March 23, 2019
In a case study from the University of Chicago, a group of teachers were promised to be awarded a bonus if their students improved their test scores while a separate group of teachers were given a bonus at the beginning of the year but had to return the bonus if their students did not improve their test scores at the end of the year. The former group saw no changes to their students’ scores whereas the latter’s students had increased about 10%.
What caused this discrepancy?
The group that received their payment early already felt ownership over that bonus and did not want to lose it. Or perhaps they had already spent their bonuses and had no way to return them. Either way, giving a bonus to someone and then taking it away is emotional and worse than never giving them a bonus at all. Losses are twice as intense as gains. This phenomenon is known as Loss Aversion, a tool to manipulate people and evoke an emotional response. In Pyre, the developers at Supergiant Games utilize loss aversion to create a heart-wrenching decision that affects the narrative and gameplay in a dynamic manner.
Loss aversion applies to much more than money; nearly every game we play utilizes this to inform or skew our decision-making in games. I bet you everyone has at least felt a tug of regret when they use a rare consumable item or left an area that you can’t return to. What if there’s a better time to use that item? What if you wasted it? What if you missed something in that zone and you’ll never be as powerful because of it?
Now, many people don’t overthink these interactions as much as I do but there are plenty of other ways to let players rethink their choices through loss. Dark Souls achieves this with experience points, which you lose when you die, preventing level-ups. In turn, the player’s life is worth much more and forces the player to ask questions like: Do I press forward and hope there is another bonfire nearby or do I cut my losses and run so I don’t lose my chances of leveling up? These decisions are powerful because they impact how you, the player, interact with the game, but they don’t affect how you feel about the game. Pyre, on the other hand, puts a twist on loss aversion, making you question what it means to win and lose.
In Pyre, you lose your friends. Er, not lose, save? Hold on, let me start again. In Pyre, you are saved by a small group of Exiles and they hail you as a Reader, one of the few literate beings in the world since reading was made illegal. With the power to read comes the power to translate the constellations and guide the party through the Rites of Flame allowing the worthiest among the exiled to return to society. Only one worthy person may be freed from exile in the championship Rite, either your chosen or your opponent. When I first reached this circumstance, I was met with a paralysis of who to choose to free first. I wanted to free the characters I loved the most but I also didn’t want them to leave. Not only would I lose contact with whichever character I choose but I also won’t be able to use them in the future Rites to come.
Let me take you through my thought process.
“Well I don’t want to lose my best boys so I’ll set one of these other guys free. Oh, wait they aren’t worthy so I have to let one of my favorites go… but they don’t even want to leave without me… I bonded with these guys and now I’m going to miss out on more backstory on whoever I choose to leave. I don’t want to miss out on that. Who would be most okay with leaving now?”
In the end, I chose Rukey, the loud, lavish, talking dog who bragged about the wealth that was waiting for him back in civilization. He was there from the beginning. Behind his confident facade was a dog as loyal as any other. Though I knew he would feel guilty for leaving, I felt he deserved a more sophisticated setting. Hedwyn and Jodariel, his two best friends stood alongside him in solidarity as we fought to get him home. After Rukey was anointed I understood I had to win this for him—I couldn’t let him down now. However, during the Rite, I couldn’t help but think “Fuck, I’m going to lose Rukey…” Despite that, we won the Rite and Rukey said his sorrowful goodbyes.
During Rukey’s farewells, I was nearly brought to tears with all the emotions that had led up to this goodbye. Never before was I so paralyzed about a loss in a game. And I do consider it just that, a loss. But I won, I did exactly what I set out to do. Even so, I wish there was another way. I lost the chance to get closer to this character. I lost the chance to learn this character’s backstory. I lost my best player. Rukey leaving severed my connection to a piece of narrative and it hurt my team for future Rites. But at least he’s free.
My fellow exiles shared in my lament as they too missed their friend, Rukey. I thought this was the end of Rukey’s story until we all escaped. I hoped for a time to speak with him again, which came a lot sooner than I expected. After some time, an owl brought us a letter from our former companion detailing what exactly became of him since he earned his freedom. It warmed my heart to know Rukey’s story was not just over now that he was gone. Still, I wasn’t ready for who to pick next to go free.
What made this choice more powerful than other narrative decisions?
In most narrative games, your decisions will affect how much each character will think of you and then will either help or leave you based on the choices you’ve made. Other common tropes include choosing who lives and who dies. These decisions are usually quite easy for me: “Oh, yeah I like Glorg-glorg way more than Bleep-bloop so I’m going to do what Glorg-glorg likes and save Glorg-glorg. Sorry Bleep-bloop.” In most narrative games I don’t feel like the choices really matter to the current circumstance of the game. Who is on my team in Mass Effect does not matter as much as who is on my team in Pyre. When I played Mass Effect, I tended to bring the same team with me on every mission and I only really cared about those two characters. However, in Pyre I need to switch characters based on my opponents and sometimes characters get sick or are having a fight with another character so they won’t compete that night. Pyre forces decision making and the final decision of who you free is also framed to the player as “Who dies?”
The developers of Pyre are incredibly clever in making you feel regretful for freeing your friends. They wanted to reframe gaining freedom as a loss through the dialogue of the characters. In my second championship Rite, I tried to free the moon-touched girl but before the Rite began she said she felt she finally felt like she had a home here with her friends in exile, and I was sending her away. As if I wasn’t guilty enough, Pamitha, my companion exile, called from the sidelines asking me to throw the match so her sister on the other team could be free. Pyre successfully framed “winning” as a crummy outcome. At nearly every turn, the game was telling me that winning really meant losing and that sent me into turmoil during the match. That was the first Rite I lost, and I didn’t try to throw the match. Once again, loss aversion took hold of my subconscious and caused me to perform worse.
A game has never made me feel so tense and distraught before, especially to the extent of affecting my gameplay. I want to see more games reframe their objectives with more narrative AND gameplay effects dependent on your decisions and performance. The most recent FromSoftware game, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, toils with this slightly as the more times you die, the more people around you become sick with this disease called Dragonrot. I want games to have boss fights with alternative options outcomes and contexts. I want to feel as though winning or defeating my foes is a horrible outcome and give me the option to have interesting and different events occur when I fail. I want to see more games reframe our current understanding of game systems through loss aversion.
Pyre sets an incredible precedent for the psychological manipulation of a player to evoke an emotional response out of them. Games should drive us to grapple with these emotional situations. They don’t always need to be framed in such a sorrowful way as Pyre but we have to understand that our highs are defined by our lows. Loss aversion will frame our lows so our accomplishments will hold more value. Loss aversion is just one way to manipulate a player and shows us how important framing the questions we pose our players are. Let’s take a lesson from Pyre and manipulate some players.