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Online Game Determines If You're a Shopaholic (or Not)

by Evan Shamoon on March 14, 2008 at 06:50 PM



There's a little flash game -- the creatively-titled "Door Game" -- that's making a bit of a stir on the Internet. The object is to score points by clicking open doors and then clicking on the rewards which rest inside them. The prevailing strategy is essentially to check out each of the three doors, and pick the one offering the highest rewards; switching between doors has its price, however, because it means using up one of your allotted 50 clicks to open the new door.

The object of the experiment was to see how players reacted to two different versions of the game: In one version, a door would start to shrink and then disappear if you stayed away from it; in the other version, the doors didn't shrink or disappear. The idea is that it's supposed to tell you about yourself more generally -- how you make decisions and how you choose to live your life.

Dr. Ariely, the creator of the game, also has a new book out, in which he discusses similar examples of the mentality -- like shoppers' tendency to go wild at a sale "because by the end of the sale all of those items would be gone, and we could never have it at that price again." Presumably these impulsive, spending-spree-prone types kept clicking the shrinking door, or something.

Anyway, check out the game and know thyself a little better. Or at least -- given the current grim state of the U.S. economy -- figure out if you should leaving your credit cards at home next time you go out. The site sometimes takes a couple of minutes to load, so keep trying!


From NY Times

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Tags: Weird

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