On Failure - A Player's Perspective

[Apologies in advance - The numbers in this thread are representative, not actual]

Here's a conundrum. In one of our puzzle card games, we have a feature that allows players to pick whether they get a Random game or a Winnable game. If they pick random, they maybe have like a 1/3 to 1/2 likelihood of winning. Whereas, winnables games are always winnable - even if a particular individual can't solve it. And most of our players tend to play one way or the other - they have strong preferences. So, then we looked at the data which showed that people who play Random games play MANY more games. On the order of 3X as many.

Now the conundrum is that we have new games that don't yet have the Winnable mode. So we know that some of our audience wants the winnable feature. And we also know that if we add the feature, some players will engage with it. And those that do will then play less games, less often, and with less long-term engagement. Which means, we can give them what they really do prefer to play, and it will lead them to have less overall fun.

It hints at something both nuanced and powerful. It's a conundrum.

Gigi

 

There's still some important data missing here:

1. What is the relative proportion of Winnable players vs. Random players?
2. You say Random players play 3X as many games... but what about the total time (or average time per game) spent playing? It could be that their games average 1/3 as long, because they are quicker to give up and try again. (That would be a sensible adaptation to frequently encountering unwinnable games.)

It might be that the two sets of players are equally engaged, and play equally as much — even if the Random players start games more frequently.

 

Is it possible that the element that gets played more is "less" fun than the shorter option? There might be other reasons it is being played.

Along those lines, I would look at how many "won" games the random players have, and see how it compares to the wins of the "winnable" group (edit: you say 3X times as many, with 1/3 chance of winning...seems likely to me they win the same amount).

I know if I'm doing something with a semi-random effect, I want to do it enough times that I feel like I've "gotten my money's worth." And subsequently, I may not be having as much fun, but instead be pushing through until I've broken even (sunk cost fallacy?).

Edit: to pontificate further, I guess we can ask the question: is failure fun/useful?

I think it can be if we understand why we fail, and if we fail because of ourselves and not because of the game.

I'm not sure exactly how your game works, but it sounds like the unwinnable puzzles are unwinnable because of the design, not because the player did it incorrectly. If that's the case, I wouldn't consider that "fun" or useful at all.

 

I feel like I need these terms inverted to really understand what you mean. Like a winnable game is really a not unwinnable game, where there is always a solution to the puzzle, whereas a random game could very easily put a key behind it's own lock.

The next statistic to dig up is how often players stop their session after winning. I'm willing to bet it's pretty high.

From there though this is starting to dip too much into the "player's should play our game, life be damned" mentality. You're letting people exercise a skill where they stop once they reach a level of satisfaction. Dragging out that point of fulfillment and creating an arena where their skills are inconsequential doesn't exactly come off as benevolent design.

 

Restating the question might help.

"Would you prefer a game where losing is the game's fault, or your fault?"

 

I don't see the link here between them not playing as long and them having less overall fun. Just because they don't play as long doesn't mean they are having less fun, they may be having the same amount of fun as others but realize after winning - there is no more fun to be had with the game. Maybe they feel they have experienced all there is to experience in the game.
What is the experience the 'winnable' players have after winning? Return to menu and pick again? I'd probably stop playing too - if this were the case, although I'm not a gamer who would choose a winnable (easy) mode.

 

This reminds me of multiple articles I've read discussing that when a developer listened to the players, they were told the players wanted one thing, but when the developers looked at the numbers, the players actually chose something else. It seems we as humans are not always so good at knowing what we really want from our games.

As for the conundrum of the two modes in the puzzle games, I tend to think of it in business terms: Does the opportunity cost of adding in the additional "always winnable" mode fall under the threshold of the advertising revenue or game sales that are generated by the portion of players who prefer that mode? As part of this, hopefully there's a way to take into account if the "always winnable" crowd are more likely to buy/play your other games. Ultimately, if the cost to create the mode is not more than the probable return, and that mode doesn't violate how you want the game to be created, then I'd say go for it.

Actually, if the line is even close, I'd say go for it because having the second mode may make players value the game more even if they never use that mode themselves.

 

The question I will levy is: what do the numbers actual say? Just because a person will play more, does that inherently mean they want to?

 

That's the "you get what you measure" problem. It's usually caused by misunderstandings about what you can measure and what it actually means.

For example, if you want to measure player enjoyment of a game, people frequently look at play time. But some players will start one game and then start two or three others. I frequently have Soda Dungeon, AdVenture Capitalist, and Tap Tap Infinity all running at once. So it might be smarter to measure number of actual engagements with the game - how many times a control event is processed - along with keeping separate foreground/background timers.

If your game spends long periods of time in the background and processes few control events, the players are not engaged with your game. They may be playing, but it isn't really stimulating them. They're just watching it run while they do other things.

Which is fine. I leave Soda Dungeon and Tap Tap Infinity run while I just sit there watching. Sometimes I put them on just to hear the music while I read a book or draw concept sketches. I still think they're good games. But my desires as a player will necessarily differ from anyone who is actively engaged with the game and clicking furiously all over it.

 

We are still mulling this one over. And I really appreciate the feedback - so many great points. In the end, here's the question that really gets to the heart of it.

Question: Was adding a 'Winnable' mode a mistake we should learn from?

The data suggests so. On the flip side, the people who like the winnable deals, myself included, might not have enjoyed our game. They might not have stayed. The data also suggests that those same people would still have enjoyed the game without a winnable mode.

Gigi

 

I suppose whether it's a mistake or not depends on what you're wanting out of your game, and what you think players want out of your game.

If it's a simple puzzle game that takes 30 seconds to play a level, the expectations are going to be different from a long drawn-out level that they have to put a lot of thought into. It's probably okay to only have levels where it's possible to fail (by RNG) in the former case.

 

Nuanced and powerful . . .

Life is not always "winnable". Sometimes, the game is rigged, it's unfair. But sometimes, you find a way to win the unwinnable, to beat the odds and defy all logic and reason. I guess some might call these victories "miracles" but what is life itself, but just that?

If you tell me, "take this road and you will arrive at your destination, or take that cave and you may reach your destination, though curious things are known to happen there and not everyone always comes back out."

I am super interested in that cave.

Because it's all a microcosmic metaphor for life itself. Taking the bad with the good, trusting that the universe is balanced in terms of dishing out fortune and famine, if you lose 10 straight games you will win 10 straight games, this is just the way things work out.

Sure, you gain assurance with "winnable" but you lose intrigue, you lose that impossible to define quality that we derive the experience we call "fun" from.

Competitive games aren't about fun, they're about who, and talent, and skill, and status.

But a game against yourself, against chaos and nature, is the universe saying, "Wanna play?"

And the answer, at least for human beings, is always going to be "yes."

 

That's two questions.

- Was this a mistake?
- What have we learned from it?

Even if a "winnable" mode doesn't belong in this game, maybe you've learned things that will tell you to place one in another game later. Maybe it doesn't fit your business goals for this game. Maybe it doesn't fit the type of game. Maybe it doesn't fit the audience. But knowing where it doesn't fit might help you find somewere it does.

 

I would bet that the same kind of thing happens in games like XCOM that allow for 'ironman' mode. I don't have access to the data, but I'd happily bet that players who pick the more 'exciting + demanding' mode are willing to invest more time into the game. I would be very careful about how you interpret the data.

The other thing is, giving players the ability to mold the game to their tastes fell out of fashion, and it's a real shame. If you give the player the opportunity to tweek things to better fit their taste, and it isn't too complex, friggin do it!

I really miss how old games back in the day would let you set the game up how you wanted. Like Civ, when you started the game: "What size world would you like?" "How many players?" "Islands or continents?" "Should we add raging barbarians to that?"

It seems like you found a very clean and effective way to let players choose the experience they want, even if what they want changes.

 

It's worth noting that sometimes, what players want is to be denied certain choices.

Imagine if, instead of having difficulty levels, your game implemented this with a pair of rings you could buy in an early-game shop: the "ring of easy," which doubles your stats, and the "ring of hard" which halves them.

A lot of people would complain that the "ring of hard" is stupid and should be removed because nobody will ever buy it, and a lot of people would complain that the "ring of easy" is stupid and should be removed because it's overpowered.

Meanwhile, it's just an item in a shop, and nobody is making anyone buy it. But you can't tell someone "if you don't want the ring, don't buy the ring" because they don't just want not to have the ring. They want the ring not to be in the shop.

I do not entirely understand what twisted crime of logic leads people to want this, but they do.

 

The problem is that if you can't separate wanting difficulty from wanting to minmax. The two desires aren't mutually exclusive, yet can't operate together as gameplay decisions.

 

I hear what you're saying, but I think these are two different things. One is within the context of the game and one is outside of the context of the game.

The ring of hard is stupid and the ring of easy is broken.

Once the game starts the player should generally want to use their wits and skill to navigate the obstacles within game.

Let's compare it to playing a trivia game. It's most players would appreciate the option to have 'easy questions' or 'hard questions' or even 'sports questions' or 'geography questions'. You're still trying to give the right answer within the rules of the game.

If instead the game always offered various answers in addition to:
E) this option is always correct

That would be stupid wouldn't it? You would just always take that choice. It breaks the game. Thing is what the ring of easy is.

 

It doesn't matter. It's an example. Here, here's another one.

Many games today offer a "hardcore" mode where if you die, the game dumps you back to the main menu and deletes your save so you can't reload it. Because, you know. You're not hardcore enough to just quit when you die and delete the save yourself. And you're also not hardcore enough to secretly backup your save and put it back after you die. You're like, just hardcore enough that you can't be arsed.

A certain group of gamers want the "hardcore" option removed because they think it's too hardcore for them, and they don't want to be offered a hardcore mode every time they play.

And a certain group of gamers want the "hardcore" option to be the only one.

It doesn't matter whether it's in the game or out of it, some people want choices removed.

That's a terrible comparison. This isn't a question of choices being right and wrong. It's a question of a choice being offered so you can choose the one you personally prefer right now. The appropriate comparison to a question would be "What flavour of ice cream is your favourite?" and that is an awful thing to put in a trivia game.

"No, sorry, the correct answer was chocolate. Lose a turn."

 

If you knew you could never lose it would very quickly get boring and you wouldnt play as many games. But there are some people who simply hate losing (I guess), the same principle would still apply.

Then you have simply added a mode for people who probably wouldnt have liked your game anyway.

 

I have literally never seen anyone state either of these opinions (apart from simple trolling, where all bets are off).

These days, most games don't let you lose. Remember when your quarter got you three lives? Ever played Defender at an arcade where they chose the highest difficulty setting? They should have just called it, "Insert Quarter and Go Home."

 

Seems to me like it's a comparison between a game that has an ending, versus an endless game. Usually it seems endless games where you either always die at some point, or only succeed occasionally, are more addictive than games that are more obviously completeable. That's mainly because of how addiction works... which is, when you offer something which seems valuable but you make it hard to get or inaccessible. Here the valuable thing is winning/completion, and yet if you make it hard to get, it creates a psychological condition where the player feels more compulsion to pursue it. It's why if you buy one bag of potato chips you'll eat them all, but if you buy 20 bags of potato chips, the lack of scarcity will make it less appealing and will break the addiction. Wanting something that you can't have, or can only occasionally have, or that you can have IF it depends on your performance - ie the only reason that you're failing to get it is because of YOU failing, and not the game failing, then you will attempt to try again more often because you think so highly of yourself. There will be people who still like 'an ending', ie a game you can win and get a completion and all that sense of release and so on, satisfaction in that way, but to a degree it's then not as much of a challenge. If the failure obviously depends on the player's ability and not the game being unfair, then they will keep trying to do better. And much of the reward is in the trying - the playing - and not so much in the 'got to the end' thing. That's nice too, but you sort of can't have it both ways. And as you've seen, if you make the ending 'hard to reach' but still accessible, it cranks up the addictiveness. So maybe you can arrange it so that all games are winnable but winning is not easy - completion is obscure and requires the best performance.... but right now it sort of sounds like you have it around the other way - it's dependent on the game level as to whether it's completable, and not the player?

 

Are the random games always of comparable difficulty to the Winnable games? Or is there a chance for an easy win with the random games?

 

It's just another example. It's still the case of some players wanting certain options and other players wanting those options to not even be available (even when it doesn't affect them).

And for the second part--what do you mean by "lose?" Do you mean the "ironman" mode cdarklock mentioned, where you have to start over completely? Or something else?

 

Is this really a known behavior from players? It is certainly odd. I've never seen this type of behavior before, although admittedly I do not play MMOs, online FPS PvP shooters, so this behavior might be prevalent in gamer circles I do not participate in.

 

I can't say I've seen it a lot, but I have seen it in a few cases.

 

Nobody does. People love having those options and both camps are happy to have the option there in every game I've ever seen it in. @cdarklock just loves to argue. The "ironman" mode as it's generally called now ("hardcore mode" in diablo), is a great example of how giving people choice extends the game and helps you give different kinds of players the experience they want.

Options like this that modify the experience to suit peoples tastes are almost always welcome.

You could even have a "Quick start" button that skips all the details for people who really don't want to be bothered. Games that have a lot of character customization for example, or a complex creation system, almost all of them will offer "quick start" characters so you can skip it.

Likewise, you can make the quick start the default and have an "advanced mode" button or something that shows you the options. Depends on who your audience is.

 

Agree - most games allow for less skilled players to play with easy mode, and they get to experience the game without having to overcome areas they might find too difficult. Although it could be unsuccessfully argued easy modes remove the barrier to entry skew the learning curve and dilute the sense of accomplishment games have been set to specifically deliver.
I've known a couple people who 'only' play games on easy mode. At the time I thought it was pretty odd because they were people around the same age as myself. Whenever starting a new game with my son - if I think it's going to be difficult, I'll set the game on easy mode.

I never - ever played a game on easy mode - ever,, until I played FTL. For some reason that game kicked my butt!

 

I remember when I first met a friend who played games on easy mode when I was a kid. I was honestly shocked anyone would ever pick it. It literally didn't make sense to me.

Fact is - there are lots of different kinds of gamers - they can have totally different tastes and want different kinds of experiences.

It's like this, you might be the greatest cook in the world with world class taste, but that doesn't mean you should hide the salt and pepper. Give people a couple simple knobs to tweek things to fit their liking and you'll have more happy players who have good experiences.

The main problem is when the player doesn't know what they're getting and the choices are coin flips. Maybe instead of "Easy" "Medium" "Hard" you have a "How many enemies" knob that you can crank up and down. I think that @Gigiwoo's example is a better kind of difficulty slider. Its not just "hard mode" - players understand the meaning of a very clear choice - so they can pick the mode that suits their taste - or even their mood at the moment.

Maybe some dude comes home after a brutal day at work and just wants to win a game, but on sunday night he wants to invest a little more effort, for a little more excitement.

 

When you go to math class, and the teacher says "Bob boards a train leaving Seattle at 9:15 with an average speed of sixty miles an hour," it is aggressively missing the point to pull out your railway time tables and say you have no indication of any trains actually leaving Seattle at 9:15 and besides trains never leave on time anyway.

Clearly, I am not communicating effectively. The meaning of a communication is what is received. I will assume that you are accurately reporting what you received, which is "this is a real thing that happened," even though I have stated on both occasions that I was using a fictional example I made up.

So let's use a real example of a real thing that really happened. I floated the idea in some community a few years back about gender-neutral dating simulators which allow you to date both men and women. (The non-binary extension of this idea never ends well. You have to capitulate to the "only two genders" camp, or you can't get any meaningful discussion at all.)

Now, because gender is a hot-button topic, a bunch of people said that they would not buy a dating simulator which had people they don't want to date in it. And that polarised into a few different groups. The largest ones were these.

1. People who wanted the genders to be DLC, and the game to be offered with one of the two binary genders by default. You bought the male version or the female version to start, and then you could buy the other half as DLC if you wanted it. This is the most sane option, where people went "I do not want that thing, but maybe other people do, so there should be a choice."

2. People who wanted the two options - male and female - to be available as separate unrelated games. You bought the game you wanted, and they didn't combine into a bigger game ever under any circumstances. You can't have a game where you date both.

3. People who didn't even want the two options to come from the same company. There were two main versions of this argument: the homophobic version where buying a game from a company that makes gay games can make you gay, and the SJW version where a company that cannot commit to only making gay games has no business making gay games. You can't even make both games, let alone a combination.

But here's the real issue. All three groups wanted choice removed. The initial assumption was that you would buy the game and there would be both male and female dating options, so you would have choice all the way from the beginning. Nobody wanted that. They all wanted to be denied any choice at all unless and until they said "I would like a choice," and their only real difference was in how much choice they wanted to be denied, and when that choice would be made available.

Group 1 thought you should have to pay extra for a choice. Group 2 thought you should have to pay extra and jump through hoops - to date both genders, you have to play both games, and your progress is not shared. Group 3 wanted you to pay extra, jump through hoops, and go hunting for the option.

No. I think the point I am trying to make is important.

It has, however, become clear that some people would like that point to be removed from the discussion.

The choice of "sometimes people want fewer choices," after all, is unnecessarily complex to understand. We should not need to think about it. That topic should go away, just to make things easier.

 

I see where you're coming from now that you provided an actual example from real experience.

That said, there really is a pretty significant difference between most game options and options involving a hot button topic of gender, sexuality and politics. It's somewhat unusual that people want to suppress other people's choices outside of really tricky topics like politics/religion/gender/nationalism.

Normally the only reason gamers wouldn't want tweeks on how games play is that a presentation is too complex, or overwhelming.

And come on man, do you really not think you love to argue?

 

There's this whole problem here where there are two ways to find out what players think.

1. Conduct extensive research on a specific question.
2. Observe what players volunteer of their own volition.

When you're relying on (2) for your results, you will only have them on hot button topics, because you will get comparatively few people volunteering on anything else.

The "hardcore" example was actually based on a very real squabble in the (old) official Terraria forum. Some people wanted not to have it at all. Other people wanted it to be the only game mode. The "debate" went on for weeks and nothing changed because we already had an optional hardcore mode that worked just fine. (Side issue: people today always seem to think everything should be a democracy, even when that wouldn't work at all.) But the semantics of Terraria's "hardcore" mode are complicated and unusual. On death, your character is deleted, but the world remains. You lose your stats and what's in your inventory, but your base and everything in it are still fine.

However, this argument has not happened enough times with enough people about enough games for everyone to have seen it. It's apparently not a believable example, because while it is in my experience, the genericised variety of it is not in everyone's.

I love problem-solving. Argument is a tool that can be used to solve problems, but I don't love it any more than I love a wrench or a screwdriver. In fact, it's frequently a really awful tool - it fundamentally relies on building a conceptual bridge from point A to point B, but that only works if everyone at point A is willing to go to point B.

I would really like it if people would just admit they don't want to cross the bridge, when that's the case, instead of demanding that I build another one. But they never do. They try to say "you built a bad bridge," instead.

I'm generally a lot more forgiving of that than I should be. I build several new and improved bridges before I say "no I didn't" and ignore the self-important jackhole who thinks I should build a special bridge just for him. But it's certainly not because I like building bridges.

Edit: Ironically, in games like Minecraft, I really do like building bridges.

 

Another great example of why a developer should give little weight to a vocal minority.
Although I know it takes more than one guy to make a game, I can't see very many (any) situations where design by committee is ever a good process, ultimately there should be a (hopefully) intelligent person in charge at the top to make command decisions.

 

Was this pre-release debate or post release?

I've seen this kind of thing in communities pre-release where peoples imagination run wild and crazy 'us vs them' things happen. Post release, I've never seen actual complaints about options other than maybe tweeking them or making clearer or whatnot.

I do not - at all - trust gamers when they're talking in imaginary hypothetical. As passionate as gamers are about the games themselves, they're downright F***ing crazy about their idea of what a game should be. Gamers know if they like something or don't like something. They have no idea what they're talking about when you're in imagination land. (See pre-release no man's sky for example of raw insanity).

 

Terraria was an early access game, with all the baggage that entails.

And I know we've discussed it on this forum before (and it didn't end well), but while people WERE going crazy over that game, Sean Murray didn't help things at all with his coy "The only way to see what you look like is to look at another player" and "the chances of being in the same system as another person are basically zero" (and it happened on release day, LOL), and those videos with sand worms and such. Not the best example.

 

LONG post-release. Like, the option had been in the game for months, but a new player started a thread complaining about it. So the peanut gallery assembled, and the soapboxing commenced.

I would expect a lot of this soapboxing was, indeed, people who had taken the position pre-release. But I'm not sure, because the ReLogic team are pretty close about what they're adding to the game and when, so as a general rule you don't have any meaningful information about a feature until post-release.

I find that game developers tend to stratify into people who go down into the trenches with players, people who are up in an ivory tower talking about the academics and the theory, and people who just stick to their knitting and write code. Each of those places has very specific contributions to the field, but if you stay in just one of them, you're missing most of the picture. It's important to read things like McGonigal's Reality is Broken, but it's also important to actually play some games and interact with the other players of those games, plus you probably ought to go write some actual code to make a game happen.

Skip any of those things, and you're missing important information. Skip two of them, and you basically don't know what you're talking about at all.

I would have stopped right about here. Except if I were adding "or non-gamers."

 

Are you sure? I never saw it in an early access state, but my first exposure to it was on console - and I didn't migrate to the PC/Steam version for well over two years.

 

Well I just googled "Terraria early access" and it seemed so.

Edit: maybe not.

 

The "communication I received" was your assertion that "people believe XYZ is a true fact". For the record, if an assertion of fact is called into question, it's not exactly helpful to just make up examples. Also for the record, your real-world examples were a lot more interesting. It doesn't surprise me there are people like that out there, the InterWebs are like a vast, seething petri dish of contrarian argument. I just stated I have never seen that which you were asserting to be true. I still find it baffling but I certainly stand corrected.

And this pretty plainly summarizes why "some people want to limit choices" is probably not germane to the topic.

Game development is not a democracy.

 

I did not assert any such thing. My assertion is that sometimes people want fewer choices. There is nothing in there about belief, because facts are funny that way: it doesn't matter if you believe them.

That didn't happen. Nobody ever questioned the assertion itself, only the examples. And the criticism in both cases was "I don't believe that example." Well, that's not important. But if it helps, I can give you a different example.

Examples are ideally boring, so they don't distract people from the core assertion.

I already said something rather like that - "people today always seem to think everything should be a democracy, even when that wouldn't work at all."

Do you have anything to say about choice in games?

 

I'm really wondering - and didnt see it in the follow up thread - if these are different player types or simply a divide that originates in the different players' expertise of the game.

I can imagine that a new player wants to play a puzzle that is guaranteed solvable. This way, the player knows the time invested will not be a dud. But once the player gets experience in the game, this is no longer necesary and he will prefer the not-guaranteed way. It will offer more challenge and surprise because it's not sure if there will be a solution.

But If you are actually pulling in 2 different types of players in your single game, maybe you should split your game up into two games. each game can then be better tailored to that specific player-type.

 

Are you sure playing 3X as many games equals playing 3X as much game time? For example, when I play a game like solitaire that is not always winnable, I may restart the game early on to get good starting cards before committing to play a game out. Now I may technically have played 5 games for example, but only committed to the play time of 1 game.

If a game were always guaranteed winnable though, I wouldn't do that kind of early game restarting.

 

A very interesting problem, I must say.

It reminds me of a study I read about a few years ago. I do not remember all the details of it, but in essence research showed that people when chosing what they want to do tomorrow would name a more complex, demanding and rewarding task than what they actually chose to do when deciding what to do right now. Translated to a gamers life, it means that a player will often chose an easy task when he sits down to play, even if he really would like to undertake a more challenging one.

In my opinion, this means that giving people an opportunity to choose something easy might not be in their interest. They might end up chosing the easy route because that may seem more attractive there and then, even though the harder route is what would give them more satisfaction at the end of the day.

Personally I have always loathed cheat codes. I have always primarily tried to be unaware of their existence, secondarily tried to avoid knowing the codes if I knew they existed. Just having the option to use the code, in effect having choice, would be bad for my gaming experience, in my opinion, as it might have caused a mental stress of being tempted to use a code whenever encountering a challenge in a game. Not to mention how detrimental it may be for the gaming experience had I ever used the code.

It's pretty much as if I'd have a chocolate bar option at breakfast each morning. Just having the option would be damaging for my breakfast whether or not I'd chose to eat it.

I do think that OP's adding of the "winnable games" choice was a mistake. For two main reasons:
1. The fun of a game is most often found in the hunt for a goal. The goal is often to win. If winning is too easy, too fast, then the hunt, the fun part, is cut short.
2. Making players aware that not all games are winnable might make the "harder" option seem like a waste of time, leading more players to chose the easier route than would otherwise chose it.

 

Woah, that's very insightful. By giving them the easier, safer option, we take them down a less enjoyable path. it's possible that having the option makes the game less enjoyable for both sides - those that chose it, and those that don't. I need to look at more data.

Gigi.

 

I've found this is also a major problem with IAP.

Once you realize that instead of grinding you can spend $1 to skyrocket ahead, it destroys the entire game play experience. Even if you never purchase anything, just knowing the option is there cheapens everything.

 

Couldn't it also mean that people tend to overestimate how energetic and motivated they will feel the next day? To me that happens often.

There are studies that people are unhappier with a thing if they chose it themselves compared if they just got it. Iirc you'll find the talk by Dan Gilbert on youtube if you search "synthesis of happiness".

That's actually a great analogy, I never thought about it that way.
I've also read of a study that self-discipline willpower is a limited good. Basically if you chose not to eat the chocolate bar you'll have less patience left for the next tedious task you'll face.