>> 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted: David Wong March 2010
#5. Putting You in a
Skinner Box
this article is
really freaking disturbing. It's written by a games researcher at Microsoft on how to make video games that hook
players, whether they like it or not. He has a doctorate in behavioral and
brain sciences. Quote:
"Each
contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an
infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern
of activity you want from your players."
His theories are based
around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by
training subjects with simple stimulus and reward.
This sort of thing
caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a
"Virtual Skinner Box."
Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian
game mechanics are a form of
"exploitation."
It's not that these games can't be fun. But they're designed to keep gamers
subscribing during the periods when it's not fun, locking them
into a repetitive slog using Skinner's manipulative system of carefully
scheduled rewards.
#4. Creating Virtual
Food Pellets For You To Eat
the highest court in
South Korea ruled
that virtual goods are to be legally treated the same as real goods.
#3. Making You Press
the Lever
If you want to make
him press the lever as fast as possible, how would you do it? Not by giving him
a pellet with every press--he'll soon relax, knowing the pellets are there when
he needs them. No, the best way is to set up the machine so that it drops the
pellets at random intervals of lever pressing.
They call these
"Variable Ratio Rewards" in Skinner land and this is the reason many
enemies "drop" valuable items totally at random in WoW.
This is addictive in exactly the same way a slot machine is addictive.
BF Skinner knew. He
called that training process "shaping." Little rewards, step by step,
like links in a chain.
#2. Keeping You
Pressing It... Forever
Humans need a
long-term goal to keep us going, and the world of addictive gaming has got this
down to a science. Techniques include...
Easing Them In:
First, set up the
"pellets" so that they come fast at first, and then slower and slower
as time goes on.
Play It Or Lose It:
This is the real dick
move. Why reward the hamster for pressing the lever? Why not simply set it up
so that when he fails to press it, we punish him? Behaviorists call
this "avoidance." They set the cage up so that it gives the animal an
electric shock every 30 seconds unless it hits the lever.
Well, we humans play
games because there is a basic satisfaction in mastering a skill, even if it's
a pointless one in terms of our overall life goals. It helps us develop our
brains (especially as children) and to test ourselves without serious
consequences if we fail. This is why our brains reward us with the sensation we
call "fun" when we do it. Hell, even dolphins do it:
#1. Getting You To
Call the Skinner Box Home
Why do so many of us
have that void? Because according to everything expert
Malcolm Gladwell, to be
satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don't even
have two of them:
> Autonomy (that
is, you have some say in what you do day to day);
> Complexity (so
it's not mind-numbing repetition);
> Connection
Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your
hard work).
It's less about
instant gratification and more about a freaking sense of accomplishment.
The terrible truth is
that a whole lot of us begged for a Skinner Box we could crawl into, because
the real world's system of rewards is so much more slow and cruel than
we expected it to be.
In that, gaming is no different from other forms of mental escape, from sports
fandom to moonshine.
David Wong is the
Editor of Cracked.com and the author of the comedy horror novel John Dies at the End, currently banned in 72 countries.
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted
5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted | Huffington Post
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