Game Design Lessons From... The Emmy Awards?

Incentivizing Behavior and Emotion

One of the perennial struggles of those producing awards shows is acceptance speeches that go on too long. It’s one of the main reasons awards shows consistently go long and are often tedious to watch.

The standard method for dealing with this is bringing up the music to drown out the speech, or sometimes just cutting away from the winner.

At last night’s Emmy Awards they tried a different approach.

At the start of the broadcast, host Nick Bargatze announced that he would make a $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. However, the amount would be decreased by $1,000 for every second that a presenter went over 45 seconds. And he would increase the donation by $1,000 for every second the presenters were under 45 seconds.

Part gimmick, part joke, part serious attempt to control speech timing - the stunt ended up taking over the whole broadcast.

Some winners got visibly agitated when they started to run over 45 seconds. Some just said ‘thanks’ and ran off so they would increase the donation. Some just intentionally ran long and didn’t worry about it, or some, like Hannah Einbinder, said they would ‘make it up’ later out of their pockets when they wanted to go over the time.

Bargatze kept the total dollars remaining front and center the entire night

This broadcast was one of the shortest Emmy Awards shows on record. So does that mean the stunt was a success?

Well, everyone universally hated it. The winners, the other people in the theater, the viewers - every review I read about the telecast had nothing but bad things to say about this donation gambit.

A podcast I listen to (Decoding TV) described the stunt as setting up a ‘bad vibe’ for the entire broadcast, one that just got worse and worse as the show went on.

So why was that? What was the problem?

It’s a psychological phenomenon called Loss Aversion. I’ve talked about it before, in some GameTeks (like this one), and I wrote an entire book about it. It’s a really, really important concept for game designers to understand.

For those who haven’t encountered it before, here’s a tldr: People feel good when they gain something, and they feel badly when the lose that same thing. But the magnitude of the emotions isn’t the same. You feel much worse losing $20 than you feel could be gaining it.

If you want to maximize stress and anxiety in your players, give them something and then taking it way. Several classic board games - notably Monopoly and Risk - follow this arc. Players start with a little, build up more and more, and then lose it all (except for the winner). This is a recipe for bad feelings and grudges that can last years.

That’s exactly the situation that the Emmy team set up with this ‘donation’. They ‘gave’ everyone $100,000, and then they gradually took it away. Yes, there was a way to add money back in - but Loss Aversion tells us that the bad feelings will outweigh the good.

At one point in the broadcast the incentives really went off the rails. The donation actually went negative - down to -$50,000. What did that even mean? There was certainly no more reason to keep speeches short. No one thought they were going to demand that the Boys & Girls Clubs give money to the Emmys! Obviously, this had not been thought through at all.

In the end (as many predicted), CBS, Bargatze, and the Emmy Organization announced that the whole thing didn’t matter and they were donating $350,000 regardless.

But the damage had been done.

So as game designers, what lessons can we draw from this experiment?

Don’t just incentivize for the behavior you want - incentives should also generate the emotions you want.

The designers of this system got what they want - a shorter Emmy Awards. But they did not focus on the experience this would create for the winners and the viewers. The goal of an awards show is to celebrate the winners. This directly undercut that, by shifting focus away from the winners and their achievement, and onto this artificial measure.

When you’re designing a game, incentives are a very powerful way of manipulating player behavior. But you need to make sure that they support the entire experience of your game, not work against it.

Don’t be afraid to pull the plug on a playtest that is going awry

Bargatze and the show producers realized as the show as progressing that the donation bit wasn’t going in the direction they wanted. They could have pulled the plug on the bit. But they just kept coming back to it, over and over again.

Similarly, when you’re playtesting don’t be afraid to change things midstream. If the rules aren’t working change them to something else. It makes better use of valuable playtest time, and is actually more respectful of your testers’ time.

Look for game design lessons everywhere

Whenever you observe a system or an activity think about what the incentives are and how they are impacting player behavior and emotion.

Did you watch the Emmy broadcast? If so, what were your thoughts on the donation gambit?