The Psychology of Lego Star Wars I

Image by nickstone333 via Flickr

Above all, it's about cooperation.

‘Isaac, you open that door and rescue C-3PO! I'll hold off these Stormtroopers!'

‘Wait! We both have to pull these levers together or the door won't open!'

What does it take to be a good collaborator? You need to want the same things as your partner, of course, and have the necessary skills to fulfil your intentions. But you also need to be able to represent your shared goals; to keep in mind what your partner wants, and how those intentions might change.

That's a problem of social understanding. Isaac and I look as though we are questing together into the heart of Darth Vader's mothership, but we are actually voyaging into each other's minds. As he commands this virtual reality with his Wii controller, Isaac needs to represent his own goal of getting through that door, but he also needs to bear in mind my goal of holding off the Stormtroopers. A complex adventure game like Lego Stars Wars requires that both participants keep track of rapidly changing intentions and motivations: both their own, and those of their partner.

We know that babies aren't born with this kind of understanding, although they are probably innately endowed with some of the capacities that underlie it. From early in the second year of life, infants have a sophisticated understanding of other people as intentional agents, who act according to goals and show frustration when those goals are not achieved. As children's social understanding improves—as they develop a fully fledged theory of mind—so they become better at representing the complexities of shared goals, and are able to engage in more and more sophisticated forms of collaboration and cooperation¹.

What's more, even at very young ages human children show a tremendous motivation to share goals in this way. It's not just that they can align their intentions with someone else's, but also that they want to, and they enjoy doing so. The pleasure of two-player mode is that we can indulge this shared motivation of Isaac's and mine. He could be tramping the path to Jedi Knighthood on his own, but it's much more fun with me at his side.

This kind of collaboration comes with social rules. The most important stricture is that both players should commit jointly to the task, and not break off except for pressing reasons. If I suddenly quit being Luke Skywalker and wandered off to check my email, I would get a stern look. I've declared myself willing to combat the Sith in all their forms, and that, for my five-year-old brother-in-arms, is a sombre commitment.

When do children begin to understand these social commitments? In the latest issue of Developmental Psychology, Maria Gräfenhein and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology investigated joint commitment to game-playing in young children². In one study, they observed how two- and three-year-old children behaved in each of two conditions of a collaborative game. In the first of these conditions, an experimenter established a joint commitment to play the game by explicitly inviting the child to join her. In the second condition, the experimenter simply joined a child who was already playing, without any joint commitment to collaborate. In both conditions, the adult then suddenly interrupted her play. How would the child react? Would he or she try to re-engage the experimenter, or carry on playing alone?

The results showed that two-year-olds did not behave differently in the two conditions. Whether or not there was a commitment to play together, two-year-olds mostly seemed to expect some continued involvement from the adult. The three-year-olds, in contrast, showed different behavior in the two conditions. Where there had been a joint commitment, these children made efforts to re-engage the experimenter, through a verbal invitation, for example, or by offering a toy. In the condition where there had been no joint commitment, three-year-olds proved much less likely to try to re-engage the adult. It was as though they recognised that the adult's attention had easily come, and so it could easily go. In a second study, three- and four-year-old children were enticed away from a shared game by another experimenter. When there had been a joint commitment, children were more likely to acknowledge their departure to their partner, compared to where there had been no such social pact.

Plenty of reason to think, then, that Isaac will be taking this shared responsibility seriously. My protestations that I cannot help him rebuild this spaceship (because I need to get on and make his dinner) fall on deaf ears. The prospect of completing this level and unlocking some more characters ought to matter more than eating. But, if the rewards are potentially great, the price of failure is also high. One aspect of successful collaboration is knowing when to give your partner a break. When you are both crucial for the success of a project, you need to be able to show forgiveness to a comrade who sometimes gets it wrong. Usually Isaac is patient, recognizing that we old-timers don't have a natural feel for video-gaming. But occasionally the enormity of the adventure overwhelms him. I'm too slow through a doorway, or I get in the way while he is trying to perform some tricky operation. Retribution is swift. He turns to me, raises his hand high and smites me with his lightsaber, reducing my clumsy avatar to a shower of colorful Lego studs.

¹ Tomasello, M., Kruger, A. C., & Ratner, H. H. (1993). Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495-552.

² Gräfenhain, M., Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Young children's understanding of joint commitments. Developmental Psychology, 45, 1430-1443.