rolling again for an 80% chance of $5,320 or nothing. And what about rolling for an 80% chance of $7,075 after that? And $9,410 after that? And $12,516 after that? In a vacuum, if it is in our "financial interest" to take the deal at $4,000, then it will always be in our interest to take the same deal for the same percentage of gain for the same probability. If you follow this logic you will eventually bust and be left with $0, even though each individual deal was in our "financial interest" to take. At what point, then, does it become rational to take the 100% chance of less money? I would argue that in context, it is hardly ever in our "financial interest" to take the deal, despite probability being in our favor, because the potential gain is only useful to a very small portion of people's starting wealth. For example, if someone starts with only $100 wealth, $3000 represents quite a substantial increase, a 3,000% guaranteed gain, while $4,000 only offers a 29% potential increase beyond that when you consider that the $3,000 is considered to be already in the bank. In context, that is the only valuable comparison here, 3,000% guaranteed gain ($100 to $3,000) vs 29% possible gain ($3,100 to $4,000). You would be foolish to take the deal in this case. On the other end of the spectrum, if you start with $1 million, $1,000,000 to $1,003,000 moves the needle much more than $1,003,000 to $1,004,000, the latter of which would have hardly any impact on overall wealth. You would have to really dig somewhere in-between to find an edge case where the potential increase of wealth is worth it over the guaranteed gain.

Wheres proper captions?

Something I've noticed that no one really comments upon is that opportunity cost isn't a real cost when it involves an infinite resource. How can it be seen as a lost opportunity when by all logic it's still there? With deals involving the infinite resource against a finite resource are struck, loss only works in one direction. How do trade-offs work with one-sided post-scarcity?

Fascinating talk, applicable to areas other than board games.
Are casinos and online gambling companies applying these techniques? The odds are already stacked in their favour!

Calling cutting off the longest road with a settlement in Catan an edge case, clearly hasn't played enough Catan 🤣

"a singed companion cube comes into the last scene of the game"

Did Geoff just predict




Alyx?

Is positive interaction(Race for the Galaxy, Mottainai, Keyflower) processed that much differently from negative take that(even in cases that are mathematically similar)?

Immediately my math-brain begins to consider which are the rational decisions, and then I stop, remind myself of his warning not to over-analyze my options, and concede; I'm shamefully forced to admit that—by default—I'll willingly decide to decide exactly the same way everybody else does.

Even though I know better, give me a safe gain and a gamble to avoid loss every time!

I think this explains a lot about the community reaction to Mojang not adding glow bugs...
or showing their concept art for birch forests.. the only difference being fungi on trees and taller trees.
the taller trees were added in world gen... but they said it was just concept art and not a promise....
ppl felt they had had something taken away, and focussed on that more than what they had gained

about tracking
discarding the 2 other card is actually much better than keeping them in your deck.
Playing a 28 card deck is stronger than playing a 30 card deck.That is the reason why there is no « 0 mana draw a card do nothing » card. It would be auto include in every deck.

I didn’t like tracking when i first played the card. But when you stats building becks, you realize that the 29th and 30th card are the worst cards of your deck, and that it would be stronger to have a 28 cards deck.

nice

That's why all this time people are still agonizing over the death of Aerith.

He told the person he won $5 but then have it sit there for an hour, keeping him on his toes whether or not he will actually get it :p

The problem with economists calling such choices “irrational” is that they’re assuming a lot of things, like the ability to reiterate at no cost, which isn’t realistic. The example he used at the beginning with the volunteer shows this: if he loses the $20 wager, he doesn’t eat lunch. If he wins, he gets $40–so what? So he can buy two lunches? He doesn’t need two lunches to prevent going hungry. So his choice to reject the 50/50 offer is absolutely rational from an evolutionary psychology POV. Ignoring real world needs like this is one silly thing economists often do. Another example: would you wager your car if you need it to get to work and keep your job? Who cares if you win a second car, if you’re risking your job to do so? This is okay in board games of course because there’s nothing at stake related to actual survival.

Oh boy, the deadly disease part didˋt age very well, did it? But great talk nontheless.

This was a deeply fascinating talk. It's gotten me to think a lot more about how I practice loss aversion in ways that aren't always logical.

you could've said "the unhappiness of losing the $20 is/feels more intense than the happiness of gaining the $20

Level drain is worse than death in some ways.
Player death feels like an end, a conclusion to that characters story.
Level drain feels like the time the player spent building up the character is lost. With the additional penalty of having to remove all the gains of those levels and recalculate stats.
It also doesn’t make thematic sense for most monsters that have it.
Early versions were even worse because it all depended on the DMs roll.

Fun fact. A study was done that demonstrated that 40% of studies are wrong.

All those negative emotions are bad for a person's well being and also feed the Archons.

I understand the intended affect of ripping up cards in legacy games, but there is another angle to it- you can never "start from scratch" with another group or hand it off to someone else, making it really a one-time-shot sort of game, devaluing it in that sense. As a player who buys their games very selectively and wants to keep them in mint condition, I will NEVER listen to you if you tell me to destroy something I bought, it's a rather presumptuous ask.

One comment on the Level draining ability, especially in 3E: I'm more uncomfortable with recalculating all those modifiers, remembering which feat was gained at which level or for spellcasters redoing the entire spell selection (on a Sorcerer that's even worse) and basically having to redo the entire sheet from the ground up is faster. BUT you can technically exploit this for respecing, which is standard starting from PF so the only useful role is lost. Speaking from experience that wasn't drained

Am i the only person who didnt care about the companion cube? Tbh i thought it was a joke, i had no qualms about incinerating it, though i did look around if there was some trick just out of having been told i had to do something, being a puzzle game i thought maybe there was a clever little puzzle to it...

What a fantastic lesson!

Every time i see "80%" I think to myself ""Those are Hydro Pump odds" and go for it.

Funny how we get the companion cube back at the end of Portal 2

To the last question about rewards/lose aversion, I think Monopoly does that great. Rolling doubles lets you go again, but roll doubles 3 times in a row and wind up in jail. Everyone feels like that player (even when it is themselves) deserves to go to jail because they are going too fast.

I feel like I am one of the 10% outliers in the regret section. I'm constantly 2nd guessing myself and would jump at the opportunity to switch because it would feel worse to have that fear validated.

With casino chips being abstracted from money, it takes that a step further with digital chips in online casinos.

it's a cool talk and i believe what he's saying, but i also chose the opposite choice for a lot of scenarios he mentioned

One of the best GDC talks I've ever watched. It reminded me of how in Potion Explosion, nobody ever wants to use the -2 point tokens that allow them to take an extra marble on their turn because nobody likes losing points. But taking an extra marble can be game changing.

I must be old school, because I'm ok with losing stuff in games . It's part of the game.

This guy doesn't measure the personal situation into his things.
I gain access to way more things with free $3000 than I would with an extra 1k and a chance to get 0.
One is a sure 3000, the other one could end you with 0.
If you played the game like 10 times, yes, choosing B would be almost always right.

Geoff's "Achievement Relocked", which goes deeper into loss aversion and it's applications to game design, is one of the most fascinating books I've read.

i dont see how taking an 80% over a sure bet on a gain is the wrong financial choice the thing 20% chance to loose might aswell be 100% because there is no garentee you can easily be the 20% who gets nothing, the problem here is none of these questions have context which the human brain uses to make all of its descions so by asking me if i'd rather make a sure bet or a risky one without asking me my financial situation before hand- its meaningless information without the context of the thinking behind the descions.

This was a fantastically interesting watch

The way this is framed is bad. If Choice A guarantees me 3000$ and Choice B gives me a 80% chance to get 4000$ and 20% chance to get 0$, it's perfectly reasonable to choose A, especially if you are poor (in general, the more value you give to the money, the more likely you are to choose A). The concept of taking averages as the "rational" thing to do is very abstract and doesn't really relate to game situations or real-life situations at all.