5 ways in which games try to cause addiction
So, again in the news they write that someone else died due to gambling . Yes, again Korea.
What the ...? Listen, I'm not trying to prove that video games are heroin. I fully understand that in this case the victim had many problems in his life. But, half of you know that World of Warcraft is addictive and that doctors consider gambling addiction a serious problem . And the question is: maybe some games were deliberately designed to make you play them, even if you do not get pleasure from it?
Of course.
')
If you were once passionate about the game, or you know someone who was, then this article is really scary. It is written by a Microsoft games researcher on how to make video games that attract players, whether they like it or not. This person has a doctoral degree in the study of human behavior and in the study of brain processes.
Please note that in this article there are no words "fun" or "pleasure." This is not his field of activity. Instead, we see the “pattern of behavior you are pursuing.”
His theory is based on the work of B.F. Skinner, who opened the possibility of controlling behavior by training subjects with lower incentives and rewards. He invented the “Skinner Box”, a camera containing a small animal that, for example, presses a lever to get food. Warning: I don’t want to say that that Microsoft guy considers all players to be just a group of mice in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design with images of mice in a Skinner box.
These same thoughts prompted researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest “The Virtual Skinner Box.”
Games have changed. Previously, after the sale of the game for $ 50 creators became indifferent how much we will play it. The main thing was to make sure that we liked her enough so that we bought the next one. But the industry is moving forward to paid games like MMOs, who need to be played and played until the sun explodes.
It is already impossible to create a game that is quite fascinating in the story, to keep you hundreds of hours in front of the screen, so you changed the mechanics of the game so that the players repeated the same actions again and again, whether they wanted to or not. Therefore, the developers turned to the Skinner box.
Game design is now a vast source of controversy. The creator of Braid, Jonathan Blow, says that the mechanics of Skinner games are some kind of "exploitation . " These games can not be fun. They are designed to force players to renew a subscription, even if they are not having fun, closing them on repetitive actions, using the Skinner system for carefully planned rewards.
Why does all this work, despite the fact that the "promotion" is just electronic objects, which in reality is not? Well…
Most of the tightening elements are based on a simple fact:
Your brain takes the game items for real. They are real.
People constantly insist (“have you spent all this time on a sword that doesn't even exist?”) - they are just stupid . If it took effort, time, and skills to get it, then it has value, regardless of whether it is made from diamonds, binary code, or at least dried meat.
Therefore, the High Court of South Korea announced that virtual values ​​should be considered as well as real ones. And now virtual production is a global industry with a turnover of more than 5 billion dollars .
And that's fine. After all, people pay thousands of dollars on diamonds, given that they do nothing but look cute. And the game armor looks cute and protects you from virtual orcs. In both cases, you pay for the idea.
Of course, over the past 25 years, each game involves the collection of things for the successful passage - there is nothing new or threatening in this. But now, since players perceive in-game items as real and really value them, addictive games send you into endless running around for the sake of collecting things, even if they have nothing to do with the goals of the game .
Developers are extremely important to reach out to our natural collecting instincts , collecting for the sake of collecting. And it works, ask at least that guy who continued to collect quest items, even when bare boobs were just within arm's length of him . Boobs.
As the wise guy from Microsoft said, developers know that they are using virtual items as feed in a Skinner box. At this stage, the most important thing ...
Imagine a mouse in its box. Or, since I am also a player and I don’t like to think of myself as a rat, imagine there a charming hamster. Maybe he can talk, and he is even voiced by Chris Rock.
If you want him to press the lever immediately, what will you do? If you don’t give him food with each tap, he will soon relax, knowing that he will get food as soon as he wants it. No, the best way is to establish a mechanism that throws out feed with some probability after each press. Very soon the hamster will begin to swing this lever as quickly as it can. Experiments will confirm this.
See? Evidence.
This is called "Variable Probability Rewards" in Skinner's theory, and this is the reason that many enemies throw valuable items in a random order, for example in WoW. It delays in the same way as the one-armed bandit. You can give up now, but then the next one will win. Or the next one. Or the next one.
“In my mouth, my legs! We almost won ”
Chinese MMO ZT Online in my opinion applies this system the most nontrivial. The game is full of chests, which may or may not contain an arbitrary object, and to open them you need a key. But how to get the keys? How-how? .. of course, you have to buy them for real money. As chips for the "bandit." Wait, this is not the best part. ZT Online does what the casinos never dreamed of: they give a special item to the one who opened the most chests during the day.
And this is hardly the most idiotic part of the game.
And now add to this casino element the fact that thousands of players compete with each other to find out which one of them is the most obsessed with opening chests. One woman admitted that she spent her entire evening opening chests - more than a thousand - trying to win a prize.
But she could not. There is always someone more moved.
Can you imagine how she looks at her little character standing in front of the chest, presses again and again the answers in the dialogs, watching the same animation hour after hour?
And if you did not know the background, you probably would have thought that she had some kind of mental disorder. How did she reach the state of pseudo coercion like a rain man?
B.F. Skinner knew how. He called this process "formation . " Small promotions step by step, like links in a chain. In WoW, you decide whether you want a super cool Tier 10 book or not. It needs 5 parts. To get a complete set, you need more than 400 Emblems (Frost Emblems) , which are earned several at a time from certain enemies. Then you need to improve each part with the Marks of Sanctification. Then again with Heroic Marks of Sanctification. To get all this, you need to rerun the repetitive missions and sit, clicking and clicking, for days on end.
As soon as it comes to this point, can we continue to call this activity a game? It is more like a rash that you scratch and scratch. And then - worse.
It is worth saying that the biggest difference between our hamster and man is that people can get food anywhere. If there were nothing in the game except pressing the boxes for arbitrary rewards, we would have switched to another game. People need long-term goals and the world of addictive games has something in its arsenal. For example…
Relief games
To start, make it so that the feed falls out quickly at the beginning and then more slowly over time. Therefore, in the MMO awards (or leveling up) at the beginning of the game it is much easier to get , but then the time and effort to increase the level grow exponentially. If only the player feels the joy of raising levels at the beginning of the game, then a further increase in demands will only increase the enjoyment of high levels. The same researcher from Microsoft discovered that players are playing more and more in proportion to getting new levels .
Destruction of cusps
The easiest way is to simply move save points away or engage players in long missions (for example, WoW raids) that once started cannot be stopped without losing progress.
But for players, this can be a real disappointment, so you can use the opposite approach in games like New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, where the levels are easy and this is like eating chips. They are small and the player can easily take another one and very soon it turns out that a whole pack has been eaten.
Somewhere in this pack is an evil dinosaur and a kidnapped princess.
By the way, for the same reason, a person who usually does not bother to read articles of 3,000 words on the Internet would be happy to do it if it is divided into parts. You do not notice boobs, reading it? My work is done!
Pay or lose
This is a more interesting question. Why reward the hamster for pressing the lever? Let's better make it so that if he doesn't click - will we punish him?
Behaviorists call this "avoidance." They rework the cage so that the hamster gets a discharge every 30 seconds until it presses the lever. He very quickly learns to stay on the lever all the time, putting pressure on him again and again. Forever. Within the limits of eternity hamster.
“Return to Excitebike!”
Why is your mom watering seedlings in Farmville so hard? Because they wither and rot if it does not. In Ultima Online, your house or castle will begin to crumble if you do not return to it regularly. In Animal Crossing, the city ​​is covered with weeds, and cockroaches fill your virtual house if you don’t enter the game often enough. This is the highest achievement for programmers - to force the player to click tirelessly, just to not lose what he has been seeking for so long
Brief summary
All these techniques have drawbacks, so in order to reach the extreme degree of attractiveness, the game must combine as many ways as possible, including the “one-armed gangster” that has already been mentioned (count how many ways only WoW takes). They only have time for hamsters to run from one lever to another.
We have already asked whether the collection of items aka an obsessive click can be called a "game." The question arises: What is a game?
Well, people play games because they satisfy the subconscious need to sharpen their skills, even if it seems useless as part of our daily tasks. They help us develop brains (especially in children) and test ourselves without fear of consequences. Therefore, our brains and encourage us feeling that we call "joy" when we play. Why, even dolphins do this:
That's why I decided not to include games like Guitar Hero in the article. They, too, are delaying, but they are delaying SO, as everyone understands this. It is absolutely natural to enjoy the fact that in some ways you become better. Also, games like Modern Warfare 2 - just a sport for those who did not physically turn out. There is no secret, everyone loves to win.
But the game elements like “push the lever until you die of hunger” are completely different. As already mentioned , the goal is to make you play even after learning all skills, make you forget about real life. Clicking on the picture depicting a chest, thousands of times, can not be called "pleasure."
Therefore, some writers criticized Blizzard after the introduction of the system of "achievements" a couple of years ago. There are rewards obliging to perform useless tasks again and again (for example, to catch 1000 fish). No things, no element of learning or discovery or mastering skills were introduced. Just routine actions and nothing more ...
... Or a hamster wheel.
Of course, developers (and commentators, I am sure) will reasonably point out that no one forces them to do this. Why should people voluntarily put themselves in the conditions of a laboratory hamster? The thing is to ...
Do you like your job?
Given that half of you are reading this article at work, I dare to suggest that it is not. And this brings us to yet another pillar of gambling - addiction as a whole - it is so difficult to overcome it.
As horrifying as the story about “the guy who missed classes because he played WoW all this time,” just about a guy who just didn’t like these classes. This is not a dystopia in which the mind is controlled by Blizzard. Just a game filled the void.
Why is such a void in our lives? Because, according to an expert in all of Malcolm Gladwell (Malcolm Gladwell) , 3 things are needed to get pleasure from work, and I am sure that most of you don’t even have two:
Be aware that pants are not a prerequisite for getting pleasure from work.
Most people, in particular the category of young gamers, do not have this at work and in general in life. But most of the trap games are specially created to give us all three ... or at least the illusion of all three.
Autonomy:
You yourself choose the tasks, or what seeds to plant in Farmville. Yes, what really! you even choose your body, species and talents.
Annoy your friends with Facebook updates is really a talent.
Complexity:
Players are engaged in monotonous "what", in particular, because it is not perceived as "quality". Remember this difficult dance for the sake of armor with emblems (Tier Armor / Frost Emblem), which was previously kept in the game of our gamer.
And then the connection between Labor and the Reward:
It's worth it. When you raise a level in WoW this incredible train of golden rays pierces your body.
This is something that most of us don't get every day — quick, tangible rewards. Rather, it is not instant gratification, but a terrific sense of completion. How much harder would we work at work in the office if we could also measure progress? And if the light penetrated our clothes? This beauty allows games to use boredom as a weapon. As we have already discussed somewhere , this is the tendency to “work to earn the right to play” in World of Warcraft, when you tire yourself, or knock out gold, earning the right to do cool things in the future. The tedious stage of knocking out gold actually adds a sense of completeness, but later. And it also helps to reduce the feeling of guilt for skipping school or working or housework for the sake of the game. In the end, you spent time on things that were worth it - those 12 hours of knocking out gold last Tuesday were much more fun than cutting this damn lawn.
Game designer Erin Hoffman once very aptly said: " Mania is not about what you do, but about what you DO NOT do because of the substitution of this affection ." She then talked about how the attraction of a simple flash game like Bejeweled depends on how much you want to avoid working open in the next window.
Wait, wait, what was I talking about?
The terrifying truth is that a bunch of people beg for Skinner's Box to crawl in and not get out because the real reward system is much slower and more brutal than we expected . In this game, no different from other forms of mental relaxation, whether it is sports or the contemplation of the moon.
Heroin: There are many more WoW in the syringe.
The danger lies in the simple fact that games have become so effective in delivering a sense of completeness that people have to quit their studies or careers. We do not believe that games will destroy the world, or that gambling will break the youth as well as an earthquake destroyed cities in the 90s. But we will get a generation that will work at Starbucks, having brains for much more. They will be dissatisfied with their lives because they have spent their youth on video games, and will be saved from this feeling by playing even more. Wash off. Repeat.
And let's look at it objectively; if you think that WoW is addictive, wait a bit until you see what the games will be in 10 years. They will only do better what they do.
David Wong, editor of Cracked.com and author of the tragic comedy novel John Die at the End, banned in 72 countries.
What the ...? Listen, I'm not trying to prove that video games are heroin. I fully understand that in this case the victim had many problems in his life. But, half of you know that World of Warcraft is addictive and that doctors consider gambling addiction a serious problem . And the question is: maybe some games were deliberately designed to make you play them, even if you do not get pleasure from it?
Of course.
#five. Developing your reflexes
')
If you were once passionate about the game, or you know someone who was, then this article is really scary. It is written by a Microsoft games researcher on how to make video games that attract players, whether they like it or not. This person has a doctoral degree in the study of human behavior and in the study of brain processes.
Every chance is just a shuffle of the factors of time, action and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways to combine them to get the pattern of behavior that you seek from players.
Please note that in this article there are no words "fun" or "pleasure." This is not his field of activity. Instead, we see the “pattern of behavior you are pursuing.”
His theory is based on the work of B.F. Skinner, who opened the possibility of controlling behavior by training subjects with lower incentives and rewards. He invented the “Skinner Box”, a camera containing a small animal that, for example, presses a lever to get food. Warning: I don’t want to say that that Microsoft guy considers all players to be just a group of mice in a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design with images of mice in a Skinner box.
These same thoughts prompted researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest “The Virtual Skinner Box.”
So what's the problem?
Games have changed. Previously, after the sale of the game for $ 50 creators became indifferent how much we will play it. The main thing was to make sure that we liked her enough so that we bought the next one. But the industry is moving forward to paid games like MMOs, who need to be played and played until the sun explodes.
It is already impossible to create a game that is quite fascinating in the story, to keep you hundreds of hours in front of the screen, so you changed the mechanics of the game so that the players repeated the same actions again and again, whether they wanted to or not. Therefore, the developers turned to the Skinner box.
Game design is now a vast source of controversy. The creator of Braid, Jonathan Blow, says that the mechanics of Skinner games are some kind of "exploitation . " These games can not be fun. They are designed to force players to renew a subscription, even if they are not having fun, closing them on repetitive actions, using the Skinner system for carefully planned rewards.
Why does all this work, despite the fact that the "promotion" is just electronic objects, which in reality is not? Well…
#four. Creating a Virtual Feed
Most of the tightening elements are based on a simple fact:
Your brain takes the game items for real. They are real.
People constantly insist (“have you spent all this time on a sword that doesn't even exist?”) - they are just stupid . If it took effort, time, and skills to get it, then it has value, regardless of whether it is made from diamonds, binary code, or at least dried meat.
Therefore, the High Court of South Korea announced that virtual values ​​should be considered as well as real ones. And now virtual production is a global industry with a turnover of more than 5 billion dollars .
And that's fine. After all, people pay thousands of dollars on diamonds, given that they do nothing but look cute. And the game armor looks cute and protects you from virtual orcs. In both cases, you pay for the idea.
So what's the problem?
Of course, over the past 25 years, each game involves the collection of things for the successful passage - there is nothing new or threatening in this. But now, since players perceive in-game items as real and really value them, addictive games send you into endless running around for the sake of collecting things, even if they have nothing to do with the goals of the game .
Developers are extremely important to reach out to our natural collecting instincts , collecting for the sake of collecting. And it works, ask at least that guy who continued to collect quest items, even when bare boobs were just within arm's length of him . Boobs.
As the wise guy from Microsoft said, developers know that they are using virtual items as feed in a Skinner box. At this stage, the most important thing ...
# 3. Make You Push The Lever
Imagine a mouse in its box. Or, since I am also a player and I don’t like to think of myself as a rat, imagine there a charming hamster. Maybe he can talk, and he is even voiced by Chris Rock.
If you want him to press the lever immediately, what will you do? If you don’t give him food with each tap, he will soon relax, knowing that he will get food as soon as he wants it. No, the best way is to establish a mechanism that throws out feed with some probability after each press. Very soon the hamster will begin to swing this lever as quickly as it can. Experiments will confirm this.
See? Evidence.
This is called "Variable Probability Rewards" in Skinner's theory, and this is the reason that many enemies throw valuable items in a random order, for example in WoW. It delays in the same way as the one-armed bandit. You can give up now, but then the next one will win. Or the next one. Or the next one.
“In my mouth, my legs! We almost won ”
Chinese MMO ZT Online in my opinion applies this system the most nontrivial. The game is full of chests, which may or may not contain an arbitrary object, and to open them you need a key. But how to get the keys? How-how? .. of course, you have to buy them for real money. As chips for the "bandit." Wait, this is not the best part. ZT Online does what the casinos never dreamed of: they give a special item to the one who opened the most chests during the day.
And this is hardly the most idiotic part of the game.
And now add to this casino element the fact that thousands of players compete with each other to find out which one of them is the most obsessed with opening chests. One woman admitted that she spent her entire evening opening chests - more than a thousand - trying to win a prize.
But she could not. There is always someone more moved.
So what's the problem?
Can you imagine how she looks at her little character standing in front of the chest, presses again and again the answers in the dialogs, watching the same animation hour after hour?
And if you did not know the background, you probably would have thought that she had some kind of mental disorder. How did she reach the state of pseudo coercion like a rain man?
B.F. Skinner knew how. He called this process "formation . " Small promotions step by step, like links in a chain. In WoW, you decide whether you want a super cool Tier 10 book or not. It needs 5 parts. To get a complete set, you need more than 400 Emblems (Frost Emblems) , which are earned several at a time from certain enemies. Then you need to improve each part with the Marks of Sanctification. Then again with Heroic Marks of Sanctification. To get all this, you need to rerun the repetitive missions and sit, clicking and clicking, for days on end.
As soon as it comes to this point, can we continue to call this activity a game? It is more like a rash that you scratch and scratch. And then - worse.
# 2. Keep Pressing ... Forever
It is worth saying that the biggest difference between our hamster and man is that people can get food anywhere. If there were nothing in the game except pressing the boxes for arbitrary rewards, we would have switched to another game. People need long-term goals and the world of addictive games has something in its arsenal. For example…
Relief games
To start, make it so that the feed falls out quickly at the beginning and then more slowly over time. Therefore, in the MMO awards (or leveling up) at the beginning of the game it is much easier to get , but then the time and effort to increase the level grow exponentially. If only the player feels the joy of raising levels at the beginning of the game, then a further increase in demands will only increase the enjoyment of high levels. The same researcher from Microsoft discovered that players are playing more and more in proportion to getting new levels .
Destruction of cusps
The easiest way is to simply move save points away or engage players in long missions (for example, WoW raids) that once started cannot be stopped without losing progress.
But for players, this can be a real disappointment, so you can use the opposite approach in games like New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, where the levels are easy and this is like eating chips. They are small and the player can easily take another one and very soon it turns out that a whole pack has been eaten.
Somewhere in this pack is an evil dinosaur and a kidnapped princess.
By the way, for the same reason, a person who usually does not bother to read articles of 3,000 words on the Internet would be happy to do it if it is divided into parts. You do not notice boobs, reading it? My work is done!
Pay or lose
This is a more interesting question. Why reward the hamster for pressing the lever? Let's better make it so that if he doesn't click - will we punish him?
Behaviorists call this "avoidance." They rework the cage so that the hamster gets a discharge every 30 seconds until it presses the lever. He very quickly learns to stay on the lever all the time, putting pressure on him again and again. Forever. Within the limits of eternity hamster.
“Return to Excitebike!”
Why is your mom watering seedlings in Farmville so hard? Because they wither and rot if it does not. In Ultima Online, your house or castle will begin to crumble if you do not return to it regularly. In Animal Crossing, the city ​​is covered with weeds, and cockroaches fill your virtual house if you don’t enter the game often enough. This is the highest achievement for programmers - to force the player to click tirelessly, just to not lose what he has been seeking for so long
Brief summary
All these techniques have drawbacks, so in order to reach the extreme degree of attractiveness, the game must combine as many ways as possible, including the “one-armed gangster” that has already been mentioned (count how many ways only WoW takes). They only have time for hamsters to run from one lever to another.
So what's the problem?
We have already asked whether the collection of items aka an obsessive click can be called a "game." The question arises: What is a game?
Well, people play games because they satisfy the subconscious need to sharpen their skills, even if it seems useless as part of our daily tasks. They help us develop brains (especially in children) and test ourselves without fear of consequences. Therefore, our brains and encourage us feeling that we call "joy" when we play. Why, even dolphins do this:
That's why I decided not to include games like Guitar Hero in the article. They, too, are delaying, but they are delaying SO, as everyone understands this. It is absolutely natural to enjoy the fact that in some ways you become better. Also, games like Modern Warfare 2 - just a sport for those who did not physically turn out. There is no secret, everyone loves to win.
But the game elements like “push the lever until you die of hunger” are completely different. As already mentioned , the goal is to make you play even after learning all skills, make you forget about real life. Clicking on the picture depicting a chest, thousands of times, can not be called "pleasure."
Therefore, some writers criticized Blizzard after the introduction of the system of "achievements" a couple of years ago. There are rewards obliging to perform useless tasks again and again (for example, to catch 1000 fish). No things, no element of learning or discovery or mastering skills were introduced. Just routine actions and nothing more ...
... Or a hamster wheel.
Of course, developers (and commentators, I am sure) will reasonably point out that no one forces them to do this. Why should people voluntarily put themselves in the conditions of a laboratory hamster? The thing is to ...
#one. Get You to Call a Skinner Box Home
Do you like your job?
Given that half of you are reading this article at work, I dare to suggest that it is not. And this brings us to yet another pillar of gambling - addiction as a whole - it is so difficult to overcome it.
As horrifying as the story about “the guy who missed classes because he played WoW all this time,” just about a guy who just didn’t like these classes. This is not a dystopia in which the mind is controlled by Blizzard. Just a game filled the void.
Why is such a void in our lives? Because, according to an expert in all of Malcolm Gladwell (Malcolm Gladwell) , 3 things are needed to get pleasure from work, and I am sure that most of you don’t even have two:
- Autonomy (you influence what you do day by day)
- Difficulty (this is not a rehearsal, remember)
- The relationship between effort and reward (so that you can see the results of your work)
Be aware that pants are not a prerequisite for getting pleasure from work.
Most people, in particular the category of young gamers, do not have this at work and in general in life. But most of the trap games are specially created to give us all three ... or at least the illusion of all three.
Autonomy:
You yourself choose the tasks, or what seeds to plant in Farmville. Yes, what really! you even choose your body, species and talents.
Annoy your friends with Facebook updates is really a talent.
Complexity:
Players are engaged in monotonous "what", in particular, because it is not perceived as "quality". Remember this difficult dance for the sake of armor with emblems (Tier Armor / Frost Emblem), which was previously kept in the game of our gamer.
And then the connection between Labor and the Reward:
It's worth it. When you raise a level in WoW this incredible train of golden rays pierces your body.
This is something that most of us don't get every day — quick, tangible rewards. Rather, it is not instant gratification, but a terrific sense of completion. How much harder would we work at work in the office if we could also measure progress? And if the light penetrated our clothes? This beauty allows games to use boredom as a weapon. As we have already discussed somewhere , this is the tendency to “work to earn the right to play” in World of Warcraft, when you tire yourself, or knock out gold, earning the right to do cool things in the future. The tedious stage of knocking out gold actually adds a sense of completeness, but later. And it also helps to reduce the feeling of guilt for skipping school or working or housework for the sake of the game. In the end, you spent time on things that were worth it - those 12 hours of knocking out gold last Tuesday were much more fun than cutting this damn lawn.
So what's the problem?
Game designer Erin Hoffman once very aptly said: " Mania is not about what you do, but about what you DO NOT do because of the substitution of this affection ." She then talked about how the attraction of a simple flash game like Bejeweled depends on how much you want to avoid working open in the next window.
Wait, wait, what was I talking about?
The terrifying truth is that a bunch of people beg for Skinner's Box to crawl in and not get out because the real reward system is much slower and more brutal than we expected . In this game, no different from other forms of mental relaxation, whether it is sports or the contemplation of the moon.
Heroin: There are many more WoW in the syringe.
The danger lies in the simple fact that games have become so effective in delivering a sense of completeness that people have to quit their studies or careers. We do not believe that games will destroy the world, or that gambling will break the youth as well as an earthquake destroyed cities in the 90s. But we will get a generation that will work at Starbucks, having brains for much more. They will be dissatisfied with their lives because they have spent their youth on video games, and will be saved from this feeling by playing even more. Wash off. Repeat.
And let's look at it objectively; if you think that WoW is addictive, wait a bit until you see what the games will be in 10 years. They will only do better what they do.
David Wong, editor of Cracked.com and author of the tragic comedy novel John Die at the End, banned in 72 countries.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/88161/
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