Reward-driven mentality

I blame the Nucleus Accumbens.

Go for the throat and blame the mesolimbic pathway.

Am I the only one that finds nuerophysiology a turn on?

Basically it's all just a Skinner box with a pretty GUI and the funny thing is, the rats pay for the privilege.

Probably not, but I also think it's pretty safe to say that you're in a very small minority

That's only the result of your operant conditioning

Did you just admit brain death?

(sorry GG, you kinda walked into that one!)

I don't understand this statement. Life is not easy and sometimes you have to do things you don't enjoy in order to get the result you desire. The same is true for a game. It's the reason why people have *goals* and is willing go through the potentially unsavory journeys in order to get there. Mind you, not all such journeys are tedious and boring, despite your penchant for interpreting it as such.

That's a patently false assumption. It's the classic chicken or the egg paradox. Most (if not all) people play a game in order to progress. Gratification is then derived from that postive progress. So on and so forth. When your character get to the next level, that's positive progress. When your character acquire a new piece of "gear", that's positive progress. When your characters stat points increase, that's positive progress. When your character finds a previously unexplored part of the game, that's progress. While individuals may place varying degrees of importance on that progress or the amount of gratification associated with it, it does not discount the fact that progress is being made. I would even venture as far as saying that few (if any at all) plays a game just to stay at level 1 forever and then also be satisfied with that ineptness.

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SUPPORT - IT'S NOT JUST A GROUPING OF ATs
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More Than a Game
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This kind of mentality gives birth to really evil games. "Life is tough, so what if a game is tough?" is only valid if you want a game which mimics real life. Ignoring the incompatibility of super heroes with real life, the bulk of the reason why a lot of us play games is to GET AWAY from real life. So if real life ain't fair, we want our games to be fair so we feel better. If real life is hard, we want games to be easier to compensate. If real life is comprised of all work and no play, we want games to be more play and less work.

Yes, different people want different things, and for those looking to work at a game, there's always Eve Online. But to me, using real life as an excuse why certain game systems are as if purpose-designed to be a chore and not fun is not a valid argument, at least in the context of making a good, fun game.

People are capable of convincing themselves that they want to do an activity that they don't want to simply because they condition their brains to associate difficulty with reward, even in cases where such rewards no longer exist. That doesn't mean games should be designed to capitalise on that, because it ruins the fun.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

While this is certainly true, it's also a question of self-conditioning. Generally speaking, these effects mostly occur to people in isolation, in the sense of people who only play one game and use that as the bulk of their entertainment. I say this because occasional breaks and motive checks tend to stifle this in a big way. When, for instance, someone is forced away from a game that has turned into a chore by real-world events, such as loss of Internet access for a few days, just to pick something random, that person may find he really hates the game when he comes back, having lost the conditioning but being faced with the same old crap. I know I swap characters on such occasions, myself.

More than anything, though, that's one reason I always try to tell people to think of not just what they want, but if what they're doing right now is actually worth doing. It's all too easy to get attached to a specific activity just because it's familiar and because it feels necessary without stopping to think what it's necessary for.

The easiest example I can think of is the "next level" effect. It's the belief that, even though you really don't want to play the game any more, "that next level" will make everything so much better. Maybe it's a power you really wanted, more slots for something that's important to you, a new round of enhancements, or maybe just a simple one more level. People will be convinced that if they just work hard enough at that next milestone, everything will be well.

And it isn't. Well, it is for a while. A very short while. But before long, you find yourself right back to where you started, hating the process and looking forward for "that next level." And when you get that, it's great for a short while, and it all starts all over again. The moral of the story is that if the game ain't fun right here, right now, then a lot of the time it won't get any better with that next milestone. I know this more or less contradicts what I said before about progress being part of the game and skipping past unfun parts, but you have to remember that I'm talking about awareness.

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Something else I want to point to is the fallacies sunk costs and a paid price. Sunk costs are pretty evident - you've already put so much effort into a character, a level or an item, so it doesn't make sense to abandon it, even though it's no longer fun, so you keep working at it to the point where you hate it by the end. And once you already have the level or the item, you IMMEDIATELY forget the price you paid for it and judge it solely on its inherent value. This makes achievements seem a lot more worthwhile than they actually are, which is good for moral but bad for judgement, because you're liable to try and shoot for the same thing again, still unaware of the steep price.

I personally like to see things in terms of worth, that is a combination of the final reward's value against the method of acquisition's cost. Yes, a particular item may be great and valuable, yet at the same time not in the slightest worth it if the process of acquiring it is far too costly. Yet so many people see something they want and think "I want this!" rather than "Is it worth getting?" Sometimes this leads to greatness. Most of the time it leads to burnout and abandoned projects, and it makes people neurotic and stressed out about what should be, at the end of the day, a game we play for fun and pleasure.

*edit*
Before I forget: I find no shame in achieving a monumental goal, then turning around and saying "This was not worth achieving. I have it now, so I'll take pride in that, but I do not want to do this again."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

because they're human beings.

The effects can occur in anyone doing anything. Since the OP talked about this game specifically, I wrote my response accordingly. And you are correct, the grasp that operant conditioning has on any one person can be broken - either through environmental means or the result of the task in question.



Video game developers know about this. Why do you think leveling up is flashy instead of subtle and behind the scenes? Why do you think XP is there? Video games, and in a slight stretch, games in general, pander to the human being's thirst for reward...MMO's have just perfected it

I think most of us do that kind of cost-benefit analysis when it comes to the goals we set. You or I might look at someone with 1000+ badges and think, "There's no way all that effort could've been worth it." But for them, it probably was. Who are we to say they wasted their time?

The assumption here seems to be that some significant part of the playerbase is miserable, and I just don't see it. Sure, people gripe and moan a lot on the forums, but that's just human nature -- they're blowing off steam or making a play for attention. We all have parts of the game that sometimes frustrate us or that we wish were different. But if people were fundamentally not enjoying themselves, they wouldn't be here.

Yep. For me, it's the starting zones. I only really do it to see if I like the powerset combo I picked and for the easy level, but the whole tutorial thing bugs me since I've done it a million times.

/shakes fist

To keep people playing. The longer you keep the butts in the seats, the larger the chance they'll get hooked and keep coming back for more.

The way I look at it, they are doing it for a very good reason: namely to lock themselves into an addictive behavior that subsidizes my fun.

As long as EvilGeko continues to spend his hard-earned wages paying people to make Excel spreadsheet entries for him to spend years hunting down, and I get content created during the other 95% of their day, I don't see a problem.


Then again, I've been updating three separate alts to I19 builds lately, and I think even EG's eyes would bug out when he sees the level of expenditure on them (this is actually the first time I've spent more than about a hundred million inf on a build, and I'm blasting through pent-up influence like it was silly strings).

That kind of misses ST's point, which is that the developers sometimes don't seem to get that they have created a Skinner box. They make a system which has moderate rewards if you play it the "right" way, but has better rewards if you abuse the game and in the process your own enjoyment, and then are surprised when people tend toward the latter.

The devs KNOW they've made a skinner box. You don't work on an MMO and not notice that you are essentially playing Pavlov.

Precisely. They seem to want us to enjoy ourselves (for purely selfish reasons of course, as activities that happen to be enjoyable in their own right work better at retaining players than rewards alone), but they're bad at using operant conditioning to lead us to enjoyable activities. Look at AE for a reward system that they were shocked, shocked that players farmed the crap out of. Look at PvP for a potentially enjoyable activity that they seem to have no clue how to incentivize.