Irresistible

by Adam Alter

  The most powerful vehicle for juice must surely be virtual reality (VR) technology, which is still in its infancy. VR places the user in an immersive environment that can be real (a beach on the other side of the world) or imaginary (the surface of Mars). The user navigates and interacts with that world as she might the real world. Advanced VR also introduces multisensory feedback, including touch, hearing, and smell.

  In a podcast released on April 28, 2016, author and sports columnist Bill Simmons asked billionaire investor Chris Sacca about his experience with VR. “I’m afraid for my kids, a little bit,” Simmons told Sacca. “I do wonder if this VR world you dive into is almost superior to the actual world you’re in. Instead of having human interactions, I can just go into this VR world and do VR things and that’s gonna be my life.” Sacca, an early Google employee and Twitter investor, shared Simmons’ concerns:

  That’s very legit. One of the things that’s interesting about technology is that the improvement in resolution and sound modeling and responsiveness is outpacing our own physiological development. Our biology has been the same—we weren’t built to ingest all this light and sound in this incredibly coordinated way . . . you can watch some early videos . . . where you are on top of a skyscraper, and your body will not let you step forward. Your body is convinced that that is the side of the skyscraper. That’s not even a super high-res or super immersive VR platform. So we have some crazy days ahead of us.

  VR has been around for decades, but it’s now on the cusp of going mainstream. In 2013, a VR company called Oculus VR raised $2.5 million on Kickstarter. Oculus VR was promoting a headset for video games called the Rift. Until recently, most people thought of VR as a tool for gaming, but that changed when Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg had big ideas for the Oculus Rift that went far beyond games. “This is just the start,” Zuckerberg said. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face—just by putting goggles in your home.” VR no longer dwelled on the fringes. “One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people,” said Zuckerberg.

  In October 2015, the New York Times shipped a small cardboard VR viewer with its Sunday paper. Paired with a smartphone, the Google Cardboard viewer streamed exclusive Times VR content, including documentaries on North Korea, Syrian refugees, and a vigil following the Paris terror attacks. I spent much of that Sunday afternoon lost in a documentary about child refugees, forgetting for long stretches of time that I wasn’t actually standing in a devastated schoolroom in war-torn Ukraine. “Instead of sitting through forty-five seconds on the news of someone walking around and explaining how terrible it is, you are actively becoming a participant in the story that you are viewing,” said Christian Stephen, a producer of one of the VR documentaries.

  But the Google Cardboard pales next to the Oculus Rift. According to Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR, “Google Cardboard is muddy water compared with the fancy wine of Oculus Rift.” Of course, for the moment, Google Cardboard has the advantage of costing around $10 online, while the Oculus Rift sells for $599.

  Despite the promise of VR, it also poses great risks. Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication at Stanford’s Virtual Reality Interaction Lab, worries that the Oculus Rift will damage how people interact with the world. “Am I terrified of the world where anyone can create really horrible experiences? Yes, it does worry me. I worry what happens when a violent video game feels like murder. And when pornography feels like sex. How does that change the way humans interact, function as a society?”

  In an article for the Guardian, tech writer Stuart Dredge noted that we’re already struggling to focus our attention on friends and family. If idle smartphones and tablets draw us away from real-world interactions, how will we fare in the face of VR devices? Steven Kotler wrote for Forbes that VR would become “legal heroin; our next hard drug.” There’s every reason to believe Kotler. When it matures, VR will allow us to spend time with anyone in any location doing whatever we like for as long as we like. That sort of boundless pleasure sounds wonderful, but it has the capacity to render face-to-face interactions obsolete. Why live in the real world with real, flawed people when you can live in a perfect world that feels just as real?

  Since mainstream VR is in its infancy, we can’t be sure that it will dramatically change how we live. But all early signs suggest that it will be both miraculous and dangerous. As Zuckerberg said, it will allow us to see doctors who are thousands of miles away, to visit and learn about distant places (both inaccessible and imaginary) that we might never experience firsthand, and to “visit” loved ones who live across the world. Wielded by big business and game designers, though, it might also prove to be a vehicle for the latest in a series of escalating behavioral addictions.

  —

  In contrast to VR, the physical realm is a long series of losses punctuated by occasional wins. Gamers have to lose from time to time. A game that pays out all the time is no fun at all. When I met with David Goldhill, the C.E.O. of the Game Show Network, he told me a story that illustrates the surprising downsides of winning all the time. Goldhill is a natural storyteller. He radiates competence and reveals an uncanny command of any topic that comes up in conversation. We discussed my hometown, Sydney, and by the end of the conversation I was scribbling notes like a tourist. Goldhill’s story involved a gambler who wins all the time. “The guy thinks he’s in heaven because he wins every single bet. Eventually, though, he realizes that he’s in hell. It’s absolute torture.” The gambler’s been chasing wins all his life, and now that they’re arriving one after another his reason for existing is gone. Goldhill’s story illustrates why variable reinforcement is so powerful. Not because of the occasional wins, but because the experience of coming off a recent loss is deeply motivating.

  The best part of any gamble may be the millisecond before the outcome reveals itself. This is the moment of maximum tension, when gamblers are primed to see a winning outcome. We know this from a clever experiment that two psychologists published in 2006. Emily Balcetis and Dave Dunning told a group of Cornell undergrads that they were participating in a juice taste test. Some of them would be lucky enough to try freshly squeezed orange juice, but others would drink a “gelatinous, chunky, green, foul-smelling, somewhat viscous concoction labeled as an ‘organic veggie smoothie.’” As the students inspected each beverage, the experimenter explained that a computer would randomly assign them to drink a tall glass of one or the other. Half the students were told that the computer would present a number if they were assigned to drink the appealing orange juice (and a letter if they were assigned to drink the sludge), while the other half were told the reverse, that the letter spelled salvation and the number spelled doom. The students sat at the computer and waited, a lot like the gamblers waiting for a slot machine to display its outcome. A couple of seconds later the computer displayed this figure:

  Eighty-six percent of them rejoiced. The computer had come through with a win!

  As you’ve probably gathered, the figure is neither a number nor a letter, but instead an ambiguous hybrid of the number 13 and a capital letter B. The students were so intent on seeing what they hoped to see that their brains resolved the ambiguous figure in their favor. The number thirteen popped out to those who hoped to see a number, and the letter B popped out to those who hoped to see a letter. This phenomenon, called motivated perception, happens automatically all the time. It’s usually hidden to us, but Balcetis and Dunning were clever enough to find a way to unmask the effect.

  What makes motivated perception so important for addiction is that it shapes how we perceive negative feedback. David Goldhill’s story shows us that gamblers hate to win all the time—but even more than t
hat, they hate losing all the time. If hapless gamblers and gamers and Instagram users saw the world as it really is, they’d see that they lose most of the time. They’d recognize that a string of losses usually foretells more losses, rather than an approaching jackpot, and that the figure above is just as likely to be a letter as it is a number. To make matters worse, many games and gambling experiences are designed to get your hopes up by displaying near wins. In a classic early episode of The Simpsons from Season One, Homer Simpson buys a scratch card lottery ticket from Apu at the Kwik-E-Mart:

  Homer: One glazed, and one Scratch-’N-Win, please.

  [Apu hands Homer his lottery ticket and he starts to scratch it off.]

  Homer: Oh. Liberty Bell.

  [Homer scratches some more and gasps.]

  Homer: Another Liberty Bell! One more and I’m a millionaire. Come on, Liberty Bell, please, please, please, please, please, please!

  [Homer scratches to reveal a plum.]

  Homer: D’oh! That purple fruit thing. Where were you yesterday?

  Homer’s disappointment is shared by millions of scratch card near winners every week. Yesterday Homer “almost won” with two “purple fruit things” and today he almost won with two Liberty Bells. There’s a pretty good chance he’ll play again tomorrow and the next day, because to Homer this wasn’t a loss. It was an “almost win.”

  6.

  Progress

  Shigeru Miyamoto knows how to design a video game that people can’t stop playing. He is the gaming world’s answer to Steven Spielberg or Stephen King or Steve Jobs—an artist who understands what people want better than they do, and who turns everything he touches to gold. Miyamoto was behind the second-highest grossing game of all time. And also the games ranked fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, nineteenth, twenty-first, twenty-third, twenty-fifth, twenty-sixth, thirty-third, and thirty-fourth. The industry would have been much the poorer without his influence. What Miyamoto seemed to recognize better than anyone was that addictive games offered something to both novices and experts. Games designed only for beginners would grow stale too soon, and games designed only for experts would lose newcomers before they became masters.

  When Miyamoto was twenty-four he joined Nintendo. For ninety years Nintendo had traded in the stagnant playing card business, but now, in the late 1970s, it was branching out into video games. As a young man Miyamoto had fallen in love with the arcade game Space Invaders, so his father pulled some strings to arrange an interview for his son with Nintendo’s president. Miyamoto showed the president some of the toys and games he’d created in his spare time, and was hired on the spot as an apprentice video game planner.

  The early 1980s were difficult for Nintendo. The company tried to generate a U.S. market for video games, but failed dismally. Thousands of unsold games were languishing in a warehouse when Nintendo’s head engineer approached young Miyamoto and asked him to design a new game that would save the dying company. According to the ever modest Miyamoto, “no one else was available to do the work.” Miyamoto’s first game was a classic named Donkey Kong. The young hero of the game was a mustachioed plumber named Mario, who was named for Nintendo America’s warehouse landlord, Mario Segale. The same Mario would go on to feature in one of the best-selling series of all time, Super Mario Bros. Super Mario was where Miyamoto showcased his ability to make games attractive to players at all levels.

  Super Mario Bros. hooks newcomers because there are no barriers to playing the game. You can know absolutely nothing about the Nintendo console and still enjoy yourself from the very first minute. There’s no need to read motivation-sapping manuals or grind through educational tutorials before you begin. Instead, your avatar, Mario, appears on the left-hand side of an almost empty screen. Because the screen is empty, you can push the Nintendo controller’s buttons randomly and harmlessly, learning which ones make Mario jump and which ones make him move left and right. You can’t move any further left, so you quickly learn to move right. And you aren’t reading a guide that tells you which keys are which—instead, you’re learning by doing, and enjoying the sense of mastery that comes from acquiring knowledge through experience. The first few seconds of gameplay are brilliantly designed to simultaneously do two very difficult things: teach, and preserve the illusion that nothing is being taught at all.

  —

  Like thousands of kids I fell hard for Super Mario Bros. I was ten years old and my family was visiting relatives in New Zealand. My aunt introduced me to a boy who was my age, and, as ten-year-old boys tend to, he showed me his action figures and his Nintendo. I’d never seen a Nintendo before, and when he fired up Super Mario Bros., he unintentionally ruined the rest of my vacation. We played for half an hour, but by the end of that visit the game was all I could think about.

  Decades later and thousands of miles from New Zealand, I gave a lecture that was inspired by Miyamoto and a Yale economist named Martin Shubik. The two men were from different worlds, but both had devised traps that took hold almost immediately. Shubik described his trap in a journal article that he published in 1971: “There is an extremely simple, highly amusing, and instructive parlor game which can be played at any party by arranging for the auction of a dollar.” Shubik described the rules of his so-called Dollar Auction Game as “simplicity itself.” Here they are in their entirety:

  The auctioneer auctions off a dollar bill to the highest bidder, with the understanding that both the highest bidder and the second highest bidder will pay.

  If one person is willing to pay eighty cents for the dollar bill, and another person, the second-highest bidder, is willing to pay seventy cents, the auctioneer takes in one dollar and fifty cents—a tidy profit of fifty cents. Both bidders pay, but only the highest bidder gets the dollar bill. This is a great deal, obviously, because she’s paying eighty cents for a bill that’s literally worth a dollar. For the second-highest bidder, though, it’s a terrible deal. He pays seventy cents for precisely nothing.

  I played Shubik’s game in my lecture, but I auctioned off a twenty-dollar bill. Bids started at one dollar, and rose in increments of one dollar. A dozen voices immediately shouted “one dollar!” because paying a dollar for a twenty-dollar bill is a great investment. I heard “two dollars!” and then “three dollars!” Some of the students stopped bidding early on, but others continued past ten dollars, on toward the magic twenty-dollar mark. When you watch people taking part, you can see on their faces the exact moment when they realize that the game is a trap. When the number of active bidders inevitably drops to just two, one of those people has to pay for absolutely nothing. For example:

  Person A: Sixteen dollars!

  Person B: Seventeen dollars!

  . . . pause . . .

  Person A: Eighteen dollars!

  Person B: Nineteen dollars!

  Were this a normal auction, the game would end here. There’s no reason for Person A to shout out “Twenty dollars!” unless he really doesn’t like Person B and would rather make zero profit (paying twenty dollars for a twenty-dollar bill) than watch Person B earn a dollar.

  But this is a trap, and so the bidding escalates:

  Person A: Twenty dollars!

  . . . pause . . .

  Person B: Twenty-one dollars!

  . . . longer pause . . .

  Person A: Twenty-two dollars!

  . . . even longer pause . . .

  Person B (more quietly): Twenty-three dollars.

  Sometimes the game goes on to triple or even quadruple the bill’s worth. No one wants to pay a huge sum of money for nothing, which makes the Twenty Dollar Auction Game a terrific way to raise money for charity.

  Shubik’s game shows that an early hook fuels many addictive behaviors. The experience seems innocuous at first, but eventually you realize that things might end badly. For my students, the hook was the slim chance of winning twenty dollars at a heavy disc
ount. In my case, the hook was a plumber named Mario in search of a kidnapped princess.

  —

  The Dollar Auction Game hooks beginners fast, but it also works so effectively because it functions a bit like a bait-and-switch campaign. Bait-and-switch campaigns are the sort of illegal advertisements that electrical goods retailers use to lure Christmas sale shoppers. A store might advertise, for example, a new DVD player—“$9 while stocks last!”—but only keep one of those DVD players in stock. Customers line up around the block, storm into the store at 9 A.M., and one goes home with the DVD player while fifty are left with a horrible choice. Psychologically speaking, they already feel like owners of an inexpensive new DVD player. While braving the cold in line two hours earlier, they started to imagine what it would be like to watch the eight Harry Potter films with the whole family gathered around a huge bowl of popcorn. The choice, then, is to abandon those fantasies, or pay $199 for the next cheapest DVD player now that the $9 model has vanished.

  This is what the Dollar Auction Game does, too. Bidders form an emotional attachment to winning the auction. For the two students bidding up to $60 in my classroom, the motivation isn’t the thrill of winning $20—it’s the threat of losing to the other bidder. As neuroscientist Kent Berridge suggested, their facial expressions show that they want to keep bidding, but they’re certainly not liking the experience at all.