Fortnite and the Psychology of Surprise and Random Rewards

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In the 2009 heist drama film 21, fierce competition on Harvard scholarships urged Ben Campbell to join his professor’s blackjack team to afford tuition.

As Ben enjoyed living large by card counting (using probability to increase wins) in Las Vegas, one would think gambling is all about winning. In reality though, it’s about losing by a hair. The same way casinos drive their gamblers to the edge by being so close to winning, video game Fortnite engages its gamers. 

Oddly enough, 300 million Fortnite gamers worldwide enjoy the game of “losing”. And at times, this enjoyment comes even at the expense of losing their partners in the real world. In 2019, a UK divorce agency reported Fortnite as the reason behind 4,500 divorces—5% of all divorces—in the country. 

So, what makes Fortnite so addictive to the extent that it can cause real-life problems? To find out, let's dive into the neuroscience and psychology behind the gamification of how Fortnite rewards its players.

The Psychology of “Losing” in Fortnite

For a layperson and non-gamer, Fortnite may seem like a foolish, ordinary third-person shooter game. But to game developers, Fortnite is the magnum opus of gaming. It’s a game that changed the game. Some may say it could belong right next to the invention of the iPhone in the halls of history. 

The rush players get when they are about to enter a match or while fighting in the final battle of victory starts in the brain, but goes way beyond it. 

As gamers work hard to combine strategy, aim, and momentum to win the game, their brains work hard too. The brain undergoes strenuous, psychological work for just one game of Fortnite at the expense of achieving the large, future reward. In striving for it, gamers get small wins along the way like finding hidden treasures, or winning the sudden confrontation against another player. With each small win, the brain is rewarded with a small spurt of dopamine, a hormone closely associated with anticipated pleasure. Just like a kid in the candy store, each dopamine candy keeps us coming back for more. 

Additionally, when gamers lose, they rationalize their defeat and often times tell themselves that what had stopped them from winning may have been the tiniest mistakes—like a single-missed bullet. When a thought like this is planted in the head like a bullet, things could get ugly and impulsive quickly. As a result, gamers want to play another match hoping for a different result over and over again. Play, screw up, rationalize mistakes, reload, and play again. 

It turns out, psychology can explain why it seems like we lose a game because of one missed shot, fail an exam due to one wrong answer, or think we don’t get the job because of something we may have said in the interview. To blame for our (over)calculations of these events are what psychologists call the near miss effect. 

In gambling psychology, the near miss effect explains why gamblers who almost had the winning spin, hand, or lottery ticket will keep spending money to play. In gaming psychology, it’s why gamers don’t have to win at Fortnite to feel the high of their wins. The strategy lies in getting both gamers and gamblers close to the feeling of winning, because when they are that close, they feel the same buzz and go on to play more rounds.

Playing Fortnite is a lot like pulling the lever of a slot machine—it doesn’t matter what you get, because you receive pleasant random rewards from small wins anyway. 

Many studies have shown how powerful random rewards can be in driving all sorts of behavior. Let’s take the classic pigeon study, for example. Researchers placed pigeons in the same environment and allowed them to peck freely between two levers: the first delivered food pellets at each and every press, while the second only provided food at a randomized manner (between 50-70% of the time).

Naturally, we’d expect pigeons to peck on the first lever because it dispensed food continuously (and, who doesn’t like unlimited meals, right?), but results showed otherwise. The pigeons preferred randomized over unlimited meals, spending nearly twice as much time picking on the second lever. Random rewards win.

We, too, are very much like the pigeons in the study. We’re drawn to random rewards and surprises more than we really think. In science speak, behavioral psychologists call random rewards the variable-interval schedule. Fortnite uses the random reward mechanism to hook hundreds of millions of gamers, and continues to reap the rewards of capitalizing on human psychology. In 2019, Fortnite’s revenue was reported at a staggering $1.8 billion, retaining its title as the highest earning game from the year before. 

While Fortnite is at the forefront of random rewards in the gaming industry, let’s see how businesses in the e-commerce and airline industry sneakily apply it to influence consumer behavior.

How Random Rewards Influence Consumer Behavior

A part and parcel of being human, especially in today’s day and age, is predicting what happens next. This happens not only with big life decisions like buying a house or raising a family, but also with mundane decisions like where and what to eat. When we go to a new restaurant or try a new meal, for instance, it’s in our human nature to predict how good or bad the food might be.

If we expect mediocre vegan food but it turns out to knock our socks off, we experience a hit of random reward. In neuroscience, this immediate surprise and satisfaction is called the positive prediction error. It’s positive because we were wrong in a good way. When things go above and beyond our expectations, our brain launches off on dopamine production mode, making us happier than we expected to be when we leave the restaurant. 

If our experience had been the opposite, we’re more likely to move on and look for the next good food. In short, we are constantly chasing dopamine, but little do we know that dopamine is a dish best served randomly.

Clever companies like Zappos capitalized on random rewards early on. Before Amazon bought the company for $850 million in 2009, they operated in the early years of e-commerce associated with slow delivery. On average, deliveries took 4-5 business days, but Zappos normally delivered within 2 days without telling their customers. Why? The power of random rewards.

When customers receive their order in day’s time instead of a week’s time, they are not only greeted by their new pair of shoes, but also a sense of surprise. The same goes for airlines and flight schedules too. 

Imagine your flight is scheduled to arrive at 10:30pm, but the captain announces the flight arrives at 10pm instead. Suddenly, everyone’s happy to be back early. But we wouldn’t be if we looked closer: In the past 20 years, flight times have increased by 8% and researchers have found that the actual flight times haven’t changed. It’s an attempt by airlines to follow the business idiom: “underpromise and overdeliver.” 

While it’s nice to be ‘randomly’ rewarded through shorter delivery and flight times, we should, as consumers, be aware of how psychology and neuroscience insights can be silently used on us. Random rewards is merely a tiny drop of water in a sea drowning with neuromarketing tactics used to drive our consumer behavior.

Turning his back on his sly professor, Campbell ended up with nothing to show but a great story for his Harvard application, leaving the scholarship director dazzled and dumbfounded. Lucky for Campbell, his story was both perfectly random AND rewarding. Winner winner chicken dinner!

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What’s Next?

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References

BBC: Why Gamblers even get High When They Lose, Chris Baraniuk

Digital Trends: Fortnite made $1.8 Billion in 2019, Retains Title as Highest-Earning Game, Aaron Mamiit

Fortnite Insider: How Many People Play Fortnite? Concurrent and Registered 2019 Player Count, Yousef Saifi 

Mashable: BREAKING: Amazon Acquires Zappos for $850 Million, Ben Parr

Sciencing: This Is Why Fortnite is so Addictive, Sylvie Tremblay

The Sun: Fortnite ‘destroying 4,500 marriages a year’ in the UK, divorce papers reveal, Alex Sassoon Coby

Wbur: How Fortnite ‘Hooks’ Your Kids, And Why Experts Say You May Not Need To Worry, Justin Kaplan