10 Secret Ways Video Games Play YOU

7. Countless AAA Games Give More HP To Your Final Chunk Of Health

There are few more satisfying moments in action games than scraping through an intense shootout or fisticuffs with just the scantest morsel of health remaining.

And while this might simply seem like a wonderful coincidence while you're playing, these moments are actually precisely engineered by developers, making use of what's frequently called "magic HP."

Basically, many action games disproportionately allocate health points across your energy bar, such that the last chunk or segment of health actually contains more HP than the rest.

As a result, you'll feel the nervous tension of being low on health, even though you've actually got more HP in the bank than you think, and you'll feel a tremendous amount of relief when you make it through the next sequence miraculously in tact.

It's been confirmed that both Assassin's Creed and Doom use this feature, and Call of Duty has a similar "death shield" system, where players with low health can't be "one-shotted" by enemies.

It's quite ingenious, really, and a remarkable example of creative number-crunching which draws out a significant emotional response in the player.