Teasing future content is a sophisticated behavioral strategy used in video games to maintain engagement, prolong user anticipation, and enhance long-term retention. By revealing partial, curated, or time-staggered previews of upcoming features, characters, events, or expansions, designers stimulate emotional arousal, curiosity, and FOMO. This paper explores the psychological mechanics behind teaser-based engagement, analyzes diverse use cases across major game genres, and examines its implications for motivation, monetization, and ethical product design.

Locus of control (LoC) — the degree to which individuals perceive outcomes as contingent on their own actions (internal LoC) or external forces (external LoC) — plays a fundamental role in how players interpret success, failure, agency, and fairness in games. Designers strategically manipulate LoC to shape engagement, retention, motivational pacing, and emotional investment. This paper examines internal and external LoC within game systems, explores how designers use control perception to influence behavior, analyzes case studies across genres, and discusses ethical implications for modern product design.

This paper examines the role of grinding as a psychological and structural mechanism within modern video game design. While commonly defined as the repetitive execution of in-game actions to obtain rewards, grinding extends far beyond mechanical progression. Grounded in principles of operant conditioning, variable reward anticipation, and cognitive investment biases, grinding shapes player behaviour, prolongs engagement, and subtly reinforces monetization pathways. Through a product-design lens, this study analyses grinding as both a progression tool and a behavioural manipulation technique, supported by case studies across MMORPGs,…

Loot boxes have become one of the most influential and controversial mechanics in contemporary video game design. Positioned at the intersection of psychology, monetization strategy, and interactive entertainment, loot boxes operate through systems of chance that directly engage cognitive biases and reward circuitry. This paper examines the psychological foundations of loot boxes, their evolution within the gaming industry, and their increasing regulation as gambling-adjacent products. Drawing on behavioral economics, operant conditioning models, and real-world case studies, the analysis explores how random-reward mechanics shape player…