Arcade Berg aka. "Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg"

Synthetic Happiness

I try to be a pretty organized guy, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. I just found a post-it note under my Wacom that's probably about six months old. It's a note saying I should post on this blog about Synthetic Happiness and the freedom of choice as discussed by Dan Gilbert over at TED.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html (2/3/2010)

Okay, so I'm a bit late, but it's time to do the post-it justice!

In this talk, Gilbert talks about two things of interest.

1. Our frontal lobe and the prefrontal cortex
2. Synthetic happiness

The prefrontal cortex makes it possible for us to simulate experiences in our head, so we don't actually have to carry them out. I won't put my head in a door opening and slam the door shut, because without even trying, I bet it'd hurt.

For a gamer, the prefrontal cortex gets to work a lot when we're playing RPG's and we have to place our skill points. In a way, I hate that part of RPG's because I always have such a hard time deciding on where to place my points, what skills to learn and even which class to play. I run every solution I can think of in my head to see what will result as the best/most fun way.

Because of that damn simulator in my head I can sit and stare at the character improvement screen for ages without making a decision. And I'm so scared of making the "wrong" choice.

And this is where the second point kicks into action, the Synthetic Happiness in relation to the freedom of choice.

Basically, the results of some research show that people feel happy even if they "shouldn't". After some time, a person winning the lottery and a person becoming handicapped are just as happy. And synthetic, the fake happiness is just as valid as the "real happiness".

But also, they show that people are much more satisfied with their choices if they were irreversible.

The example they give is a university hosting a photo course. At the end of the course, the students are only allowed to keep one out of two photos as a huge print. Half the group are told that they can always change which one to keep later, by just returning the old one. While the other half are told that they must make the decision now and they can't change it later on.

The numbers then show that most of the people that could change it afterwards weren't satisfied with their choice, while the people that got stuck with their choice were much more satisfied. The mind adapts to the current situation because it can't be changed, and they're experiencing synthetic happiness.

So if we then translate this into games; the way to make players feel best is by not letting them edit their choices during the game. Not allowing re-assignment of skill points and "unlearning of spells".

In a typical RPG you can't really make this bulletproof though, since you can always restart the game with a new character. As it should be, if you ask me.

But all in all, I think designers should really take the adaptation and synthetic happiness into consideration when designing.

It's been hiding for ages.