The Psychology of Vampire Survivors
It all started when I remembered we needed blueberries. I went to my partner’s office as he was getting ready to leave, only to see Las Vegas unfolding on his monitor. There were easily hundreds of enemies on the screen unable to get close to his character. Not that I could even see his character model as there were rainbow streams of light shooting out of chests accompanied by music that wouldn’t be out of place in a slot machine.
“What the hell is going on there?” I asked.
He glanced over with a cheeky grin. “Gaming.”
After telling him about the blueberries, he did something I didn’t expect: he just left the house as the game was running. He didn’t ask me to check on it, he didn’t ask me to do anything to the game, he just left. And apparently he won.
This game, as the title suggests, was Vampire Survivors. Labelled an ‘Action Roguelike’ on Steam, it is a game based on the simple premise of hunting monsters while surviving. Accompanying the simple premise is a simple control scheme as you are only required to move your character around the screen as the game automatically fires your weapons for you.
Despite the simplicity of the game, it has been a runaway success. It is currently rated ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ on Steam and was even a nominee at the 2022 Game Awards. People adore this game – but why?
In this article I would like to explore the psychology of Vampire Survivors, particularly why it has been so successful and why people have found so much joy from the game. I am doing this from an outside perspective as someone who is not affiliated with the game and am not involved in the promotion of the game. I’ve simply seen how much joy it has brought to myself and my loved ones and have been eager to explore it.
As usual, there will be a summary at the end if you do not wish to read everything. Now, let’s begin!
Contents
Vampire Satisfaction
I’ll start this article off by sharing an unfortunate truth about our modern lives: our lives are often structured in a way that doesn’t bring as much satisfaction as our brain would like. Employees often wait a month for the relief of a paycheque, then the grind begins anew. If you’re a college student, you’ll have to persevere for 3-4 years or more to finally get that sheet of paper in your hands.
To combat this dissatisfaction, psychologists recommend inserting small victories and little pleasures into our day to make sure we feel content [1]. If you’re an avid list-maker like me, you’ll love the satisfaction of ticking something off your to-do list. If you’re exhausted from a day of work, it can be worth hanging in there for the wave of satisfaction from beating a challenging boss before another day of work.
Vampire Survivors’ approach to small victories and little pleasures is quite an attractive one. I’m not much of an achievement hunter, but the game’s achievement list not only acts as a guide for how to play the game, but rewards you for learning, experimenting and hanging in there. You survived for five minutes in the first stage? Well done, here’s a brand new weapon to play around with. You survived for a period of time in a map? Congratulations, here’s a character with a moveset based on one of your favourite video game characters.
While I’m not a game developer, the research argues that Vampire Survivors’ achievement list makes for good game design. These incremental achievements that guide us towards progress can be described in game theory as ‘optimal challenges’ [2]. What makes these challenges optimal is that they are balanced enough to be within our capabilities at the time, especially when they help us to unlock new things to play around with. In my first hour of play alone, I found a wealth of power-ups to play around with, unlocked several new characters and unlocked a new map. That’s a lot of satisfaction and ticked boxes for one hour of gaming, and enticed me to play more.
I have several loved ones who adore Vampire Survivors and have supported it on multiple platforms, and completing the achievement list is often their endpoint for different platforms. This brings me to my next point.
Ethical Survivors
In the introduction, I mentioned how my partner’s screen would fit right into a Las Vegas casino with its flashing lights and sound effects. I have previously written about sequences in games with flashing lights and sound effects — loot boxes.
It’s common for the opening sequence of a loot box to be filled with spectacular lights and sound effects. These moments of anticipation can activate the brain’s chemical reward system, releasing endorphins that create pleasure [3]. But where there’s an outcome we’re not very fond of, there’s an option to buy more loot boxes.
This phenomenon is interesting when compared to Vampire Survivors. In Vampire Survivors, opening a chest reveals a sequence of lights and sounds that leads to a range of gameplay upgrades, weapons, coins and more. Loot boxes are so exciting and enticing because they want to encourage a cycle of purchasing and anticipation, but there is no way to feed Vampire Survivors any more of your money outside of additional DLC packages.
This practice seems inconceivable in the modern gaming landscape where games can be designed to frustrate players into spending money, whether it’s a pay-to-win model or even a pay-to-play model such as the Dungeon Keeper reboot. And it is this inconceivability that I feel contributes to the success of Vampire Survivors.
In previous articles, I have talked about how even a simple announcement that a game won’t contain loot boxes can create a storm of positive PR on social media. It’s an unfortunate reality that gamers are becoming a bit more jaded and expect to be nickel and dimed by publishers. While I’m having fun with Street Fighter 6, I feel a weary jadedness to needing to purchase in-game currency to play as the costume colour that I like.
With all this in mind, I would lean towards calling Vampire Survivors an ethical game. It is an inexpensive game filled with content, different characters and playstyles, and doesn’t try to frustrate you or force you into microtransactions or season passes. If you want more content to continue your experience, there’s some equally inexpensive DLC for you. I also find it quite nice that while ‘addicting’ is a word I often see used to describe the game, it doesn’t engage in predatory practices to get you hooked. As I previously mentioned, I know several people who have bought the game multiple times and use the completion of their achievement list to hop off the game and move on to other things. They find it a joy to continue supporting the game and hop off when they feel they are done.
I feel that these factors are important for how successful the game eventually became. Similar to games like Among Us, Vampire Survivors was a word-of-mouth success, and it’s a lot easier to sell people on a game that is incredibly good value for money and doesn’t try to frustrate you into spending more money.
Sleepy Survivors
I wrestled with myself over whether to include this section, but I feel that it’s important to represent the experiences of people that both data — and most importantly, memes — suggests isn’t all that uncommon.
I love rhythm games and often play them as close to the highest difficulty as I can. Of course this meant getting a complete edition of Theatrhythm: Final Curtain to play a symphony of Square Enix songs. After one especially gruelling day at work, I forced myself to play the game and found myself so exhausted and dizzy that the beat map made me nauseous. I quit the game and sadly haven’t played it since.
Online discourse argues that I shouldn’t have experiences like this. Mothers lie when they say you’re too sick for video games because gamers are always gaming. When I published my data analysis on whether 20 hours of gaming per week constitutes an addiction, I was inundated with comments on how those were ‘rookie numbers’.
But some weeks I don’t get very much game time. Sometimes I’m so tired that the games I usually gravitate towards can make me feel sick. Am I not a real gamer? Did I waste my money building a gaming PC?
This is where something called cognitive dissonance comes into play. Cognitive dissonance refers to the psychological discomfort of holding two contradictory beliefs about something [4]. This could be something like “I love video games and spend a lot of money on them” alongside “I don’t really want to play video games right now”. Surely if you love something and dedicate your resources to it then you’re going to want to do it, right?
So let’s go through this experience using cognitive dissonance. I’m tired at the end of my day, but I’ll feel guilty if I watch Netflix or read a book instead of play video games as it’s incongruous to my identity as someone who loves video games. If I play something fast and complex then I may not be able to keep up with the action. If I play something competitive, I know from research I’ll be more likely to have a bad time or even rage quit. Maybe I could switch it up and play a different type of game?
As you’d expect, Vampire Survivors is perfect for this. While there are lots of possible weapon, item and character builds, the game still simply involves you moving your character around the screen and surviving as long as you can.
I can’t help but feel that data supports the idea of tired gamers chilling out with Vampire Survivors. Statistics shared by the official Steam Deck Twitter account frequently show Vampire Survivors as the most played game that month, only recently dropping down to lower positions following hot new releases. While I couldn’t find any formal surveys of Steam Deck users, I searched for some informal user polls to give me some indication of demographics. After searching around, I was able to find results ranging from 42% of users aged 30+ (N=693, open registration) to 85% of users aged 30+ (n=653, closed registration to academic and industry emails). While I can appreciate how the sampling skews the findings, it’s still quite high on the lower side of things.
I mentioned earlier how I sometimes worry if I’m showing my gaming PC enough love. People have embraced their technology being used as a Vampire Survivors machine, even making memes about using their highly customised and highly modified Steam Deck just to play the game. It brings me joy to think that a simple and enjoyable game can keep people connected to the world of gaming while they recharge and unwind after a hard day.
Speaking from experience, Vampire Survivors sessions on the Steam Deck are best enjoyed under a blanket with a warm cup of tea.
Backlog Survivors
If you’re reading this, chances are you have a video game backlog. Maybe it’s been years of Steam sales, free giveaways on the Epic Game Store or even discounted games on the Android or iOS store. No matter how or on what platform, there are some wonderful games waiting for you.
But I actually want to flip the script a little bit. Instead of talking about video game backlogs, I want to talk about media backlogs. I understandably talk a lot about video games on my website, but there is a world of wonderful content out there such as movies and TV shows to catch up on. Even YouTube feels like it’s in a great spot with cosy vlogs and highly-produced documentaries on a wide range of topics. I’ll throw myself under the bus and share that as of writing this, I have 651 videos in my Watch Later playlist. That’s gonna take some time to get through…
It’s important to talk about media backlogs in the context of Vampire Survivors for two reasons. Firstly, the previous section talked about the concept of cognitive dissonance and how we might feel guilty watching a two hour YouTube documentary about a chess computer when we have a video game backlog to conquer. I also previously mentioned how Vampire Survivors can have a natural end point in terms of unlocking all of the achievements.
When you pair these two things, it’s a win-win combination: you get to enjoy your two hour documentary while continuing to play video games, and if you’re a backlog buster then you’re working towards the satisfaction of the end point. Even if you’re playing past the point of unlocking all of the achievements, multitasking like this can still alleviate the guilt you may feel neglecting your expensive gaming PC to watch something instead.
The topic of multitasking brings me to my second point. I feel that multitasking hasn’t had it easy lately with the rise of split-screen TikTok videos. Suddenly multitasking represents the fall of society as the current Gen Z zoomer mindset needs more than one thing to occupy its brain. We’re all doomed etc.
With this in mind, I set out to find some research on the benefits of multitasking when doing things like watching TV. During my research, I came across a book chapter focused on the psychological benefits of knitting [5].
The knitters reported that knitting during passive activities actually had a wide range of benefits to them. One knitter described how it helped their marriage as their husband would otherwise get frustrated at their fidgeting and idle hands. Other knitters reported that it helped manage the symptoms of a wide range of mental health conditions including ADHD, anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette’s Syndrome and trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling).
Reading this chapter was a delight as I’ve been championing video games as a method of reducing anxious and idle hands for years now. If it’s socially acceptable to knit and watch television, it should be perfectly okay for you to play games like Vampire Survivors and watch a YouTube documentary, and hopefully it will keep anxious and fidgeting hands at bay.
Strategic Survivors
While brainstorming for this article, I noted how satisfying it is to reach a point where you are confidently destroying hundreds of enemies appearing on screen — maybe even while standing still. Confident that this was a strong enough point to sustain its own section, I set out to research ideas such as the satisfaction behind power fantasies. While researching this, I was led down a different, much more interesting rabbit hole.
Enter ‘Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play’ by Deterding et al. [6]. In this paper, the researchers tackle the unenviable task of explaining why both idle games and games like Dark Souls are satisfying despite a massive range of challenge and success outcomes. While I spoke in the introduction about my partner wandering away from the game, Vampire Survivors takes dozens of hours and many, many upgrades to get to that point, so I don’t think it quite fits into the idle category. Despite this, the researchers provided some fascinating insight that changed my perspective on the game simply being a power fantasy.
The theory that the researchers use that I will be applying to Vampire Survivors is called predictive processing [7]. To massively condense this theory, it argues that we strive wherever possible to minimise errors and uncertainty. When playing a game, this can come from three things:
- Pragmatic risk: This is when we choose options and routes that will get us closest to our goal. For Vampire Survivors, this could be picking the character and weapons you’re best with.
- Epistemic ambiguity: This is when we find out more about the game and how to conquer it. For Vampire Survivors, this could be something like a particular enemy spawning at the 20 minute mark but your weapons can deal with it no problem.
- Novelty: This is when we’ve explored and identified the scope of the game and what it can bring. For Vampire Survivors, this would be similar to the above point while also minimising the element of surprise.
While I did say that Vampire Survivors isn’t technically an idle game, I want to use one of the arguments for the satisfaction of idle games and apply it to Vampire Survivors. The researchers argue that idle games can give people the satisfaction of doing better than they had expected thanks to the power of upgrades, meaning that improvement becomes exponential rather than linear. In fact, games where we perform better than expected can help improve our mood [8-9].
This definitely happens with Vampire Survivors in its approach to the upgrade system. You begin by picking up individual weapons and upgrades, then you get the power to combine them to make an upgraded weapon. Fan-favourite weapon Garlic can become the Soul Eater when paired with the Pummarola item. These upgraded weapons exponentially increase your survivability and how much damage you dish out. I still remember how exhilarating it was to get my very first weapon upgrade — it put a huge smile on my face.
This research paper helped flip my perspective on the game. It’s not necessarily about being big and strong and powerful, it’s about being so smart, so tactical, so knowledgeable about the game that you can confidently deck your character out and walk away. When I came to this realisation, I couldn’t help but think of another game: Final Fantasy XII.
Final Fantasy XII’s gameplay revolves around the Gambit system. This system has been described as ‘Programming for Beginners’ as it allows players to set conditional statements for battle. An easy example would be ‘Ally: HP<60% → Cura’. This means that if a party member’s health falls below 60%, the selected party member will prioritise healing them.
Back in my undergraduate days, I visited a friend while she was playing Final Fantasy XII. She had her Gambits so well-optimised that she could swing her chair around and talk to me during battles. She wasn’t cursing at the game, she wasn’t complaining that she spent her money on a game that ‘plays itself’, she was proud of her setup and even had a cheeky smile on her face. The same type of smile my partner had when he proudly told me he was gaming while walking away from the computer.
When it’s easy for us to think of power fantasies and being the biggest and baddest there is (I was guilty of this myself), sometimes it’s good to give ourselves a little bit more kudos at how well-optimised, well-strategised we are and how we understand a game so well that sometimes we don’t even need to look.
Miscellaneous Survivors
In this final section, I’m going to share two additional theories that can help explain why Vampire Survivors is enjoyed by so many.
The first theory is one that is commonly used to explain why people continue to enjoy and play video games. This theory, known as Self-Determination Theory [10], argues that gaming helps fulfil three main needs for us. I’ll explain each need and why I feel it relates well to Vampire Survivors:
- Autonomy: For a game to be rewarding, we need to be interested in the outcome and feel that we are personally in control of achieving this outcome [11]. Vampire Survivors is a single-player game that provides a lot of choice and customisation in terms of characters, weapons, upgrades etc. This provides players with lots of choice and options in meeting the next achievement on the list.
- Competence: For games to make us feel happy and rewarded, they should provide us with a sense of accomplishment [12]. This can happen in a myriad of ways in Vampire Survivors, whether it’s creating a wonderful superpowered weapon, working your way through the achievements, or surviving longer than you did last time.
- Relatedness: Games that we are personally connected to and invested in are more likely to make us happy. This is quite a fun one to talk about in the context of Vampire Survivors as it’s a component I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about yet. There is a fun range of characters to choose from and unlock which are homages to other video game legends, such as Pugnala the bullet witch inspired by the legendary Bayonetta, or the adorable O’Sole who leaves a trail of flowers in their path, referencing the beloved Amaterasu from the game Okami. I rushed to unlock these characters as I adore their respective inspirations, and I can’t begin to describe the smile on my face as I left a flower trail with O’Sole.
The second theory that I want to share is a theory that I’ve talked about before: the idea of video games being digital laboratories. Psychologists such as Piaget [13] argue that we are natural hypothesis testers and love to test and explore things about our world. Not only do I feel that Vampire Survivors is a great game for this, but a stage of the game is specifically designed around encouraging experimentation along with trial and error.
Do you remember when I said that combining Garlic with Pummarola grants you the Soul Eater weapon? Well the game doesn’t actually tell you that, you have to figure that out for yourself.
You will reach a point where the game teases that combining x + y = z, but you have to experiment with these combinations to figure out what equals what. When you finally do, your experimenting is rewarded with a super powerful weapon.
While this built-in experimentation phase can bring us satisfaction, it doesn’t end there: you can still try to figure out and share your favourite ‘builds’. Builds refers to everything from what character you pick to what weapons and upgrades you build around. Communities can thrive around sharing and borrowing powerful builds for playing the game, so why not try to find and share your own?
Summary
- Vampire Survivors provides an in-game achievement list that rewards incremental progress and exploration with weapons, upgrades, characters and more. These challenges are described in game theory as ‘optimal challenges’ and keep us playing due to how satisfying they are. The small victories and satisfaction that the game provides are a fun way to combat the dissatisfaction that modern life brings, such as waiting a month for a paycheque or years for a degree.
- Vampire Survivors contains exciting anticipation mechanics that are similar to how publishers encourage you to buy loot boxes. However, there is no way to feed the game any more of your money outside of additional DLC. It seems that the ethical game design of Vampire Survivors has contributed to its word-of-mouth success as it’s easy to recommend an inexpensive game filled with content that doesn’t encourage loot boxes or microtransactions.
- Sometimes some of us feel too tired to enjoy video games. This can lead to a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance: we feel psychological discomfort over buying video games or maybe even building a gaming PC yet being too tired to enjoy them. The simple gameplay of Vampire Survivors can keep people connected to the world of video games and alleviate feelings of cognitive dissonance when tired.
- While we may be familiar with video game backlogs, we may also have media backlogs of TV shows, movies or even YouTube playlists. The simple gameplay of Vampire Survivors makes it a perfect multitasking game when consuming media and helps alleviate the guilt of watching something rather than gaming. Playing games like Vampire Survivors while watching TV can also have mental health benefits such as occupying anxious and fidgeting hands.
- When playing Vampire Survivors, you can eventually reach the point where you deal so much damage that you can look away or walk away from the screen. The theory of predictive processing argues that this is incredibly satisfying to us as we are so knowledgeable and so optimal that we have confidently minimised the chance of defeat.
- Additional reasons for the success of Vampire Survivors include: how we feel in control of our victories in the game; how the game can make us feel accomplished; how we feel attached to the game via characters inspired by our favourite video game characters; the thrill of experimenting with different weapon and upgrade combinations to find weapon upgrades; and the fun of finding and sharing powerful ‘builds’ that can help conquer our monster foes.
Credits
A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.
This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, redKheld, Austin Enright, NotGac, Shaemus, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Mulgar, Tobias Svensson, Gamma Ray Garrett and Pot. Thank you!
References
[1] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227-268.
[2] Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, NY: Harper Perennial
[3] Kim, S. W. (1998). Opioid Antagonists in the Treatment of Impulse-Control Disorders. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 59(4), 159-164.
[4] Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
[5] Ahlers, J., & Thomas, M. D. (2019). Why Do You Knit?: Exploring the Role of Knitting in Identity and Wellbeing. A Global Perspective on Friendship and Happiness, 111-134.
[6] Deterding, S., Andersen, M. M., Kiverstein, J., & Miller, M. (2022). Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 924953.
[7] Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford: OUP.
[8] Pine, R., Fleming, T., McCallum, S., and Sutcliffe, K. (2020). The effects of casual videogames on anxiety, depression, stress, and low mood: a systematic review. Journal of Games and Health, 9, 255–264
[9] Reinecke, L., and Rieger, D. (2021). Media entertainment as a self-regulatory resource: The recovery and resilience in entertaining media use (R2EM) model. In Vorderer P., Klimmt C. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of entertainment theory. Oxford University Press.
[10] Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
[11] Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668.
[12] Ryan, R.M. & Brown, K.W. (2005). Legislating competence: The motivational impact of high stakes testing as an educational reform. In C. Dweck & A. E. Elliot (Eds.), Handbook of Competence (pp.354–374) New York, NY: Guilford Press
[13] Piaget, J. (1936). Origins of intelligence in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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