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The Psychology of Collection and Hoarding In Games
This article at Gamasutra takes a look at how the compulsion to hoard and accumulate objects, as well as the desire to accomplish entirely abstract goals, has become part of the modern gaming mindset.
"The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation explains that in compulsive hoarders: 'Acquiring is often associated with positive emotions, such as pleasure and excitement, motivating individuals who experience these emotions while acquiring to keep acquiring, despite negative consequences.' Sound familiar? The 'negative consequences' of chasing after the 120th star in Mario 64 or all 100 hidden packages in Grand Theft Auto III may be more subdued than those of filling your entire house with orange peels and old cans of refried beans. But game designers know that it's pretty damn easy to tap into this deep-rooted need to collect and accumulate. And like happy suckers we buy into it all the time, some to a greater degree than others."
Gotta catch em all, POKEMON!
They always attribute this behavior to some kind of compulsive outlier, but the the behavior is common to all humans. And is at the root of a lot of the fruitless consumerism. Comes from before there was culture or communication. Comes from the lizard brain. And probably never failed the early hunter-gatherer who didn't get penalized for keeping too may cats or a garbage-ridden apartment.
Okay, so basically this article is saying that people collect and horde in-game items because they like it and it makes them happy ("positive emotions").
Sort of like the way psychopaths kill because it makes them happy, lazy people are sedentary because it makes them happy, and fat people eat too much because it makes them happy.
That's saying about as much as barking dogs.
I think it's mostly children that do crazy stuff like collect all the hidden packages.
So this is why I idle 24/7 in a vain attempt for a pithy sniper hat...
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Learning that there is such a thing as the Obsessive Compulsive Society is really the best birthday present I could have gotten.
But game designers know that it's pretty damn easy to tap into this deep-rooted need to collect and accumulate. And like happy suckers we buy into it all the time, some to a greater degree than others.
Game designers are just out to reel in suckers. Skinner boxes, treadmills, and obsessive compulsive triggers - anything to land them a pigeon. Yup. That's it. It wouldn't ever be because someone wants to build something they think might be fun.
"Games are designed with lots of stuff to collect because gamers like to collect stuff. We have no idea why, really, and lord knows we didn't try to test any hypotheses."
This is not some new thought or idea. Its survivalism and hasn't changed since... ever. Horde it up 'cause you may not have it tomorrow, and you still gotta eat. This trend in games is now obvious probably because of the popularity of WoW et. al. and how our "selves" are so easily transferred to an abstract, digital realm where we can horde and collect as long as there's stuff to horde and collect. For fuck's sake, people have been collecting and playing card games for decades. This is incredibly un-newsworthy.
Oh, wait.
Not this time, buddy.
Let me tell you about houses full of crap. Multiple sets of all the armors, weapons, and huge amounts of reagents all laid out on the floor in neat grids.
My pride and joy was stealing the full set of dramora armor off of the guy who helps you with corpus disease. I made a low DPS dagger with huge magical armor damage and broke the armor off his body. Then I knocked him out bare handed and robbed him and charmed him back to friendly. Each item was enchanted with a variable stat increase. All decked out I was totally unstoppable.
The best hoard was all the moon sugar in the game, which I ate all at once. When I ran and jumped it would load four or five games tiles before I hit the ground. It never wore off before I was bored of the game.
I am replaying Ultima Underworld right now on DOSBOX and am fighting my self not to hoard because items have no effect in that game really and trade is useless. P.S. Where is the bandit's hideout behind the store room? I cannot find it at all.
I wouldn't particularly call this hoarding. You're supposed to do everything you can in the game. Just because the way they show that you've accomplished something is a digital trophy of sorts doesn't mean you're hoarding them just by getting as many of these trophies as you can.
I don't think I play games like Mario64 to 'collect' all the stars, I play until I think I have finished the content, the stars track that progress. Once the game is finished, the stars don't really have any meaning or other significance.
This is very similar to filling in all the answers to a crossword, not so similar to making sure my T.V. Guide collection is complete.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I have been playing Fallout 3 for the last month or so I'll use it as an example. I specifically purchased one of the DLC packs because it changed the ending and allowed me to explore the 2/3 of the map I completely missed in the main storyline. Bethesda is especially good at creating compelling games that like a good book you hate to see actually end. Games are far too expensive to justify a flat 6-10 hours of gaming, having a plethora of achievements to unlock and hundreds of places to explore prolongs the gaming experience, increases the "fun" and extends the value of the game. I think its great that many developers are seeing the value in this.
i'd type a thoughtful reply to this article, but i'm busy playing Last Stand for the 80th time so I can get enough money for that 10th slot.
...not the game.
The box.
I was offered $20.
For the box.
And would not part with it. ...help?
I am a science fantasy fan
What's up with the flood of articles lately that try to psychologically deconstruct gamers and their games? They all act like it's some big discovery that video games pander to humans' psychological traits. All they're really saying is that people play games because they're enjoyable. Surprise surprise.
I think it's part of the whole "video game addiction awareness" crap that some groups are harping about nowadays, saying that video games cause all kinds of murder, mayhem, and familial strife. If they can make it seem like video games are designed around some sinister theory of exploiting human psychology to mind-control the players, then they can feel justified in demonizing gaming as a whole.
I've never had much of a desire to own stuff. But I've never owned a broadcast TV in my whole life. I have a DVD player and a large flat-screen display, but no antenna or cable connection. Watching 20 minutes of commercials per hour is bad for you. Hours a day of "consume, consume, consume" has to have an effect.
The "hoarding" mentality may come from overdosing on advertising.
At least my pack rat nature has been channelled in digital things that can be stored on hard drives. Sure I spend 250 dollars last month upgrading because I'd filled every drive I owned, but I'm lucky.
My dad accumulates books. Online used book stores like abebooks are the worst thing to ever happen to my mother. Now five or six books arrive in the mail most weeks from all over the country. Last time I was home pretty much every open wall in the house had vanished behind bookshelves.
Hording in the digital age may still be expensive, but at least it takes up a lot less total volume in meatspace
There's a whole foundation for obsessive compulsives? Why wasn't I informed of this?
Wailt til you get your own place and you intend on being there for a while, that's when you'll find out what you're really like for hoarding stuff. I'm terrible, though I have friends who are really light on what they own. Partly depends on your needs and interests I guess. Doing a house up is terrible for this...
There always seems to be one more tool that needs to be bought to fix a simple DIY job and having a garage, oh that's a killer for keeping spare dust sheets, lengths of useful timber, etc....
Sounds like you're pretty good at getting rid of books as soon as you've read them but I find that tough! :-)
haha, that made me laugh. Good riddance to signal 11. Unfortunately, the typical slashdot post reads like it was written by him.
Such as these? http://images.google.com/images?q=runescape+bank+pictures
Rule 284: Deep down, everyone's a Ferengi.
If you're prone to obsessive behaviours then you're going to be prone to them in games as well as in real life. I can't see how game designers are somehow bad for catering to this. As long as the game is playable without the need to collect all the widgets then they're actually just creating extra features.
Speaking as someone who is prone to obsessive behaviours I can tell you that the most idiotic flash game can 'trap' me if I'm not on my guard. For me it isn't the need to collect widgets, it's the "One More Game" syndrome. Win or lose, it's the need to play just One More Game.
And that, dear readers, is why I won't play online games any more. Rather than battle the temptation I'll just avoid those things that could cause me problems. Bravo to the designers for giving people the option but I'll pass, thanks.
One last thought for all of you folks who have a ton of $ITEM in your house. After having to clear out the households of several deceased relatives I recommend that you GET RID OF YOUR CRAP! We're doing that ourselves since we discovered first-hand just how much stuff accumulates and how much space is being filled by completely useless $ITEM. Books have gotten cleared out to just the ones we really like, unused small appliances are gone, saved 'just in case' are gone. We're not only doing this as a favor to whoever has to clean out our house but to actually make it more livable. We've even got ~gasp~ empty space on the bookshelves.
... The Psychology of Collection and Hoarding In Basements?
That might be more useful.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The need to acquire things, more than any other single thing, comes down to one basic human need; to feel as though we are, in some way, superior to our fellow man.
Blizzard understood that implicitly, and three of their most successful games, Diablo, Diablo 2, and World of Warcraft, were essentially based on that principle from the ground up.
A multiplayer game doesn't need complex or innovative gameplay to be compelling, at all. All it really needs to do is provide ways for a player to think that he has a bigger dick than the other people he's playing with, and you can keep him perpetually addicted.
It's not about a rat pressing a lever and getting a food pellet, at all. It's about the rat thinking that he has bigger genitals than other rats.
You could just as easily compare collecting things in games to collecting illegal music downloads that you'll never listen to. Same goes for having the largest collection of illegal movies that you'll never watch (but you can sure brag about!) It's easy to get caught up in this stuff, but you gotta be reasonable. At least collecting things in a game is more rewarding than collecting horrible movies that you won't watch.
sounds like you're a better man than me! nice one :-)
One lesson I learnt was - don't use storage places, they are a waste of money. At one point I was due to go off to a project in Ghana for a year so I put my stuff into storage. Project didn't work out, six months later I pulled my stuff out of storage - and when I worked out how much I'd spent on storing it... well it would have been cheaper to sell/ throw away /give to friends on long term loan most of that stuff and just buy new stuff when I got it back. Waste of money storing cheap furniture etc for that long. Really interesting was that there were skips for dumped stuff round the back of this chain self storage place and they were always full, I wasn't the only person coming back after a while and wondering "what the heck did I store this for?".
I used to be a librarian so getting rid of books is truly painful.... :-)
We've named all our kills after some former pokemon. Even got some named on the wall. I was thinking of building a Rolling Chest Freezer that looked like a Ultra Ball so we can fill it with pieces of fillet pokemon.
I was going to say this is correlation not causation. However, it's not even correlation. The two aren't related. Achievements are motivational because off of a sense of accomplishment, giving a person a positive sense of self-worth (or introjected worth, external acceptance in other words). Obsessive behaviours are not the same at all. I can't speak for hoarders but as far as "checkers" go, it tends to be motivated by fear, from a chemical imbalance according to the medical theory, although more modern thinking now says it's due to introjects in early life.
But anyway. Obsessive behaviours are not the same as achievement behaviours, not the same AT ALL. Total nonsense.
With the NES collectors, you could argue that there is no real harm in having 6000 ROMs from a game system that's 15 or so years old. They don't sell it
...except in the Virtual Console aisle of the Wii Shop Channel.
The glass can be recycled and the metal can be sold to a scrap dealer. I work for a glass company and I know that we get paid a small amount per ton of glass that we have them recycle. This is window glass, too, with mixed amounts of tempered and untempered glass, along with various coated glasses and such.
I think the secret door (locked) is in the corner on the left of the entrance.
The game has a couple of bugs (features) which actually discouraged hoarding -
1) nesting containers increases the chances of those items disappearing (PROTIP: Don't store talismans in nested containers ;)
2) As you go back up levels to get the Key of Courage the more items you have the larger the tendency for them to disappear.
Bookmarked. Just like ever other webpage I've ever surfed to.
I glanced through the comments and didn't see it, so I thought I'd mention what I know. I just finished my junior year in college, and at my institution we took a pretty rigorous (read: I can't believe I survived) course in psychology. Though it was an intro course, we got a new prof and she felt the need to cover numerous parts of the brain and detail their functions / interactions with other parts (she was a cognitive scientist, so her affinity to detail in brain studies makes sense). To make a long story short, we learned that the part of the brain responsible for hoarding is called the "right mesial prefrontal cortex." This part of the brain is present in everyone; genetic factors and other reasons provide for its excessive activation in some people as opposed to others. This explains why some people hoard much more than others (even though almost everyone possesses the same basic circuitry). Furthermore, certain companies (we focused on advertising companies, but the gaming industry works in this case as well) intentionally focus on tapping this circuitry to make a buck. From this, we get the McDonald's Beanie Baby rush, the Furby craze, and a host of other collectible furors we all remember. It seems that with some collectibles (Pokemon, anyone?) we just can't help ourselves.
I donno how common this is, but whenever I play a game with some sort of super powerful weapon/grenades/missiles or really any type of rare/semirare ammo, I almost never use it. I always have to save it "for when I need it". Always waiting for the next big boss or tough spot that I really never think of using what is argueably the funnest part of most games. Sometimes I look and realize I have had maxed out grenades (or whatever) for the past few hours and havent used one, despite having passed by tons that I cant pick up because... Im already maxed out.
In fallout 3, I beat the game having used the shotgun, hunting rifle, and melee for 75% of the game. I used a total of 9 grenades the entire time, no mines. Looking back, I realized I had over 200 grenades in my house, 100 mines, almost 3000 rounds for the minigun, 15000 for the assault rifle. Only ever used the basics though, because I might need it... And I have to open every door/box/filling cabinet I pass. I replayed it, using a new style forcing myself to use ONLY grenades/heavy weapons/melee. After a while, I noticed I was drifting back to the old habits again.
Partly I blame game designers that make something "seem" special or rare, and initiating that mind set of having to save. Money/credit systems in games are usually screwed up. The first few hours you are desperate for money, the next you are swimming in it. In mass effect, I just started playing two days ago and have around 150,000 credits. Every kill nets another 1500 and then the surveys of minerals are worth some 5,000 alone. There isnt anything for me to buy anymore that I even want/need!
The first thing that comes to mind is the achievement system on Xbox Live. While I'm not a big achievement hoarder, I have known people that HAVE to get EVERY point in EVERY game. To the point of running around for hours in a game to get that last 10 points.
I saw this news item on my iphone before driving my late-model car to my condo by the lake, which I go to on weekends to wind down from the 14 hours days I put in during the week (plus weekend time remotely at the condo) so that I make enough to maintain this lifestyle.
I can't believe people will do all that in the game just to accumulate stuff.
Before flashy effects and extreme graphics, games had real, belieivable content.
Hoarding is a way for game designers (not developers!) to add content that seems meaningful. Just fill it up, baby.
Hey, new research study idea: "Faux studies are contaminated by game players born and bred by bad design"
...743GB of p0rn sitting on my server at home, despite the fact that I'll never have enough time in one lifetime to view all of the 234,000 movies and 1.78 million images.
When my wife finds it all I'll refer her to the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation and claim that it's not my fault, it's a deep-seated human trait that compells me to collect stuff.
For the Horde!
That was supposed to be "Thoughts from England"
I found in Balder's Gate, (one of the last games I seriously tried to play), that I enjoyed trying to build a strong and efficient character with effective tools/weapons, but that after a while I saw the pattern of more difficult challenges increasing the demand for more powerful weapons/tools. When the pattern became obvious to my base, automatic nature; (intellectually I knew from the outset how such games were designed), I lost all interest in the game because it felt repetitive and the story was uninteresting. I quit about a quarter of the way through.
My base, automatic nature, I think, has figured out that the more effective survival technique is to learn the over-arching pattern behind a challenge and then find a way to hack the system rather than to defeat the challenge head-on directly. --Once a pattern is understood, the need to engage in more base magpie-like behavior becomes pointless, and thus my "reward center" stops pumping happy juice into the rest of my brain.
Games which DO manage to engage me forever and ever are more akin to territory-winning combat scenarios where the 'enemy' is constantly advancing. My survival instincts, even if they recognize the old patterns, will nonetheless be stirred to action when they can predict the loss of territory and life if I take no action whatsoever. And so my 'happy juice' center starts pumping like mad when it sees the possibility of annihilation creeping towards me across the game board. In Balder's Gate, after a while, all I wanted to do was hang up the sword and find a nice little cottage by the sea to settle down in where I didn't have to work so hard at such a menial labor.
They don't call it "Hand to Hand" combat for nothing.
-FL
I'm a hoarder, although I always called it completionist. I've always wanted to find all the secret rooms and collect all the things I can to get 100% in a game. But the goal has to be attainable. If it becomes a chore then what's the point?
I spent more hours than I care to disclose swimming around all 3 islands in GTA San Andreas collecting those shells, and then thought "Why the fuck am I doing this, it's incredibly dull." and I haven't been bothered enough to finish the game. If I can't complete it then I'm not interested. That's why I'm totally disinterested in setting foot inside WOW, a game that it seems from the outside can never be completed. A game that I've witnessed real people spending every spare minute practicing digital fishing in order to attain some fake skill which will enable them to do something else probably equally pointless. I've got enough chores to get on with in the physical world without setting myself a bunch of other tasks that no-one I know will ever see the results of, or even less, appreciate.
Now, can anybody tell me how to get 100% completion on Fire & Ice for the Amiga. I got 96% and I'm pretty sure I found all the secret rooms but that 4% betrays the fact that I either missed one or the game is wrong.
it's better than collecting STD's
I also think that monster ecologies would be cool. Kill all the fur seal in freezly land when power leveling and fuck... they went extinct. Kill all the predators and shit we are overrun with disease carrying rats!
Ultima Online actually did this when it first came out. It was removed when it turned out that there was a small but sufficient minority who enjoyed *deliberately* exhausting a resource for no other reason than the sheer joy of screwing over all the players who needed it.
It would be cool if they had that mechanism, but if someone over-hunted animals, they would break the law and be a marked man.
Then it would be up to the other players to hunt them down and bring them to justice!
This idea appeals to me because I hate bots and farmers etc. in MMORPGs.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
For the hoard!
I knew a guy who would collect body parts off of WoW monsters, heads, hands etc. he refused to turn them in for quest rewards..
Does anyone else find this trend of item/achievement hording to be troubling?
I wish I could denigrate and demean those who waste away their online lives pursing the virtual carrots on virtual sticks, but then I remembered that I logged 40+ hours in the last two weeks trying to unlock the new spy & sniper weapons in a Team Fortress 2 content expansion pack... Now I've got them, and I've played with them for at least a few hours, but now I feel no reason to play the game by myself much anymore. (I will still play if my friends ask me to, because then it's a social experience.) That said, when the next patch comes out, I might invest a few more hours in the game.
Still, I think my behavior is troubling, because the amount of quality development time put into those new weapons and maps in TF2 is nowhere near the level of quality development time put into most single-player games, and I put just as much play-time into those titles.
I hate seeing less innovation leading to more profitability, because that encourages developers to take the easy way out: "let's use our remaining development time to add achievements instead of new gameplay modes or side missions!"
It's also incredibly discouraging to see my hobby, which some liken to an art, to turn into a world-wide e-peen waving contest. For some reason, I have an urge to turn off the computer and read a novel, purely as a political gesture to make myself feel better.
When I first read the article title I misread it to be Hoarding of Games and it started me thinking of way back in my computer days in the early 80's. The same psychology of hoarding gave me pause, and reminded me of the kids I used to know that would try to collect every game for a system that they could. Pirated of course. Some people used to try and collect every piece of software written for old Apple II or Atari's. They spent so much time collecting and trying to collect that most of what they had they never even played or used once. It made me reconsider what I thought about piracy....stealing, sharing, collecting. I'm still not sure what I think of this inbred way of going about things in the human species, but I find the urge to hoard interesting. When someone has 10,000 pieces of software or 20,000, what does it mean? After the 200,000th song or the 10,000 movie.... what then..... more collecting, different collecting.