Have you ever felt the sensation of playing a videogame way past the point where it was fun? Have you ever finished a game, and then looked back a few weeks later and thought What the hell was I doing with my life? Why does that happen?
Some games are strongly build around reward schedules, where its design is aimed to make you continually repeat dulling and tedious tasks that have long lost its novelty, creating the illusion of engagement. Even some poorly designed action games use this system to convince players to smash the same buttons for 12 hours straight.
You can spot some of the techniques they use in random loot drops, grinding of monsters, leveling up, farming, loot boxes, etc. Persuading you to stay for just one more prize, even though you have been long bored and sleepy. You could say that almost anything with points system is using this sort of strategem. And it goes way beyond points; it can be applied on anything that has a clear and manifest reward. In this article I want to talk about how games can condition behaviour.
In the early 30’s, Burrhus Frederic Skinner began studying psycology in a ground-breaking new way. What is now called Radical Behaviorism.
Before him, we already knew how to condition immediate reactions. How to induce fear, hunger, sadness and many other reactions on whatever topic we may picture. Imagine getting a guy terrified of pencils or induce him extreme sadness over pumpkins, maybe getting him sexually attracted to bunnies.
The boundary of this power is that it was limited to immediate and not well-thought reactions, not to rational decisions. The ground-breaking discovery of Skinner is that rational and logical decisions can be induced too. In fact, Skinner went so far as to stating that there is no real free will, and that every decision is the outcome of the consequences of previous decisions, and how they affected us.
These discoveries of Skinner, and how this knowledge can be used to change the way people make choices, has been subject of great controversy over the following decades. And eventually widely and quite smartly used in the videogames industry.
Skinner performed a brilliant and simple experiment. He created a machine that consisted of a simple closed box with a button inside it that automatically let some food in. The method of the experiment consisted in introducing a pigeon inside the box and record the evolution of its behaviour.
What happened is that Skinner proved that he could condition the decision making of the pigeon. Because pecking the button was not an immediate reaction to stimulae, it was learned behaviour; and this distinction makes all the difference. This is operant conditioning. And even more amazing, he found out that operant conditioning can be applied on humans too.
Further research showed even more impressive conclusions: The best way to convince someone to continuously do an action is not always giving him a reward immediately after, but to recompense him a random number of times he performed that action, or just scattered enough in time to create the sense of randomness. This strategy happened to be far more effective.
Usually this can be spotted in gambling. We all know that gambling games are not rigged in favour of the gambler, and the gamblers are well aware of that too. So why do they keep playing? Consider asking yourself something: Whould you rather spend 8 hours in a casino playing blackjack and ending with 100€, or pushing a button in a factory for the same time and ending with 100€? Which activity would people tell you is more fun?
When talking about conditioned learning, we need to understand what a reinforcement is. Plainly, it is just the rewarding support of someone’s action. This is achieved by exploiting conditioners. And we can differntiate two different kind of conditioners:
Primary Conditioners. Or what we are used to call biological needs or fundamental. Food, water, sleep, sexual desire, etc. The effect of the reward from this conditioners might have a huge effect, but it utterly diminishes once the person reaches satiation or the biological limit of their needs.
Secondary Conditioners. Also, we have those needs that land out of the biological realm. Like social approvation, sense of power or even money. These things do not hit a satiation point. And thus, reinforcement over this conditioners can be extremely powerful. Some even argue that trying to fulfill this unappeasable needs is what fuels the human progress and creativity.
Funny enough, those secondary needs are considered just proxy achievements in order to eventually be able to get the primary ones.
Too many games use rewarding Skinner techniques as a catch, as a cover to delay your realisation of how terrible, boring and uninspired they are.
Besides understanding how behaviourism is used in videogames, it is important to know that there are other better ways to stimulate engagment. Not just simple Skinner Box satisfaction cons, tricks, hustles, hoodwinks, gambits, flimflams, strategems and bamboozles the system rewards you with.
Games can foster engagement by applying more interesting and immersive mechanics, as:
Compelling Narrative. Have you ever wanted to get lost in a world? Continue reading a book, watching a move or playing a videogame just because you wanted to be in that universe? This is what great masterpieces achieve, in any genre. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the Middle-Earth of the Lord of the Rings, the world of Skyrim, the post-apocalyptic scenario of the Fallout series, etc. It is not even necessary to build a complete Legendarium, you just need to develop interesting and sensitive stories to keep people engaged. Unravelling and solving mysteries can be as compelling and rewarding as any cold skinner-boxy compensation system.
Mastery. We all like to practice, learn and improve our expertise when playing a game. Players can be engaged just by having the opportunity of masterying their skills and utilising theat mastery to overcome different challenges. This can be well implemented in simple fighting games like the Street Fighters saga, more complex ones like the Dark Souls, or with mental challenges like in Portal or the Civilization games. And all of this can be hugely pumped up with online competition.
I am not saying behaviourism is a bad thing or that leads to methodologies that ought to be entirely avoided. All honest and compelling design strategies can be fairly enhanced using Skinner-Box techniques, making the game more exciting and engaging. But we need to be aware of their existence, and be able to get rid of this increasing reliance on behaviourism methods that just aim to trick players into a compulsive non-compelling and unhealthy gaming.
We can do better than that.
Written on 13 Apr 2018 by Alejandro Jiménez Rico