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Super Mario Bros. Is one of the best selling video games of all time. Over 40 million copies have been sold since its launch in 1985. It's included in the World Video Game hall of Fame and time's all time 100 video games. It's ranked by IGN as the best Nintendo game ever made. And yet the game, at least by today's standards, is remarkably simple. The actual size of the game is 40 kilobytes. That's less than a single high resolution image on on your phone. So how did this simple 2D platform game become so iconic? Well, it's partly due to this fantastic theme tune, but it's also due to some very smart use of psychology and.
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It'S really well thought out. Like the designer of Super Mario Bros. They really thought that. There's articles about how they broke it down.
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That's today's guest on Nudge.
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Ramli John hey everyone, my name is Ramli John. I am the founder of Delight Path, a consultancy helping B2B companies improve their onboarding. I'm also best selling author of product led onboarding and my new one coming out is Eureka.
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Today Ramley and I will break down the behavioral science used by Super Mario. We'll cover how these subtle principles are used by this 40 year old game and still used today by modern day companies to hook customers in all of that. Coming up, the world famous blogging site Tumblr had a problem. To succeed in marketing, they needed to move quickly. They needed to create content that was trending. But their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign. That was until they switched to HubSpot's customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly. Rather than waiting for the engineers, they could use HubSpot to send all their email comms as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And the result? Well, they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce. If you want to move faster like Tumblr then head to HubSpot.com all right in front of me. I have the 1985 Super Mario Bros. Games and I'm ashamed to say that I've never actually played this game before. I enjoy Mario games, but I've never actually sat down to play the original. Which is why I'm a little surprised. By the start of this game, the game is pretty, pretty much already loaded. All I have to do is press Player one and I'm dropped right in. And literally as I was recording this, slowly an angry looking enemy was walking towards me. It's called a Goomba. And if I didn't move and jump, which you may have heard earlier, it would have killed me and I would have lost a life. That happened when I was just recording this intro before. This minimalist part of the game is partly due to the limited amount of memory space that's actually available for the game, but it's also a masterclass, a complete. According to Ram Lee in onboarding, if.
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You want to look for an example of like the best onboarding experience, look at video games.
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This Goomba, this enemy is walking towards me and it will keep walking towards me and it will keep killing me unless I do something. I'm not told what to do. I'm not told how to jump or how to kill it, but it kind of seems obvious, you know, Goomba's soft looking head just makes it feel like Mario should be able to jump and kill it, Jump right on it and destroy the enemy. And that's, that's what I'm able to do.
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You come out, you're a little Mario, you scroll to your right and the first thing you see is one small little Koopa or enemy coming at you. And it's one, just one, not three, not two. And it's moving slowly. It's like, oh, what would happen if I stomp on this in turn off, it passes away.
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And once I squash the Goomba, which I'll do now, I'm rewarded with 100 points. And now to the right of me, a four pulsating square boxes.
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On that side too, there's four coins it's blinking at. You just want to hit it. And that all happens within the first five seconds.
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These four boxes which if I jump to, I can unlock, well, they reward me with coins and a mushroom which I've just eaten, which Mario eats to double his size. So immediately within five seconds of starting the game, I feel accomplishment. I've killed my first enemy, I've started collecting coins, and I've even improved my character. Now this might seem simple, but this opening sequence is built on some important psychological principles.
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Feeling like the user or the person, the player just won something within that first few seconds is very motivating.
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One of the reasons why this is motivating is due to the goal gradient effect.
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It's the goal gradient effect. We increase our effort and desire to complete something once we've achieved a goal and seeing the next in line and we even run faster. This is the reason why runners, when they see the finish line, they push harder. Them seeing the possibility of them winning.
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Can really help Ramlee's right, Being near a goal is motivating. Researchers in a 2017 study found that marathon runners are 51.4% more likely to finish in the minute before the three hour mark than the minute after. Super Mario Bros. Lead designer Shihagira Miyamoto knew players are motivated by the chance to achieve goals, so he didn't only offer rewards and points at the end of the level. He gave users plenty within the first five seconds. We are always more motivated to act if a goal seems close. Previous guest on Nudge Ayelet Fischbach shares an example of this in her book Get It Done. She cites a study where Ran Kivets, Oleg Uminsky and Yo Wong Hyang partnered with a New York cafe. In the experiment, all of the cafe customers received a Reward card offering one free coffee after they had bought 10. Half of the customers received the card with 10 open slots. The other half got a card with two more slots. So 12 open slots versus 10. However, two of the 12 slots were pre filled with these bonus stamps. So strictly speaking, these were identical reward programs for Fishback writes how every customer who got a card needed to make 10 coffee purchases at the cafe to collect the 10 stamps to get their free coffee. That was the same for everyone. However, the allure of those free stamps, those bonus stamps was extremely high. People who thought they had gotten that head start came back to the cafe far more and were far more likely to fill up their reward card than the others. The result was fairly impressive. Those with the bonus card completed their 10 purchases within 12.7 days on average versus those who didn't have the bonus head start only finished them on average within 15.6 days. So that's 20% faster for those who feel that they had already started the process. The coins Goomba and the Mushroom in Super Mario Bros Are these quick wins that trigger the goal gradient effect. They give the player the feeling that they have already begun their adventure and that they are on their way to bigger rewards just like those bonus stamps in that study. It is a smart nudge, but it's just one of the many that Mario applied.
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They really teach you through doing. They position Mario on the very far left of the screen and that already positions you to think about what's next. Your brain is like I need. I need to go to the right because there's a lot of empty space there.
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There is no on screen instructions, no pointers, no walkthroughs. In Mario, you can only learn through.
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Playing rather than pointing out here's the Bad guy, kill it. Here, here's. Here's the coins, like, move your head on it. They tap into that whole curiosity. Something's moving, something's blinking. And by design, now they're like, oh, what should I do? So they're really teaching by doing and not saying.
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This idea of teaching through doing is proven to accelerate the learning process.
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That really taps into a psychology principle around mirror neurons, where the brain lights up when you're actually showing or doing something rather than explaining it.
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The best video games tend to teach through doing, as do some products.
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A lot of companies do this. I mentioned dueling already. A B2B example is Freshdesk, where as soon as you sign up, Freshdesk is a support tool. They get you to actually open a ticket, a fake ticket, a dummy ticket, respond to it, and then close it. And it all feels very safe because they tell you up front that this is what it looked like, but this is not your customer.
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Mario forces its user to learn through doing. If you don't move in Mario, you will die within 10 seconds of starting the game. It's only through playing that you survive, and thus, by playing, you start to learn the game mechanics. It'd be easy to have the first enemy behind a block unable to attack you straight away, but that wouldn't force the player into action. If you don't move, you die. And yet this first world in Mario is still very easy. Almost every player can complete it without dying. At least the first level of the first world. And that ease, it's on purpose.
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Any great video game does this. They start off the first level as easy, like, they obviously want you to get hooked on it. And starting off in hard mode gets people frustrated. And when they're frustrated, they leave, right? They know it's like, ah, I can't beat this boss. So you. If you recall Super Mario World, where world one, it's easy, you jump around, you might fail. The second world is you're underground, and now there's, like, flowers biting at you and there's bats and. And the. It gets progressively harder. You're now swimming, so they're progressively making it harder over and over again.
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Ramping up difficulty slowly stops players from feeling overwhelmed by the challenge, because if a goal seems unreachable, it'll demotivate users. In a study cited in Adam Alter's Anatomy of a Breakthrough, people who visited a music rating website were offered a $25Amazon voucher for rating 51 different songs. Raters were 40 times more likely to quit. And earlier in the task than those who were closer to the goal. Those who were closer to the goal rated more songs than those who were.
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Earlier on Slowly leveling you up that's a principle called progressive overload, where you start small to build habits like this is what you know, like Atomic Habits by James Clear talks about where don't set a goal to run a marathon right you first of all, you'll hurt yourself, but you'll feel overwhelmed. Like start off with I'm going to wake up tomorrow and run a kilometer.
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In other words, we gain motivation if the reward seems closer. Successful games like Super Mario ramp difficulty up slowly so users never feel like the ultimate goal will be too difficult to achieve. It keeps players hooked, and many companies apply this exact same principle.
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If you look at Shopify, what they do is they progressively disclose certain fields so they hide fields. And when you respond that yes, I'm switching tools, they show another field. Which tool are you switching to so users don't feel overwhelmed, Give players a.
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Quick win, teach them through doing, and ramp up the difficulty slowly. All of these tactics help trigger the goal gradient effect, motivating players to keep playing. But Super Mario Bros. Had other tricks that it used to keep players hooked. We'll cover all of those after this short break. Content Is Profit, hosted by Louise Anfonsi, is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible. Content Is Profit is one of those real, practical listens. You'll get tips on selling things that actually work. You'll hear frameworks, tactics, and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before. I would suggest if you want to get started, listen to the how to get your first 500 email subscribers. That's a great example of how wonderful this show is. A good mix of insights and ideas. So go and listen to Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Remember how I told you I was surprised by how simple the start to Mario Bros. Was? You simply click Player 1 and you're immediately dropped into the game with no choices and no instructions. Well, Ramley says this lack of choice was on purpose.
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Rather than showing different things and different gaps and things to climb. It was one bad guy Koopa and four flashing coins. And that really exemplifies the whole Hicks law, where the idea is that the more choices there are on the screen or anywhere else, the longer it takes for somebody to make a decision and the longer the decision time it takes, the more likely they they leave.
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I've just finished reading Consumerology, a great book on consumer psychology, and the author, Philip Graves will actually join me on Nudge in a few weeks time. Anyway, in his book, Graves shares a real world example of Hicks Law, a diet and exercising tracking website, Daily Burn tested alternative designs for its homepage. The web team found that reducing the number of options that visitors could click on on the homepage from 25, which was the original, to 5, which was in their test. While reducing those options improved conversions by 20, limiting the number of choices actually encourages action. Mario won't ask you to pick your outfit, your starting world, what hat you would like to wear within the first five seconds because that additional choice decreases motivation.
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Another great example is canva. Canva has thousands of templates and if they just dropped you in there to show all of their templates, it would feel overwhelming. And Hicks Law applies here. What Canva does is they ask you who are you? Are you a teacher? Are you a small business? Are you a big brand? Are you a student? And based on your choice, they're like, oh, based on your choice, here are the top templates. If you said that you're a teacher, here are some presentations that would engage your students. If you're a small business, here are some Instagram templates that you can use to post up on your social if you're a big brand, here are some brand guidelines that you can use.
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What's interesting about Hick's Law is that it contradicts what we as players and consumers expect. If you'd asked me if I'd like to choose the character I'd like to play at in Super Mario Bro, I'd probably say yes. And yet in reality, that choice might demotivate me. Graves shares a great example of this in his 2010 book. He writes how Google made the mistake of asking customers how many results they would want to see on each page. After using the search engine, people responded to the rational question in a rational way. If you're searching for something, you would assume that more choice is always better. They said, don't show me 10 results on the page, show me 30 results. However, when Google tripled the number of results it provided after a search from 10 to 30, it found that traffic actually declined. More choice wasn't better, but Super Mario Bros. Limited the number of choice they gave players, not just because of Hicks Law, but also, according to Ramlee, due.
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To another law, Miller's Law, in its Office. The idea that you could only process seven pieces of information at once. Beyond that, we start to forget things.
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Of course, Mario applies this brilliantly.
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And you know that applies in Mario. First of all, when how they kind of progressively walk you through that experience where it starts off easy so you don't have to remember a lot of things, only five things. And then the next level is slightly harder and then you have to remember slightly more. And then now you're in the next level, it's like oh, okay, I remember this, I need to jump over it and oh my goodness, that flower will bite me.
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The enemies change as you progress through the levels. Platforms start moving and falling. There are invisible blocks to discover and new power up opportunities. These additional elements appear slowly. They don't appear all at once. And this is to overcome Miller's law. When presented with seven items or more at once, we'll start to forget things. By only introducing a couple of elements in each level, Mario is able to keep players hooked up. But there's one psychological principle that Super Mario Bros. Didn't apply.
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IKEA fact. For people who don't know what it is. There's been studies that shown that people who build something feel more emotional connection than buying something that's already pre assembled. And there's a lot of places where this can be applied. First of all, let's talk about video games. In things like Super Mario Kart, which is another game that I'm obsessed with, you can at some point you can choose and customize your car, you can customize your player and really it's all about the customization. Now when you're building this, it's not just Donkey Kong or Super Mario, it is you. It's your character. Now you have customized it to that point where it is something that is part of something you built and you value more than something that is already pre selected or pre built for you.
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The 1985 Super Mario Bros. Didn't apply this, likely because the game had so little memory that it wouldn't be able to customize based on each user. However, other Nintendo games from a similar time did manage to apply it.
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It's Zelda. You get a chance to name your character. I replayed this, this game recently on my Game Boy Flashback to anybody who used to have one. And it would. The first question ask you is what is your name? And now you, your character isn't Link, which is the guy with the sword. You are now Phil. This is Phil. Hey Phil, how's it going? So every conversation you have in the game is now using your name and.
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Ramlee has a great example of a company that applied this exact same principle to boost their signups.
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A great example I can think of in the B2B world which they've done this, they've nailed this. They have data that shows it qualitatively is Wave. Wave Apps is an easy way to create beautiful invoices for entrepreneurs. And a lot of these entrepreneurs are switching from Microsoft Word and Excel for sending invoices. And one of the first things they ask you is what is your website? As soon as they get your website, they actually pick off your brand colors and then they show on the right of the screen as soon as you upload your your website what your invoice can look like with Wave and it's picked up your logo, it's picked up your brand colors.
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Super Mario Bros. Is a rather simple game, yet it is clearly made with an impressive understanding of consumer psychology. The lead game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, knew the game shouldn't overload the player with more than seven bits of information at once. He knew to reduce the amount of choice he offered new players. But above all, he understood the goal gradient effect. He knew that players are demotivated if a reward seems too far away. So he always kept the next coin, the next flashing box or killable enemy within sight on the right of the screen. This simple game dynamic has kept players hooked for years. Over 40 million people have spent hours playing the game over the last 40 years and millions of them have completed it multiple times. And I could see why I was hooked. Even when I was supposed to be preparing for this podcast, I got hooked on the game and ended up playing far more than I thought I would. Oh yes, I've saved the princess. How great is that? What a wonderful game. So I've finished the first world in Mario and you know what? I really enjoyed that. Yeah, I started the Next World and the Goomba's still walking towards me. What a fantastic game. It's taken me far too long to actually play that game. And it's interesting that a game this old, you know, 40 years old now and with a memory the size of a high resolution image can still be this addictive. And I think that's testament to all of the wonderful behavioral science they use. That is all for today, folks. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to Ramley for joining me on the show. If you've enjoyed today's show, you will love Ramlee's latest book. Here's what the book is about.
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It's all about helping B2B companies onboard their customers and users. Traditionally, B2B onboarding is quite challenging, but also quite terrible. Tunnel data shows if you onboard a customer right, B2B or B2C, they stick around longer, they pay longer and they pay more. And as well as they upgrade that book, Eureka shares a playbook that I've put together working with different B2B companies including Zapier and Appcues and Leadpages improve their onboarding experience.
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I've left a link to Ramley's website and the book in the show notes if you'd like to check it out in the show notes. You'll also find links to follow me on LinkedIn to subscribe to my free Nudge weekly newsletter that goes out to 9,500 of you every week with the best behavioral science tip I have found that week. And if you do, go to nudgepodcast.com to sign up to the newsletter. You'll also find my newly redesigned website. I've spent the last couple of weeks redesigning the site, so do go and check it out, get a quick preview of it and let me know what you think. You'll be able to contact me through the contact form on my new website, so just go to nudgepodcast.com to check out the new site and bonus points for anyone who notices any of the nudges I've applied on my very own website. Well, that is all for today folks. I really hope you've enjoyed today's episode and I'll be back next Monday for another episode Episode of Nudge. Cheers.