5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted _ Cracked
5. Putting You in a Skinner Box
John Hopson is a games researcher at Microsoft Game Studios.
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. He invented the “Skinner Box,” a cage containing a small animal that, for instance, presses a lever to get food pellets. Now, I’m not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in a Skinner box.
This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a “Virtual Skinner Box.”
So What’s The Problem?
Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing–and paying–until the sun goes supernova.
Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, sothey had to change the mechanicsof the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.
This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. 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.
Why would this work, when the “rewards” are just digital objects that don’t actually exist? Well…
4.Creating Virtual Food Pellets For You To Eat
Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:
Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.
People scoff at this idea all the time (“You spent all that time working for a badge that doesn’t even exist?”) and those people are stupid.If it takes time, effort and skill to obtain an item, that item has value, whether it’s made of diamonds, binary code ect.
There’s nothing crazy about it. After all, people pay thousands of pounds for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A orange Goli looks pretty. In both cases you’re paying for an idea.
So What’s The Problem?
Of course, virtually every game of the last 25 years has included items you can collect in the course of defeating the game–there’s nothing new or evil about that. But because gamers regard in-game items as real and valuable on their own, addiction-based games send you running around endlessly collecting them even if they have nothing to do with the game’s objective.
It is very much intentional on the developers’ part, an appeal to our natural hoarding and gathering instincts, collecting for the sake of collecting.
As the Microsoft guy proves, developers know they’re using these objects as pellets in a Skinner box. At that point it’s all about…
3.Making You Press the Lever
So picture the rat in his box. Or, since I’m one of these gamers and don’t like to think of myself as a rat, picture an adorable hamster. Maybe he can talk, and is voiced by Chris Rock.
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. He’ll soon start pumping that thing as fast as he can. Experiments prove it.
They call these “Variable Ratio Rewards” in Skinner land and this is the reason many bonus boxes drop random things with the hope u might get x4 multi/booster. This is addictive in exactly the same way a slot machine is addictive. You can’t quit now because the very next one could be a winner. Or the next. Or the next.
2.Keeping You Pressing It… Forever
Now, the big difference between our Skinner box hamster and a real human is that we humans can get our pellets elsewhere. If a game really was just nothing but clicking a box for random rewards, we’d eventually drop it to play some other game. 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. This is why they make it very easy to earn rewards (or level up) in the beginning of an MMO, but then the time and effort between levels increases exponentially. Once the gamer has experienced the rush of leveling up early, the delayed gratification actually increases the pleasure of the later levels. That video game behavior expert at Microsoft found that gamers play more and more frantically as they approach a new level.
Eliminating Stopping Points:
The easiest way is to just put save points far apart, or engage the player in long missions (like galaxy gates) that, once started, are difficult to get out of without losing a life /progress.
But that can be frustrating for gamers, so you can take the opposite approach of a game like New Super Mario Bros. Wii, where you make the levels really short. so it’s like eating pack of crisps,They’re so small on their own that it doesn’t take much convincing to get the player to grab another one, and soon they’ve eaten the whole bag.
Play It Or Lose It:
This is the real bad 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. It learns very very fast to stay on the lever, all the time, hitting it over and over. Forever.(just like you rank point and rank, drop if u dont play!!)
Why is your mom obsessively harvesting her crops in Farmville? Because they wither and rot if she doesn’t. In Ultima Online, your house or castle would start to decay if you didn’t return to it regularly. In Animal Crossing, the town grows over with weeds and your virtual house becomes infested with cockroaches if you don’t log in often enough. It’s the crown jewel of game programming –keep the player clicking and clicking and clicking just to avoid losing the stuff they worked so hard to get.
All Of the Above:
Each of those techniques has a downside and to get the ultimate addictive game, you combine as many as possible, along with the “random drop” gambling element mentioned before. They get the hamster running back and forth from one lever to another to another.
So What’s The Problem?
We asked earlier if the item collection via obsessive clicking could be called a “game.” So that raises the question: What is a game?
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. even dolphins do it.(bubble rings)
But these “hit the lever until you pass out from starvation” gaming elements stray into a different area completely.As others have pointed out, the point is to keep you playing long after you’ve mastered the skills, long after you’ve wrung the last real novel experience from it. You can’t come up with a definition of “fun” that encompasses the activity of clicking a picture of a gowing box with your mouse a thousand times.
Of course, game developers (and various commenters, I’m sure) would correctly point out that nobody is making the players do it. Why would humans voluntarily put themselves in laboratory hamster mode? Well, it’s all about…
1.Getting You To Call the Skinner Box Home
Do you like your job?
Considering half of you are reading this at work, I’m going to guess no. And that brings us to the one thing that makes gaming addiction–and addiction in general–so incredibly hard to beat.
As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playing WoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme. The games just filled a void.
Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwel, 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).
Autonomy:
You pick your quests
Complexity:
Players will do monotonous grinding specifically because it doesn’t feel like grinding. Remember the gates.
Connection Between Effort and Reward:
This is the big one. When you level up
The danger lies in the fact that these games have become so incredibly efficient at delivering the sense of accomplishment that people used to get from their education or career. We’re not saying gaming will ruin the world, or that gaming addiction will be a scourge on youth. But we may wind up with a generation of guys/girls working at tesco when they had the brains and talent for so much more. They’re dissatisfied with their lives because they wasted their 20s playing video games, and will escape their dissatisfaction by playing more video games. Rinse, repeat.
And let’s face it; if you think Dark orbit is addictive, wait until you see the games they’re making 10 years from now. They’re only getting better at what they do.
peace out ,and remeber its only a game
congrats if u read all you have been rewarded with 10million real brain xp that wont disapear over time…
next week i may if you good do a vid on how to make you own badge and rocket from a cornflake box ,sticky tape,and a fairy liquid bottle