From my youngest years, I remember playing video games: early mornings, late nights, moments of frustration, defeat, and triumph—luckily, sometimes, in that order. I remember long mornings of practice so that I could finish Mega Man 6 or, later, the feeling of grinding through Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, or loading an emulator of Final Fantasy V or Chrono Trigger and being stunned by the colourful sprites, or, later, trying to speedrun Resident Evil 2 after having memorized the spawn points for enemies and puzzle keys.
Despite this love, though, I am forced to recognize that my love of gaming does not always bring out my best qualities. I still have a scar on my head, for example, from when, as a child, I slammed a Nintendo against myself in frustration. More existentially, I recognize that I’m largely risk/choice-averse and, reflecting on this in my grade 12 year, I couldn’t help but feel that that was connected to my propensity for ‘saving my game.’ If I made a mistake, I could just go back and try again. In real life, though? If only! They also tend to fuel my addiction to productivity; rather than stop playing when I stop having fun, I have to be a completionist, beat every level and earn every achievement before I can consider myself a success (and get down on myself if I don’t finish.)
All this to say, it’s difficult to measure how much of my choice to read Jamie Madigan’s Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them is a self-interested attempt at self-understanding and self-help, an academic interest to explore a cultural phenomenon, or an attempt to build my resources for a video game course I intend to teach next year. Regardless of motive, though, Madigan’s text serves as an excellent primer to the relationship between our minds and gaming. For full disclosure, I should mention that I’m writing this review months after finishing the book, so some of the details that were more immediate have faded away. If this review seems somewhat thin, I accept all the blame—I feel like every chapter of Madigan’s book had something worthwhile to offer.
The range of the text is pretty strong, if leaning a little heavily on the sociology of games. Rather than an individualistic psychology (which is there), for better or for worse Madigan focuses on collective experiences and the gaming industry. A selection of chapters in the book includes: 1. Why Do Perfectly Normal People Become Raving Lunatics Online?, 3. Why Are Fanboys and Fangirls So Ready for a Fight?, 4. Why Do We Get Nostalgic About Good Old Games?, 6. How Do Games Get Us to Grind, Complete Side Quests, and Chase Achievements?, and 10. How Do Facebook Games and Smartphone Apps Get You With In-Game Purchases?
What is interesting about Madigan’s book is that, in most cases, he is drawing from diverse psychological studies that are unrelated to the gaming industry and then looks at how “human nature” (I always use that term with reservation) manifests itself through the avenue of gaming. For instance, he talks about an experiment where young boys were sent to a summer camp in separate busses and given team names. By the time they reached the camp about an hour and a half later, they had already solidified group identities and it produced antagonisms immediately. Madigan then connects that to the phenomenon of group identity online, the competitiveness of online games, and so on.
Games, in many ways, feed addiction. What I found really surprising, though, is how we can manipulate situations for the better. For example, when monitoring people cheating in online games, there was some reduction of cheating if players received an on-screen reminder immediately before a match to not cheat. There was a marginal improvement, too, when they changed the language. Being reminded not to cheat? Meh. Being reminded not to be a cheater? Well, there’s something that defines your identity. People can justify a behaviour, but it’s harder to justify their being. I’m already considering how I could use this to my advantage pedagogically: “Don’t plagiarize” orrrrrrrr “Don’t be a plagiarist!” In this sense, games become an avenue for exploring social phenomena and can be leveraged to build better communities.
There are actually a number of incentives that I could see myself using in an educational context—in fact, I already have. In the chapter “How Do Games Get Us to Grind, Complete Side Quests, and Chase Achievements?”, Madigan talks about how games motivate you to complete quests by only revealing the quest once you’ve already started. For example, if you need to collect 10 diamonds, it will only tell you about the quest after you already have the first one. In that model, the likelihood that you’ll complete the quest skyrockets because you’re already invested. I’m doing that with my assignments: students are completing their brainstorming or a free-write to get ideas down, or completing an opening paragraph before I even tell them what the final product assignment will be. I can’t say it’s working quite as well as it does in video games, but still, it’s worth a shot!
The idea of quests, grinding, and achievement are all of profound interest to me. When I think about my favourite games, or the games in which I spend the most time, it’s all about watching those numbers go up. I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that I get addicted to JRPGs quite often, particularly the Tales Of and Star Ocean franchises. I suspect that I find myself so entrenched in those games because there are so many things to do. There’s the main quest, sure, but there are always a plethora of side quests, plus achievements, plus metrics to max out: character level, skill levels, affinity levels, and so on—and with parties of 6 or 8 characters, there’s always someone levelling up. It’s hard to put down the controller where you see visible, quantifiable progress every few minutes. If only real life was like that.
Madigan links this idea to Self-Determination Theory. He begins by referring to a study that found that players “are attracted to achievements and quests [because] [...] they want to experience achievement through progress, power, accumulation and status within game.” The achievement motivator researcher suggested that he could pick out what type of gamer people were based on a simple survey and that he could “predict how many hours someone is likely to spend with a game” based on how well it satisfies our need for achievement. That certainly holds true for me, as does the downside that Madigan identifies: “the competitive or grinding aspects of achievement may also lead them to be in a slightly worse mood.” There’s something Freudian in continually returning to pain, but you’re always chasing that high of ‘completion’ that comes so infrequently. So yes, I get down after wasting a few hours trying to max out a character stat but then just have to hope I feel accomplished in some impossible future.
When explaining the connection to “self-determination theory,” Madigan explains that people engage in voluntary behaviour because of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Namely, they want to feel that they are competent, that they have meaningful choices in how to express that competence, and the need to feel connected to others in the process. Video games provide that space in a way that few other mediums (indeed, few other interactions) can. Competence can be demonstrated with clear benchmarks (level, score, etc.) and the interactivity of the medium provides instant feedback (actually, I remember being at a conference years ago that addressed the gamification of education and the need for continual immediate feedback…). As for relatedness, we’ve already learned about how team affiliations create a place for people—healthily or not.
There were a number of chapters that were compelling in that respect, though I’m blanking on a number of the details. I remember one chapter discussed the bias we have in favour of decisions we’ve already made. In reference to buying a new console, for instance, people might debate the specs of each before finally settling on one. The funny thing is that after people commit to a decision, they feel more dedicated to that choice as the ‘right’ one, as if our brain is protecting us from the pain of a mistake. That also helps to reinforce group identity (we’re the smart ones because we bought a Playstation instead of an X-Box!).
There were a number of other phenomena that were compelling with respect to group identity, but instead I’d like to spend some time to focus on the idea of individual identity. For more on this topic, I’d recommend the first chapter of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell. Madigan discusses the Proteus effect, meaning that our gaming avatars are not mere ornamentation. “Avatars,” he writes, “alter the identity of the people who use them because players make inferences about what attitudes are expected of them based on their appearance, then are more likely to alter their attitudes and behaviour to match.” If this is true, our avatars ought to be aspirational. We would have the power to decide the people we want to be and how we want to be perceived. Legacy Russell discusses how there is no barrier between ‘real’ life and ‘online’ life, and here we see how the implications of avatars might play out. Players who play Call of Duty, for instance, are more likely to associate the word ‘me’ with words like soldier and pistol while players of Gran Turismo identify more with the word racer or driver. Madigan notes that after playing a game where people inhabit the body of a superhero, they are more likely to engage in helpful behaviour in ‘real life.’
Of course, the negatives of that also hold true. Madigan gives the the example of women gamers occupying bodies that make them more self-conscious of their physical bodies and more likely to side with the false premise that victims of sexual assault are in some way at fault for their own abuse due to what they wear, etc. Again, it requires an ethical commitment to representation—and maybe even selection of our avatars—when playing games.
Speaking of ethics, there’s a fair amount of content here regarding money-making schemes and content. For instance, there’s discussion of games that are essentially pay-to-progress. You can imagine the kind of games that get referenced: the Facebook games that make you wait, the apps that are free to download but that require payment if you want to make more progress than once every three hours, and so on. Madigan does the math and works through the layers of displacement that exist to keep players playing without realizing the cost. For instance, you might need crystals to progress and gems to build structures, and so on. Both crystals and gems can be earned…slowly. Both can be purchased for real money, but there are all kinds of mechanisms to ensure the opacity of the exchange rate. Not only that, but when you buy these currencies, it’s never in even increments, so you’re never quite sure how much you’ve paid and you always end up having more than you wanted but less than you need for the next interval.
In one anecdote, Madigan cites a man who had something like five devices and accounts that he dedicated hours and hours to to make progress in a Farmville-like game. He even had a device in the shower in a ziploc bag so that he could play in the shower. What’s fascinating though is that only about 3% of players will ever spend money on a game and only about 1% of players will repeatedly spend money on a game—but they will spend a lot. It’s wild to think that games can rely on such a small portion of their players to make a return on the investment—the fact that once people do succumb to these games it justifies the developers’ game-mill is astounding.
The most egregious example is a case study Madigan refers to called Cow Clicker, a Facebook game that had one objective: click the cow. All you had to do was click the cow. Then a timer would start until the next time you could click your cow. It was created as a satire of Skinner box games, yet it gained rapid popularity and became a phenomenon, with people buying custom cows. What started as a joke evolved into a moneymaking hit. It was a fascinating story for all of what it might suggest about human psychology.
In between me reading this book and writing this review, I pitched an online course with my school board about video game media that has been approved for the 2024-2025 school year. Provided it gets the enrollment to run, this course will draw on several sections of this book. It has so much to offer when it comes to identity, community, choice, achievement, and a sense of fulfilment. It’s an excellent entrypoint to psychology, sociology, media studies, and video games. It’s accessible in its language, deep in its content, and offers opportunities for a lot of rich reflection. I loved it.
That’s it for now: game over, reader wins.
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