INDUSTRY INSIDER: MARK MCGUINNESS
The player is not a spreadsheet I
During the summer columns our Industry Insider, Mark McGuinness, looked outward, to nature. This month he looks inward, to the mind. Biomimicry showed what works. Decision science explains why, and it hands digital gaming its next real advantage: an experience built around how players actually decide, not how we wish they would.
n our previous insights, I went looking in nature for the answers to acquisition, activation and retention, and found them in the flower, the honeybee and the cleaner fish: four billion years of solutions to problems we persist in treating as new. That was a column about looking outward. This month I want to look inward instead, at the one part of the system that every operator controls least and understands worst. The player’s mind.
I trained as a scientist, and the habit of asking how things actually work has never left me, so let me begin with the uncomfortable part. The player is not a rational calculator, and neither, if we are honest, is anyone else.
WE DESIGN FOR A SPREADSHEET
Most digital gaming is still built for a customer or ICP who does not exist: a player who reads the terms, compares the odds across four apps, weighs the expected value, sets a
10 NOVEMBER 2026 GIO
budget and then calmly sticks to it. That player is a spreadsheet with a pulse, and the research buried the model decades ago. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that we run on two systems: one fast, intuitive and emotional, the other slow, deliberate and inclined to laziness. Most decisions, including the decision to tap, to stake and to stay, are taken by the fast system and rationalised by the slow one after the event. We feel, we act, and only then do we assemble a story about why.
Decision science is the disciplined study of that real sequence, and of the predictable ways in which it bends. Design for the spreadsheet and you serve no one. Design for the instinct, then give the deliberate mind what it needs to feel in control, and you have the beginnings of an experience. Consider a single bias by way of illustration. We feel a loss roughly twice as keenly as we feel the equivalent gain. That one asymmetry, known as loss aversion,
governs how a player experiences a near miss, a chased deposit or a limit that halts them mid-session.
Ignore it, and your messaging lands wrongly while your duty of care arrives too late. Understand it, and you can design a session that steadies the player precisely where the pull is strongest.
That player is a spreadsheet with a pulse, and the research buried the model decades ago
FRICTION IS A FEATURE Begin with friction, which the industry has spent a decade casting as the enemy. The mission was to strip it out: one tap to
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