Decision Fatigue
The degradation of decision quality after a player has made too many choices in a session, leading to autopilot behaviour, random picking, or quitting entirely.
In games, this means
In a game with constant loot decisions, skill allocation, and resource management, a player three hours in will make worse choices than the same player in hour one, not because they are less skilled, but because the cognitive cost of deciding repeatedly accumulates. This is distinct from choice paralysis (too many options at once), decision fatigue is the cumulative tax of deciding over time. The fix: reduce the frequency of low-stakes decisions, batch them, or make them reversible so they carry less weight.
Tags
Psychology
Core Loop
Difficulty