Learn about games: design marketing mechanisms that make users addicted!

There are many people who like to play games. Games use interesting and effective marketing mechanisms to attract users to spend more time in them, thereby retaining users. So, can the marketing mechanism in games be used as a reference for other products? The author of this article analyzes this and shares it with you.

If there is a marketing mechanism that can make your users addicted to your product, and use your product as frequently as eating and drinking, and even continue to spend money (burn money) and work hard to use your product, and actively encourage their friends to use your product, would you regard this mechanism as the Bible?

Does this sound like a refined product of poppy flowers? Or a secret technique in a novel? Don't get me wrong, the difference between the two is that the former is a kind of "mechanism" while the latter is a product.

What I want to talk to you about today is this mechanism. Although this mechanism cannot be seen or touched, it actually affects our daily lives, and it is also a heavy weapon that many companies and marketers are madly pursuing and obsessed with.

Maybe this is not clear enough. Let me give you an example and you will understand what it is.

Please think about this question: "Have you ever played games?" Or: "Do you have friends who like to play games?"

I think you should understand what I am talking about now. Yes, it is the marketing mechanism behind the game!

Why did I say that this marketing mechanism is what many companies and marketers are crazy about and pursuing? Let's recall these two scenarios, which you must have experienced:

Scenario 1: If you play games, you will definitely have this experience. In order to advance to a higher level, you will play games with your friends and stay up late to play games. During the promotion match, even if your boss calls you to ask you to work overtime, you will ignore it and call him back after the game is over.

Scenario 2: If you read the news, you will occasionally see this kind of information: "A student played games and recharged more than 200,000 in 3 days!"

In fact, if you observe carefully, you will find that from children who are still in school to people in their 50s and 60s, they also like to play games. They will often discuss with friends how to improve their gaming skills, recharge games, and bring friends around to play together. It is such a continuous cycle, and then the game users and operations will grow like a snowball rolling down a mountain.

You see, isn’t this the positive business cycle system that all companies and marketers are pursuing: “Make users fall in love with the product—users continue to consume—old users bring new users—new users continue to consume—new users become old users and bring new users”?

In contrast, many new products entering the market try to attract new users by offering them for free or spending money on them. However, once they stop offering them for free or providing subsidies, they will find that the number of users stops growing or even decreases. Why do games have such an addictive magic?

Before understanding the principles behind the operation of the game, we need to first understand one thing: what is the essence of the game?

This is a screenshot of the Apple game selection interface. In the screenshot, we can find some major categories of games. If we further classify these games into some major categories, there are mainly two categories:

• Survival: strategy, action, sports, racing, adventure, etc.
• Time-killing categories: children, leisure, puzzle, music, etc.

Looking at some classic and popular games, we can find that the first type of need that games satisfy people is the survival instinct.

For example, classic games such as Super Mario, Contra, and Tetris, as well as the now popular League of Legends and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. The ultimate goal of these games is to overcome various levels in the game, eliminate enemies, and live as long as possible. Only the one who survives to the end is the winner and the king of the virtual world!

In the early days of human beings struggling with the natural environment and animals of other races, human genes required us to strive to adapt to the environment and find ways to survive in the competition. If we could not survive, we would perish. This shows that the survival instinct is the result of natural selection of the human species for thousands of years, or billions of years.

Therefore, we have an innate desire for survival. If we look at the game world, most games are inseparable from the pursuit of the primitive desire of survival instinct. The satisfaction of this primitive need can indirectly stimulate the player's dependence on the game.

For example, CS, a classic game in Internet cafes 20 years ago, is a group of policemen fighting against a group of gangsters, and the one who eliminates the other side wins; 20 years later, the classic and popular game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is a game in which the last person alive after eliminating everyone wins.

Is there any difference between these two games? The difference is that the graphics are more detailed, the guns, gameplay, costumes, etc. have become richer, but in the final analysis, they are both shooting games, both are games of survival through confrontation, and there is no essential change.

In real life, there is also such a phenomenon: some young people are unwilling to work and have a negative attitude towards life, and they immerse themselves in the world of games every day and cannot extricate themselves.

Why are they like this? They have no interest in life, but are as excited as chicken blood when it comes to games. If you observe carefully, you will find that most of these people are actually doing very well in the game. In real life, they can be regarded as people above the middle class. They have good records and very good equipment.

It is also possible that he is a master of the King rank in the game world, a team leader of a family or the president of a union, and he often organizes some team activities. He may also have a group of younger brothers who call him Big Brother in the virtual world.

But these big brothers are actually little brothers in reality, because compared with the reality, the virtual world can satisfy their primitive desire for survival and provide them with a good living environment. Compared with the reality of being beaten, it is not surprising that they choose to escape and sink into the virtual world.

So you see, does the virtual game world resemble the development of human beings? From the earliest slash-and-burn farming, fighting various dangers (fighting against enemies), to today's human civilization ruling the entire earth (finally surviving), isn't it exactly the same?

As a social animal, humans, once their most basic survival needs are met, will realize how to gain advantages among their own kind and be recognized by everyone, thus changing from competition among different races to competition within the same race.

In many cases in ancient times, we can find that after pacifying the external situation, the royal family began to engage in intrigues and struggles. TV dramas often show several princes fighting openly and secretly, just to finally reach the top and become emperor.

The internal fighting among ordinary people is about who can own more material things, such as more servants, more land, more houses, and even more concubines.

In the game, the fight changes from physical combat to literary combat, from a competition of strength to a competition of technique and IQ. This is the need met by another type of game: satisfying social needs.

Social needs is a general term that can be expressed in many forms: killing time, showing off high distribution in the circle of friends, gaining recognition from others, etc.

This is also the biggest reason why those small games that seem to be simple and crudely made and do not have exquisite graphics can still be popular in the circle of friends.

• For example, the game “Sheep Sheep” that was popular on WeChat some time ago satisfied people’s social needs of killing time and then posting their scores on their Moments to show off.
• For example, WeChat’s first popular mini-game “Jump Jump” also meets the social needs of killing time and showing off in Moments;
• For example, if you become MVP or advance to a higher level in King of Glory, you will actively post it on your Moments to satisfy your social need to show off.

Therefore, we can find that the essence of games is to meet people's survival needs and social needs.

If your product meets these two needs, it can make users addicted and make them feel: you are electricity, you are light, you are the only myth, and I can only love you?

That’s not enough. Next, I want to talk to you about the operating mechanism behind the addictive game!

Specifically, there are three parts: setting goals, reinforcing behavior, and random mechanisms.

01. Set goals

When are people most motivated? The answer is that they are most motivated when they have a clear goal or direction, because after they know where they are going, all that is left is to find a way to get there. Once people have no goals or directions, they will become shaky, like a rootless duckweed.

You might be thinking: “Setting goals? That’s too easy. I can just give users a goal.”

How do most people set goals?

For example, in a sales team, the leader may wave his hand and say, "Our task this year is 1 billion!", and then hold regular meetings every day to cheer people up, shout slogans, formulate reward and punishment rules, and finally wait until the end of the year to check sales.

I think the most ineffective part is the part where people cheer for others and shout slogans. Others look at them as if they are watching a circus, and the participants awkwardly scratch the soles of their shoes.

How do planners in games set goals?

The first step in setting goals: give a clear purpose

If you have ever played games, you will know that every game has an ultimate goal, and your task is to keep working hard to overcome difficulties to achieve this goal.

For example, in League of Legends, at the beginning of the game, you will see that both your team and the enemy team have a crystal. Your task is to protect your crystal. As long as you destroy the enemy crystal before the enemy destroys your crystal, you will win.

For example, in CS, if you are a policeman, the opening screen will give you a prompt that your goal is to eliminate all the gangsters or rescue the hostages to win; if you are a gangster, your goal is to resist the police's rescue operation or eliminate all the hostages to win.

But setting goals does not mean simply telling your users or team members to just keep moving forward, because if the goal is too big, it will often end before it even begins.

Sometimes when children don’t like to study, parents are often largely responsible. If he is just in the first grade, you can tell him: “Son, you are in the first grade now, and your mission is to beat the millions of candidates in the province, get the top 10 in the provincial college entrance examination, and get into Tsinghua University or Peking University.”

Then your child must feel that he is not his biological child and would have pulled out your oxygen tube while you were lying on the hospital bed.

Why? How many students have their families pay a lot of money to hire famous teachers for tutoring and training, buy all kinds of nutritional supplements for them, and study hard for more than ten years, but in the end they can't even get into a top university. Now he is just in the first grade. If you let a child defeat millions of opponents and get into the best university in the country, he may just give up.

The reason for giving up is simple: the goal is too big, and personal abilities are totally incompatible with it, so one simply gives up struggling.

What should we do in this situation? Next, let’s talk about the second key point of setting goals: creating flow!

The second point of setting goals: creating flow

When setting goals, three situations may occur:

1. The goal is too big and the ability does not match : If the goal you design is too big, the players can't catch up even if they add 98 gasoline, then the situation is that no one will play the game. The reason is very simple. No matter how hard you try, no matter how much you struggle, you have already seen the ending, there is no fun at all! Just like what I mentioned before, tell your children to get into Tsinghua University or Peking University.

2. The goal is too small and the ability does not match : If the goal you design is too small, players can become super-powerful with just a breath, and no one will play because it is too boring and uninteresting. In order to attract new players, some games have slogans with very low thresholds: one-hit critical hit 100000000+! But it is still not attractive.

3. Matching goals with abilities : This is the direction that planners should strive to design. Only in this way can players be attracted to the maximum extent and have the motivation to continue playing the game. We can call it creating flow!

What is flow? To put it simply, it is when you are doing something that is just right for your ability, or you can complete it by just standing on tiptoe and working hard. The state you are in when doing this thing is called flow.

What the game needs to do is to design such links that can match the player's ability with the game plot, so that the player has hope.

Therefore, in the game, when you are still a novice, your range of activities is in the novice village, doing some tasks that you can complete at that time. The NPC will guide you to do some copies that you can complete with some effort, and to fight some small bosses that you can defeat with some effort, and will not let you face the super boss right away.

For example, when you are level 1, the game will guide you to fight monsters of the same level or level 2. After you level up, the game will guide you to continue fighting monsters of the same level or slightly higher than you. You can fully grasp this. After entering this cycle, you will unknowingly continue to level up from level 1 to level 100.

Build up your confidence by constantly matching the flow, and as your level increases, although the difficulty you face will increase accordingly, it will still be within your ability to complete.

At this point, you can recall why you always accidentally play games for most of the day or stay up late at night. One of the reasons is that you are always immersed in the flow of mind where you can continuously complete your goals. You will not give up directly because you think it is too difficult or too boring, but keep moving forward and finally forget the time. This is what we call: addiction!

Therefore, when designing a product, we need to think about: how to set goals for users, how to design a flow that suits users, and how to help users design a roadmap that takes them step by step to the end.

Is it enough to know how to set goals? Not yet. There is still a crucial step missing to make users addicted.

02 Reinforce Behavior

Have you ever noticed this phenomenon: when you were young, your parents forced you to study, attend training classes, and do homework, but you had no interest in learning at all, and your test scores were always not at the top of the class;

But you are very interested in playing games with your classmates. You can teach yourself how to play games without anyone teaching you.

Those who were born in the 1980s and 1990s and have become parents will find that it is very difficult to teach your children and urge them to study math and Chinese well and get good grades, but children can learn by themselves by watching Tik Tok, playing games, and making videos.

Why do some people feel uncomfortable spending a few dozen dollars, but are willing to spend tens of thousands to give tips to the anchor in the live broadcast room?

From a biological point of view, it is because a neurotransmitter called dopamine has a profound impact on us. As long as we play games or watch videos, our brain will secrete dopamine. Dopamine makes us feel physically and mentally happy. When we feel happy, we will continue to want this feeling to continue, so the brain will stimulate us to continue this behavior to continue to secrete dopamine.

But why does the brain secrete dopamine only when watching videos and playing games, but not when studying or doing things beyond our ability level?

Here, we have to mention a famous American psychologist Skinner and his Skinner box experiment.

The Skinner box is a simple box with a mechanism. He first put a very hungry mouse into a box with a button. Every time the mouse pressed the button, food would fall. By binding the food and the behavior of pressing the button together, after repeating it several times, the mouse learned to press the button. This is the first step of the Skinner box experiment.

Every time the mouse pushes the joystick in the box, it will get food, which is a positive stimulus. Once this behavioral connection is formed, the mouse realizes that it can get a piece of food by pushing the joystick once. By getting food, the mouse's brain will stimulate it to continue this behavior.

Every time you pull the joystick, you get a food reward. This behavior is called establishing a positive association. Every time you get a reward, the enthusiasm for this behavior is enhanced. Continuing this behavior is called reinforced behavior in psychology!

Then Skina did a reverse experiment. After a period of time, the mouse behaved in this way, but was not given food. After peeling the skin several times and finding no reaction, the mouse stopped repeating these behaviors. In psychology, this is called behavioral extinction.

These two experiments illustrate a phenomenon that rewards are conducive to establishing long-term behaviors, so when the behavior controller wants the other party not to do something, eliminating the reward can have an immediate effect.

At this point, you will understand why you feel like you have only watched short videos for 10 minutes in bed, but when you look at the time, it is already 2 o'clock in the middle of the night, because every time you swipe up, you can watch a new video content, and your brain continues to secrete dopamine, and your brain continues to feel happy, so that you linger, forget the time, and even feel that time passes too fast. (It is equivalent to the white mouse continuously getting food rewards)

You will also understand why you feel like you are living a year at work, because you have to work 8 hours a day for a total of 30 long days before you receive your salary. (It is equivalent to a mouse pressing the joystick for 30 consecutive days to get a food reward);

So, seeing this, you will understand why children don’t like to study but love to play games (including adults who love games), because it takes a semester to get a possible high score, while games can get rewards immediately.

From a psychological point of view, being able to gain a sense of accomplishment immediately can give people the motivation to keep moving forward. Then, without the need for others to urge them, they will spontaneously want to continue doing this thing!

Sometimes, if a certain gameplay of the game gives too little reward, the positive feedback will become weak, making players feel that this gameplay is unattractive and thus have no motivation to stick with it. Of course, different players have different needs, and planners will not place a single reward when driving player behavior. There are often multiple rewards and multiple stimulations. Players who want to become stronger are driven by equipment, players who want to see the plot are driven by the plot, and players who want to see the scenery are driven by art.

For example, in Mario Odyssey, gold coin rewards are a core driving force that can drive players to explore the world by placing gold coins in different places.

If this kind of thing happens in games, others will say you are addicted to games. If it happens in work, others will say you are working hard!

Through this experimental analysis, we can find that there are two ways to motivate users to use your product for a long time:

• If you want him to do something, give him a reward immediately after he does it. The reward will bring him positive feedback and control his behavior, allowing him to repeat a certain way of playing and strengthen positive behavior.
• You don't want him to do something, find the reward for it, remove the reward to stop the wrong behavior, and gradually make him stop doing this behavior.

Understanding this principle, we are not surprised by the reasons why many short video platforms have explosive traffic content:

A six-month fitness plan designed for you by a fitness coach with 15 years of experience may only have a few dozen views, but those "3-minute fat burning" and "7-day abdominal muscle training" by non-professionals can have hundreds of thousands of likes. Is it because the fitness coach is not professional enough?

No, it's human nature to always seek immediate feedback and gratification! Compared to half a year of hard work, I only need to work a little harder in 7 days to get abdominal muscles, why shouldn't I click in and take a look?

Chen Jiaoshou, who has 10 years of experience in marketing, tells you “How to become a copywriting expert and a marketing expert in 5 years”. The number of readers may be only 200, but those clickbait articles with titles such as “Just master this one trick to increase your profit 200 times!” can become popular articles that go viral. Is it because Chen Jiaoshou is not professional enough?

No, because compared to studying hard for 5 years, why bother to work so hard when you can get 200 times the profit immediately with just one move? Go in and take a look, what if it is true?

In fact, behind these simple and fast video articles that go viral is the grasp of the human psychology of pursuing "instant feedback". In fact, any normal person will understand that if you really want to get a good figure, a good brain, or achieve certain achievements in a certain field, it is impossible to achieve it in just 3 minutes, 7 days or one trick.

After we understand this important principle, although we cannot burn fat in 3 minutes, we can use this principle to apply it to marketing work:

When your users churn, think about how to stimulate them to use your product again.

For example, when users consume, they can immediately earn points equal to the amount of consumption. When the points reach a certain amount, they can exchange or receive corresponding high-value gifts.

When you teach your child that he doesn't like studying, you should think about how to stimulate his enthusiasm for learning.

For example, if you finish your homework on time every night during the five days of school each week, you can get a doll immediately. If you collect five dolls, you can go to KFC for a meal on the weekend, or go to the amusement park for a few rounds, or ask to buy a toy you like.

When your team's morale is low, think about how to stimulate their enthusiasm for closing deals.

For example, you can set up a transaction bonus. No matter how much the transaction amount is, you can hold an evening meeting on the day the order is signed and distribute cash in front of team members to encourage the salesperson to keep working hard. This will in turn motivate other members who haven't made a deal to work hard on placing orders tomorrow and also get a cash bonus!

If you play League of Legends, you can experience how the game takes this strategy to the extreme and makes players excited;

If you kill an enemy hero, there will be background sound and text prompt: "First blood!";

If you kill five people in a row, there will be a background sound and text prompt: "Five kills!";

If you kill more than six people in a row, there will be a background sound and text prompt: "Super God!"

If you want your target users to become addicted to something, the first strategy to reinforce behavior is: instant gratification, immediate rewards, and continuous stimulation!

Is it enough to make users addicted just by providing instant rewards?

It is not enough, because you will find that if the rewards continue to be material, there will be a threshold. In other words, the threshold is the diminishing marginal effect.

Although mice like food very much, when the food continues to increase and exceeds their needs, their desire will gradually decrease.

Although Jack Ma has a lot of money, when the money became so much that he couldn't even count it, he said he was not interested in money.

How to solve this situation?

Let's see how the game works:

Games are often divided into different ranks according to the players. Taking LOL (League of Legends) as an example, there are bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond and so on.

This rank represents comprehensive information about the player's skills, record, etc. The higher your rank, the more you can enter a higher circle, get more comprehensive information, and enjoy a better identity experience.

If you want to pick up girls through gaming, for example, by helping girls to rank up, then the girls will definitely ask you, "What's your rank?" If you answer, "I'm bronze," the girls may look down on you and say, "I'm gold, and you're not as good as me. Why do you still want to pick me up?"

But if you answer: "I'm not in good shape recently, I'm barely a King rank." The girl's eyes will definitely light up: "Help me to rank up!" (Subtext: Big brother, give me a chance, I want to be your sister-in-law)

In the real world, rank is like your car. When you want to pick up a girl from get off work, she asks you what car you drive, and you answer, "A small two-wheeled electric car," you will probably be rejected by her.

If you answer: "If you want to keep a low profile, I drive a Porsche. If you want to have some fresh air, I drive a helicopter." Then, the girl will basically just happen to be on the way to your house, and her parents are not at home, and she just happens to not have her keys with her, and then ask to stay at your house for one night.

In fact, higher status, identity display, title symbolism, etc. are another manifestation of competition in biological evolution. With the continuous development of human society, in addition to material rewards, people will turn to spiritual rewards!

Why do people pursue this kind of fame so tirelessly? Because it is essentially a need for human survival, but in civilized society it is a more advanced form of fame.

From material to spiritual pursuits and competition, this is the same for both humans and other animals. From the animal world, we can find that this is a manifestation engraved in the genes of organisms.

For example, peacocks. Male peacocks will compete for the favor of female peacocks by spreading their tails;

For example, gorillas will beat their chests to show off their strong muscles in exchange for mating rights with female gorillas.

There is a similar dynamic in the business world.

For example: Airlines will classify passengers into different levels of customers to highlight their status and grant them different treatments;

For example: credit card companies will classify passengers' cards into: silver cards, gold cards, diamond cards, black gold cards, etc.

Spiritual rewards seem illusory, but can they really make people continue to be addicted?

The answer is yes.

In the gaming world, spiritual motivation is used to its fullest extent in two common ways: sense of experience and sense of identity.

Experience : In the game, there is no difference between a default skin and a purchased skin except for the surface difference. However, after seeing other players have new skins, various killing effects and different background music, many players will be motivated to buy them, even though they know that this will not have any other attribute bonuses for the account character, just to feel the experience of having different skins when playing the game;

Sense of status : Another manifestation is spending money to buy equipment. Game props are essentially just a bunch of codes, but there are still many players who want to experience the fun of being a boss, to become a family elder, to lead a team in a group fight, to feel the feeling of being called "boss" by their subordinates. They don't want to spend a long time to accumulate little by little, but just want to enjoy the experience of a 999999 knife immediately, so they continue to spend money.

Therefore, when we want users to continue to be addicted, in addition to the first strategy of reinforcing behavior, we should think about: what kind of spiritual rewards (sense of experience/sense of identity) can we give them so that users can continue to use our products?

Can you make users addicted to your product by doing the above points? No, it’s not enough…

03 Random Mechanism

We have to admit that most of the time, no matter how good your product or service is, customer churn is as irresistible as the blooming and withering of flowers. This is also why we often have to face a problem: how to reduce user churn or extend the user’s lifetime value as much as possible?

In fact, many times, it’s not that you didn’t do well enough, but that customers are tired or bored and gradually move away from you.

But what causes users to feel tired or bored?

The main reason has been mentioned earlier in this article, that is, the excitement brought by dopamine reaches a threshold, producing a marginal diminishing effect. If you want to continue to get pleasure, you have to increase the stimulation of excitement.

Early experiments studying addictive behavior caused by brain stimulation can be traced back to the 1950s. Two scientists installed electrodes on the cerebral cortex of mice that causes pleasure, and then placed a pedal in the cage that could trigger electric shock stimulation. They found that the mice learned to constantly step on the pedal to trigger electric shock stimulation and thus get pleasure.

Similarly, every time we win a game or achieve something, it triggers a sense of control in our brain, more dopamine is released, and the corresponding areas of the brain are activated, producing a sense of pleasure.

For example, every time you kill someone in the game, this stimulation will be activated once, and your brain will receive an excitement signal.

Scientists proposed in their research report on drug addiction: If a person's brain is immersed in a certain stimulus for a long time, then the sensitivity to the stimulus will decrease and the threshold will increase.

So, when you have played League of Legends for eight seasons, and the heroes in each season remain the same, and you only need to play 10 games each time to advance to the King rank, and you can get 4 pentakills in each game, you may feel that this game is outdated, boring, and unchallenging;

So, when you are in a company, repeating the same fixed work like a screw day after day, and the little money you get every month can't be called a salary but can only be called a loser's remuneration, and you can hardly save any money after deducting rent and living expenses, and looking at the job that almost ends in sight, it is not difficult for you to understand why young people can travel at will and fire their boss at will.

Because they have reached the critical threshold!

Is there any way to solve this problem? Yes, design a random mechanism!

Remember Skinner's Skinner box experiment? In addition to the first reinforced behavior experiment, two more experiments were conducted:

The second experiment: After every 5 correct behaviors, the mice were rewarded with food. This time, without the stimulation of food, the mice retained the behavior for a longer time, which shows that the mice had an expectation in their hearts: if I do it 4 more times, the food will come.

The third experiment: He made the reward mechanism more random. Sometimes the rat pressed 5 times and food came out, sometimes pressed 8 times, and sometimes pressed 1 time and food came out. In this case, the rat would be confused because he could not predict whether there would be food next time. He would try again and again, and this behavior would last for a long time. He would always think: Maybe if I press one more time, I will get food.

Among these three experiments, the mouse's button-pressing behavior lasted the longest. This experiment proves that randomness has an extremely powerful effect on the establishment of long-term behavior.

In fact, this principle has been widely used in business and has achieved very successful results:

For example, in the 1990s, you could collect cards by opening the bag of Little Raccoon instant noodles, but even if you bought 10 boxes, there might be a few cards that you would find difficult to collect. However, this trick conquered countless elementary school students.

For example, Pop Mart, which specialized in selling blind box dolls in the past two years, also used the strategy of random mechanism and successfully went public.

It can be seen that neither primary school students nor adults can escape the law of the blind box effect!

In fact, this random mechanism is the killer feature that makes people addicted to games and gambling projects!

Games: Take King of Glory or League of Legends as an example

Basically, player-versus-player games all use a random matching mode. Do you think the planners do this to ensure the fairness of the game?

In fact, it is not. In order to keep players motivated to play the game, increase their stay time, and make the player's winning rate as close to 50% as possible, the game designer will adopt a random matching mode of the same level. This has three advantages:

• Try to keep yourself in the flow state as much as possible, and avoid encountering experts or novices who make you lose the desire to fight;
• Because victory is neither too easy nor too difficult, you can always maintain the motivation to gain a sense of achievement;
• Because the players are close in strength, the outcome of the next round is often unpredictable, and the rewards are also unpredictable, which arouses curiosity and desire.

This will make you look forward to the next game. If you win, you will cherish the victory and want to expand the results or have a perfect ending. If you lose, you will feel sorry and think that you have a chance to turn the tables if you try again.

Many people will expect to win the next game, or think that they can go to bed after winning one more game, but in this case, they often end up fighting until dawn.

In some games, we often see that many people spend a lot of time and energy in the game to get equipment:

• For example, there is a chance that good equipment will drop from killing monsters, and there is a chance that bad equipment will drop, so players will keep killing monsters until good equipment is dropped.
• For example, strengthening may produce a mythical beast or an ordinary pet, so the player will continue to strengthen until a mythical beast is produced;
• For example, taking medicine may produce a good bonus or may have no effect, so the player will keep taking medicine until a good bonus is produced;

This mechanism is not only effective in games, but also in random projects such as gambling:

Chinese people are definitely familiar with poker and mahjong, especially mahjong, which has even become a representative of Chinese culture.

Why has mahjong been popular for so long and has made so many people become gamblers? This is because of the random mechanism at work!

Those who win money always want to expand their achievements, win 3 games with 1, and even better, beat the other three players completely. The losers will feel that their previous losses were due to bad luck (because as long as no one cheats when drawing the cards, it is all due to luck, i.e. randomness). If they play another game, they will surely be able to turn their luck around and win back all the previous losses.

This is one of the main reasons why winning gamblers are keen on playing mahjong, and losing gamblers are willing to sell their cars and houses to turn the tables. They always think in their minds: "Let's try again!"

Therefore, when you want to retain customers for as long as possible, you have to think about: how to design a reasonable and attractive random mechanism to keep customers in the flow!

In addition to randomness, Skinner also discovered a very interesting behavior in the experiment: a sense of ritual!

This time he used pigeons instead of mice. They could get food by simply pushing the joystick. He also conducted the same experiment as above with mice, in which they could get food by randomly pushing the joystick.

Skinner wrote in the report that 6 of the eight pigeons had a very obvious reaction, and the two observers had a completely consistent record. One pigeon formed a conditioned reflex that turned counterclockwise in the box, turning 2 to 3 times between two reinforcements, the other repeatedly hit his head to a corner above the box, and the third showed a lifting reaction, as if he placed his head under an invisible pole and lifted it repeatedly. The heads and bodies of the two pigeons showed a swaying movement, with their heads and bodies swaying greatly from right to left, and one pigeon formed an incomplete anxious or light-touched conditioned reaction movement that rushed straight to the ground but did not touch.

After seeing this report, do you feel ritually?

Comparing it to the game, such as Onmyoji's talisman drawing system, it actually has no effect, but if you just shipped it when you draw a certain pattern, you will subconsciously bind the shipment and two things that have nothing to do with this figure to continue to draw the same shape.

I hope this metaphysical method can help you continue to ship, so many card draw games now pay more and more attention to the sense of ritual in the process of card draw. This is partly because of this, not only the game is the same in real life.

When you are doing something, what you expect happens by chance, people will subconsciously bind the irrelevant two to try to explain it with metaphysics, and eventually produce superstitious behavior!

For example, this singer Pavarotti must find the nails for the elbows in the venue before singing, because he feels that the bent nails will give him good luck if he can't find him, he will sing and smash them;

For example, a well-known LOL player must place the keyboard and mouse in a fixed position during the competition, otherwise he will feel that the position of the keyboard and mouse will affect the outcome of the game, so that before the competition, he must use a ruler to accurately measure the position and distance.

For example, when playing mahjong draws, you must rub the cards with your fingers. We all know that under normal circumstances, even if you rub the cards out of Mars, the size of the cards will not change, but people will still pray that rubbing them can bring them the self-touched card!

Skinner believes that when the consequences of a person's behavior are beneficial to him, this behavior will repeat itself, and when it is unfavorable, this behavior will weaken or disappear. Therefore, we can use various positive reinforcement or re-strengthening methods to affect the consequences of the behavior, thereby predicting, controlling and correcting people's behavior!

Finally, let’s talk about how the game makes money. As we mentioned earlier, the game will adopt a series of randomness to make players addicted. By taking up a long stay, players can constantly brush out equipment, pets or items with low probability.

But if the player is anxious and cannot wait, he can speed up the process in another way, which is to use the money ability!

• For example, you can only synthesize equipment 10 times a day to get the Archangel magic wand, but if you recharge, you can synthesize equipment 100 times a day, or even more, greatly shortening the time to get equipment;
• For example, there is only 1 hero card in a pack of plain noodles, but if you want to fill all hero cards in one day, you can buy a box of plain noodles at one time;
• For example, the probability of getting A doll when opening a Pop Mart blind box is only 10%, but if you want to get it immediately, you can directly recharge and open 10 blind boxes at one time;

The above is how to scientifically plan the principles and systems behind addictive marketing mechanisms. I hope it will be helpful to you!