When Game Mechanics and Psychology meet

While mulling about that killer board game rattling around in the back of my mind that will never get published, I googled "game mechanics". I came up with a mechanic that isn't used too much in board or card games, but wanted to see where else it was used. From there I said to myself, "What kind of different game mechanics are there?"

There are the usual good resources like Wikipedia, but there were a few websites that gave me pause. Websites about a company's game-making strategies or a gamification wiki show how insidiously meta the industry can become. Examples such as Blissful Productivity, Extinction, and Loss Aversion read more like psychology textbooks than descriptors of game mechanics. I feel that there are two categories being mixed together here: game mechanics used by the player and game mechanics used on the player. I would want to enjoy studying the former, and understand that studying the latter is important in designing games, though probably less enjoyable for me. I would very much like to categorize the two separately. Perhaps call them game mechanics and game conditionings? (Named after classical conditioning, a la Pavlov.) Or some sort of word that shows that it is what a game uses to entice players to play.