The Psychology of Diablo III Loot

If you’re still spending time with Diablo III, grinding for loot as well as upgrading your gear using the Auction House, then you may be interested in Jamie Madigan’s new article, where he references a number of psychological cases to help explain the loot mechanics in the game that keep players coming back.

There’s a setting in Diablo III that lets you see when someone on your friends list pops achievements. For example, when your buddy beats Diablo (OMG SPOILARZ!!) for the first time on Hell difficulty and earns the associated achievement, you get a little notification near the chat area, along with an icon. It’s a neat social system that I think could be expanded to make people keep grinding for super awesome Rare or Legendary item drops.

To illustrate why, consider a simple, 1973 experiment by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman where they created a tape recording of 39 names. Nineteen of these names belonged to famous people, and the remaining 20 did not. When asked, 66 percent of the subjects were able to recall more famous names than non-famous, and the vast majority –80 percent — incorrectly claimed that there were more famous names on the list than non-famous.

The reason for that last result, the researchers argued, has to do with what’s called the availability heuristic. In short, it refers to the fact that to the degree that recalling instances of an event or class of things from memory is easy, we will judge them to be more frequent or more numerous. In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman digs even deeper into the phenomenon, arguing that it’s an example of how part of our mind (the eponymous “Fast” part) will slyly substitute an easier question (How easy is it to recall an example of this phenomenon?) for a more difficult one (How frequent is this phenomenon?).