What people want and what makes them happy rarely coincide.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The idea that letting people choose what they want to make them more happy isn't completely off base. An individual is in an excellent position to know their own needs, wants, and preferences. But it's also false in a lot of cases and for a lot of counter-intuitive reasons. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

• Humans are blithe as fuck about borrowing from the future to benefit themselves now. We can see this with non-emergency payday loans and drug usage. Even though in the long run it'd make them happier to forgo.
• Humans have a very bad sense of iterative probability. The Monty Hall Problem is a classic case. Even if you increase the number of doors with goats in them to a thousand a majority will still choose to go with their original decision.
• All things being equal, humans tend to see 'not making a choice' as morally superior. All things being equal actually understates the case. Quick philosophy website example steal: if you have a runaway train about to crash into a station (killing 10 people) and the only way to stop it would be to throw an old lady in front of the train, many people would opt not to do it. However if you frame the choice as five workers being stuck in the middle of the tracks and the only way to save their lives is to veer the train off into a crowded station, most people would elect to run over the five workers.
  
  This is related to but distinct from the status quo bias and it's such a huge problem with moral philosophy that I'm going to make a separate thread on this one of these days.
• Human beings naively optimize all of the time. That is, when given the choice to make decisions ahead of time they'll allot a wider range of options than they would actually use if the choices were made discretely. That is, if you go to the grocery store on one big shopping trip every month you'll have more wasted goods (discounting spoilage) because people will buy things for the future that they don't actually end up using.
• Dunning Kreuger effect. Enough said. It's so bad that oftentimes complete strangers are better at assessing a person than they are of themselves.
• People overestimate how long it will take for them not to get tired of a fixed choice and due to the status quo bias will persist until the breaking point. If a little kid's favorite meal is broccoli and cheese, giving it to him every day will actually decrease his happiness. And not just until the final two or three days when he decides he can't take it anymore, but the third and fourth day of broccoli and cheese for dinner will have a sharp dropoff in desirability.
• Humans have a status quo bias i.e. are lazy and fear change. Enough said. Read Green Eggs and Ham.
• As counter-intuitive as it seems, people actually get demotivated by having a wide array of meaningful choices. You'd think that giving a student a list from six 18-19th century English Literature books (that they've all read) to write an essay about would make them less happy than a list of twenty books (that they've also all read), but surprisingly enough that's not the case.

I could really go on all day, but you get the idea. What I'm trying to get at is that if anyone makes the claim 'dude, just give them what they want, it'll make them happier in the end' for any game design (or life) decision, you should be very very skeptical of the claim. Depending on what the topic is, doing such a thing will just end up a huge pile of failure for you and everyone involved.

[A Man In Black]

So, is this an offshoot of the loot discussion?

Because while I find the argument for random loot fairly convincing save for one issue. If people don't get what they want, they will be unhappy, and they'll have someone to blame for their unhappiness. Even though they'll be happier in the long run than if you just automatically give them everything they want, there's still that friction. What do you do to mitigate the friction from the day-to-day frustration when the randomness doesn't give people things they want?

[Koumei]

Dunning Kreuger effect. Enough said. It's so bad that oftentimes complete strangers are better at assessing a person than they are of themselves.

Here's something I'm wondering about: many people know about the DK. Presumably, if enough people understand it, would they not second-guess any self-analysis? I suppose this is a general "How does knowledge of a psychological bias or effect influence people's decisions?" thing. There are probably plenty of studies on it, but you know how you mentioned laziness? Yeah.

I just find myself second-guessing any self-evaluation, generally going with the evaluations of general consensus (enough people say I draw good porn that I'm willing to assume this is true on an amateur level, note that I don't have to self-evaluate here).

Humans have a status quo bias i.e. are lazy and fear change. Enough said. Read Green Eggs and Ham.

If the eggs and ham (things you fucking recognise) are green? There is something wrong with them. I would not eat such food that was green without either:
A) It being marketed as such, and still sealed, well within the best before date. I will then want to try it because it's different and cool.
B) Getting a full tox screen and bacterial test run on it.

As counter-intuitive as it seems, people actually get demotivated by having a wide array of meaningful choices. You'd think that giving a student a list from six 18-19th century English Literature books (that they've all read) to write an essay about would make them less happy than a list of twenty books (that they've also all read), but surprisingly enough that's not the case.

That sounds very false to me. Now if you expand that out to an infinite list to pick from, I see it becoming harder for them to make that initial choice, but feeling a lot better about the decision afterwards. Which is tied to one of your first points: instant gratification versus long-term results.

Not that I particularly care, given it's just another long-winded rant full of deepisms, as though you're revealing amazing truths that everyone else is just too thick to get, for your incredible new product/business strategy.

[Fuchs]

And what do you do if they never get the stuff they want? "You'll get lucky the next time loot drops" turns into "You'll have fun in the next game... probably".

Like it or not, gamers these day and age are not the uninformed masses anymore. They know what they want, and they are not happier if they have to jump through hoops until finally they get to have fun with an item - especially if that decreases the time they can actually use that item.

People don't think "Oh, this axe is worth it, I suffered 3 levels for this!" They think "Oh this axe is great... but I have only one level left to play with it before the campaign ends".

Playing the loot lottery is as smart as playing the real life lottery. And a game where you can't play the character you want within the scopes of the game, not without getting lucky at a random roll, is stupid.

[Nihilistic_Impact]

As counter-intuitive as it seems, people actually get demotivated by having a wide array of meaningful choices. You'd think that giving a student a list from six 18-19th century English Literature books (that they've all read) to write an essay about would make them less happy than a list of twenty books (that they've also all read), but surprisingly enough that's not the case.

That sounds very false to me. Now if you expand that out to an infinite list to pick from, I see it becoming harder for them to make that initial choice, but feeling a lot better about the decision afterwards. Which is tied to one of your first points: instant gratification versus long-term results.

This is true and something I'm taught and regularly employ at work. The idea behind it is that people can become easily overwhelmed with choices, so limiting them helps them to be more selective or they lock up. General rule of thumb in my line of work is 2-3 options; most often it's do you want to take your meds now, or in a half hour.

If you think about it it's also why people are found of saying restrictions breed creativity.

[Fuchs]

This is true and something I'm taught and regularly employ at work. The idea behind it is that people can become easily overwhelmed with choices, so limiting them helps them to be more selective or they lock up. General rule of thumb in my line of work is 2-3 options; most often it's do you want to take your meds now, or in a half hour.

If you think about it it's also why people are found of saying restrictions breed creativity.

If a player can't decide what exact magic weapon he wants I can always ask what kind of weapon(s) they like (which is a far narrower range) and pick the magic properties myself then, as the DM.

[Nihilistic_Impact]

Which is something I can agree with. When creating a character I usually have an image in my mind of what I invision them later on as they advance in levels.

Not everyone will know exactly what magic item they'll want and opinions can change over the course of the campaign; but usually they do like a certain type of weapon.

Honestly I think a mixture of random and player suggested thoughts are best way to go.

[Lago PARANOIA]

That sounds very false to me. Now if you expand that out to an infinite list to pick from, I see it becoming harder for them to make that initial choice, but feeling a lot better about the decision afterwards. Which is tied to one of your first points: instant gratification versus long-term results.

I pulled that example more or less from the whole Choice Is Demotivating psychology paper where they did run that experiment, though it was with movies rather than books. The thing is that the people who had a wider array of movies to choose from initially ended up being less satisfied in the end. Which is really counterintuitive because you'd think that they had a much greater chance of having the perfect movie that they could pour their heart and soul out into.

Now as the counter-methodology for that paper shows, it's not strictly a 'more choices = less fun' relationship. For one, several papers on the same subject show that it's actually more of a bell curve and having really few (or no) choices is still less motivating than having too many.

Secondly, there are a lot of factors that play into the ceiling for 'gah, this is actually making it less fun for me'. Time pressures, meaningfulness of choices, consequences for a bad decision (i.e. do you get a chocolate as opposed to what kind of chocolate), whether they employed a choice elimination heuristic, how familiar they were with the options, the horizontality of the choices (in D&D terms, choosing from a list of twenty fixed classes is more demotivating than choosing from a list of 12 classes and 3 builds for each class, crazy as it sounds), and so on. The choice demotivation threshold is extremely complex, but it has far-reaching ramifications for how you want to design your RPG--ramifications that run counter to what most people expect. Not just for WoF or for random magical item drops.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As far as the Monty Hall goat problem goes, I actually got the thousand-goat version first (as opposed to second, which is how it's normally done) and made the right choice. But when I got the two-goat/three door version of it I derped the fuck out. It was so weird, too, I knew what was going on but I just couldn't force myself to intuitively see that there was an optimal and suboptimal choice. It felt really weird.

[tussock]

Playing the loot lottery is as smart as playing the real life lottery. And a game where you can't play the character you want within the scopes of the game, not without getting lucky at a random roll, is stupid.

I see our point of difference now. You played 2nd edition where your Bastardsword fighter found magic bastardswords just because you were one. So you have always "planned" on being a bastardsworder with that exact magic item since forever.

I played Basic and 2nd edition with arbitrary random no-trade magic items and spells. The items I ended up getting with various characters could not be planned for, and thus always required me to adapt to them, which was part of all my character concepts because it had to be.

And when I specialised in something dumb like a two-handed sword, I expected to be using non-magic weapons for a very long time, and maybe get a better cut of the other types of treasure because of that, like boots and belts.

You can't want specific magic items if the game doesn't give them to you. Well, you can, on account of you'll bitch forever about it if you don't and your DM has no spine, but you get what I mean.

[Fuchs]

You can't want specific magic items if the game doesn't give them to you. Well, you can, on account of you'll bitch forever about it if you don't and your DM has no spine, but you get what I mean.

You call it bithcing, I call it "people agreeing on what kind of game to play".

It's not AD&D's era anymore. Back then people rolling their character stats in order was also done - today that sort of game would tank.

Why narrow the choices and options down by limiting them to ranom rolls? You can play your "I adapt to random treasure" character, I can play my "uses a short sword when using a weapon" character in the same game.

Players have changed. Alternatives are there. Either a game adapts, or it dies.

[fectin]

As far as the Monty Hall goat problem goes, I actually got the thousand-goat version first (as opposed to second, which is how it's normally done) and made the right choice. But when I got the two-goat/three door version of it I derped the fuck out. It was so weird, too, I knew what was going on but I just couldn't force myself to intuitively see that there was an optimal and suboptimal choice. It felt really weird.

It's because the host isn't picking at random, and must eliminate a bad offer. It's usually described without one of those elements, so it's a psychology question instead of a probability question.

[Fuchs]

While you can make a case for some people not knowing what makes them happy, you can generally assume that people know what makes them unhappy.

In RPGs, playing a character they don't like generally falls under "makes players unhappy".

Telling them that no, that doesn't make them unhappy, generally doesn't make them happy - quite the contrary.

[OgreBattle]

Lago, does posting on The Gaming Den give you happiness?

[PoliteNewb]

Isn't it great that Lago found the universal definition of happiness, so he can tell "people" why they aren't doing the right thing to get it? Makes me feel happier. Objectively happier.

[BearsAreBrown]

Stop being dicks and quibbling over the definition of happiness. He's right.

Ask a player if they like RPGs with lots of choices. They will invariably say they do. Present them with 30 possible actions per round + movement and see if they're still happy.

People are bad at knowing what will make them happy, and even worse at explaining why. This isn't Lago dicking around, this is accepted well understood psychology.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Lago, the 'bias towards inaction' that you noticed is a manifestation of uncertainty about the future.

When you're on a runaway train that is going to 'crash into' a crowded station, throwing an old lady in the way may not stop it. Even if it does, there might not have been a need for that: what if someone got to the emergency break or cleared the platform? Contrived examples with known non-probabilistic outcomes lead to 'illogical' answers. The heuristics used for decision making just aren't designed for dealing with impossible situations (and why would they be?). Furthermore, people questioned often don't "trust" the examiner. They actually think something along the lines of 'This must be a trick question; the crash probably won't be that bad, so I won't kill the poor old lady' or 'This must be a trick question; there's probably another way to stop the train, so it can probably be stopped before the workmen get squished'.

It's true that this can lead to absolutely retarded moral philosophy and behavior in practice, but that's true with any heuristic-based decision making.

[shadzar]

It's not AD&D's era anymore. Back then people rolling their character stats in order was also done - today that sort of game would tank.

and yet there are plenty of people still playing AD&D.

you need to sign up to dragonsfoot.org and see what happens to you there.

i give you 2 hours tops, before you are banned for trolling.
________
[topic]
as for what players want.. there are some things a game like D&D CAN offer. but the game is more about choices DURING play, than BEFORe play that make a difference.

i dont care if you only get to pick your class as an elf, or you get to pick 1000 feats and skills, none of that will matter when it comes down to play. nothing tells you you MUST use caltrops when you run away.

the game is played AFTER the character is created. this is even true in 3rd. (considering you plan your build 500 levels in advance)

it will boil down to the old sayings...

give them an inch, they will take a mile.

and

you can please all the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time; but you cant please all of the people all of the time.

so as a player, you jsut have to accept that you dont always get everything you want, and even if you do, you wont enjoy it that much because YOU arent the only one playing...there are at least 3~4 other players minimum that will be interfering with your goals.

it is part of the game.

[Fuchs]

Stop being dicks and quibbling over the definition of happiness. He's right.

Ask a player if they like RPGs with lots of choices. They will invariably say they do. Present them with 30 possible actions per round + movement and see if they're still happy.

People are bad at knowing what will make them happy, and even worse at explaining why. This isn't Lago dicking around, this is accepted well understood psychology.

People know what they hate though.

[Maj]

The paradox of choice is only a concern when all the options on the table are similarly desired.

If there are 20 flavors of cheese on the sample table, and 18 of them are bleu, then I actually only have two cheeses to decide between because I can't eat bleu cheese. While it looks to an outsider like I have a lot of choices, I actually don't.

Most of the people on these forums understand that in the stacks and stacks of books containing magic spells, a relatively small percentage are what you actually want to use. Based on character type and campaign type, even more spells get eliminated until there's not as much overload. To a newb, there are a lot of spell choices... Except there actually aren't.

The idea that 30 possible actions will make players unhappy will only hold true if players don't have some way of eliminating some of those options which character type and circumstance most certainly will. But players don't have to choose only one option and be happy with it; they have to choose one option this round. Which means that the effectiveness at accomplishing the player's goal will also become a factor in the frequency of an action.

[Username17]

The paradox of choice is only a concern when all the options on the table are similarly desired.

No. The paradox of choice becomes a concern if it takes actual effort to determine how desired any particular option on the table is. This is especially apt for role playing games, where many of the options are going to be things like "Nybor's Gentle Reminder" which could do basically anything.

People know what they hate though.

not without a fair amount of introspection and research they don't. People were totally psyched about the Skill Challenges, and lots of people thought they were great. Only after using them a few times and letting it sink in did they realize that they actually hated the fucking things.

-Username17

[Ikeren]

All things being equal, humans tend to see 'not making a choice' as morally superior. All things being equal actually understates the case. Quick philosophy website example steal: if you have a runaway train about to crash into a station (killing 10 people) and the only way to stop it would be to throw an old lady in front of the train, many people would opt not to do it. However if you frame the choice as five workers being stuck in the middle of the tracks and the only way to save their lives is to veer the train off into a crowded station, most people would elect to run over the five workers.

This is related to but distinct from the status quo bias and it's such a huge problem with moral philosophy that I'm going to make a separate thread on this one of these days.

There is a vast moral discourse on this subject that you simplified a little too much; and also used a tragically bad example for. Tsk. Tsk. Your number of lives in both situations is different; you're supposed to keep numbers consistent for Trolley Problems. The way you properly frame your statement is thus:

Trolley Problem 1:

You have a runaway, out of control trolley. You are a brilliant physicist and a doctor. There is a Y path; and it is currently moving towards 5 people, whom due to being a brilliant physicist and a doctor, you are certain it will kill those 5 people. You also see that they're pinned under some material, and you know that they will be absolutely unable to get out of the way, or get any assistance in getting out of the way. There are no possible realities where these 5 people will not die if the trolley runs down that path.

On the other path, there is one person. He is in the same situation as the 5. All 6 of these people are unknown trolley workers; all have equal chance of turning out to be great or morally reprehensible beings.
You stand beside a switch. Do you flip it?

(Answer: Most people say yes; 5 lives > 1 life)


Scenario two:

You have a straight trolley path; there are 5 trolley workers trapped as in Scenario A. You are still a brilliant physicist and doctor. You are on a bridge over the track. There is a fat man, another trolley worker, on the bridge. Being a brilliant physicist, you are absolutely certain pushing him over will both kill him, and stop the Trolley, saving the lives of the 5 trapped trolley workers. All 6 of these people are unknown trolley workers; all have equal chance of turning out to be great or morally reprehensible beings.

Do you push the fat trolley worker off the bridge?
(Answer: Most people say no, even a lot of people that said yes to the first half)

Due to laws in your country, you are likely not to be held legally accountable in any of the situations (no consequences to self).


What this seems to reveal is an inconsistency in our moral intuitions, and there is a vast literature in sorting it out. "Appeal to inaction" is a way of framing it, but your examples used different number of lives, which allow for different consequentialist calculus; which you want to weed out.

[Username17]

All things being equal, humans tend to see 'not making a choice' as morally superior. All things being equal actually understates the case. Quick philosophy website example steal: if you have a runaway train about to crash into a station (killing 10 people) and the only way to stop it would be to throw an old lady in front of the train, many people would opt not to do it. However if you frame the choice as five workers being stuck in the middle of the tracks and the only way to save their lives is to veer the train off into a crowded station, most people would elect to run over the five workers.

This is related to but distinct from the status quo bias and it's such a huge problem with moral philosophy that I'm going to make a separate thread on this one of these days.

There is a vast moral discourse on this subject that you simplified a little too much; and also used a tragically bad example for. Tsk. Tsk. Your number of lives in both situations is different; you're supposed to keep numbers consistent for Trolley Problems.

Actually changing the numbers underlines the core problem with the bias towards inaction. If the number of people were the same, the fact that there is a bias towards inaction would be merely a curiosity. But since the bias towards inaction is actually strong enough that it can tilt a trolley decision more than changing the number of lives does - the bias towards inaction is itself clearly immoral.

-Username17

[Ikeren]

@Frank; good point, except I think you get less clear answers then. It's hard to tell if someone isn't acting because there aren't enough lives being saved/killed, (IE, balance isn't good enough), or whether it is an actual bias towards inaction.

IE: 5:1 ratio? Inaction
IE: 10:1 ratio? Action

Just means that someone has a higher threshold for action; which is less morally interesting. If you could set up a scenario that was

5:1 ratio? Action
10:1 ratio? Inaction;
That'd be an interesting reveal. Except I think you'd have a hard time setting up that situation that anyone would discuss. Like; Lago says this is a common view in the example he sets up, but I don't think I could find many people that wouldn't admit that this is logically inconsistent and morally suspect.

[Username17]

Lago says this is a common view in the example he sets up, but I don't think I could find many people that wouldn't admit that this is logically inconsistent and morally suspect.

Well people who hold that "The ends don't justify the means" actually feel that the bias towards inaction is not merely a curiosity about human psychology but a positive moral stance that they support. Personally, I think that such a sentiment is reprehensible, but there you go.

In any case, the whole point is that a majority of people would admit that the bias towards inaction is logically inconsistent and morally suspect once they analyze the results. However if you give people the chance to make the decisions one at a time with a short period for reflection - their gut reaction is as Lago stated in a majority of cases. And those answers are, when held next to each other, clearly wrong. People give markedly different answers when the question is phrased "Would you change the track the trolley is on?" than they do when the question is phrased "Which track would you put the trolley on?"

The point is indeed that if you ask people for superficial answers to questions about what is best for them you will get answers that are wrong a very large amount of the time. So when designing games, simply polling people as to whether they superficially think an idea is good or not will not actually tell you whether people will like it in practice. People will say that they like something until they try it for a while and it turns out to make them miserable (like 4e Skill Challenges), and people will say they hate something until they give it up and it turns out that it brought them great joy (like trash drops).

-Username17