Jamie Madigan writes about the psychology behind video games, covering player behavior, pricing, immersion, empathy and framing effects.
HN commenters cite it for clear examples of framing effects, like World of Warcraft's rest system, and recommend its podcast for its varied guests, including academics.
The difference a tiny change in framing can make is amazing: https://www.psychologyofgames.com/2010/03/framing-and-world-of-warcrafts-rest-system/
> In World of Warcraft what they did when they first designed the game was they had an experience system that would, over time, lower the amount of experience you got because [Blizzard] wanted to encourage people to play for like two hours at a time instead of twelve hours at a time. So the longer you played you’d get this experience degradation and then it would bottom out and at that point it would be a fixed rate of experience. And people just hated it.
> And so they went back and [Blizzard’s Rob Pardo] was like all right, basically what we did was we made everything in the game take twice as much experience to achieve as before and then we flipped it. So actually what happens is you start getting 200% experience and eventually it goes back down to 100%. So that effectively now how they spin it is that if you log out for a while you get this 200% boost when you log back in! And then over time it goes away and you just get regular 100% experience. It’s EXACTLY the same as it was before, except NOW everyone is like “Fuck yeah, Blizzard, this is exactly what I want!”
For anyone interested there is a good podcast on the Psychology of Video Games :
https://www.psychologyofgames.com/podcast/
Jamie Madigan, the host, has also spoken at GDC and whatnot and gets a good variety of guests including quite a few academics who work in the area.