Skinner Boxes
I’m not a psychologist, but I have played modern free-to-play and mobile games, so I know what it’s like to be in a psychology experiment. Surely having had hundreds (read: thousands) of hours of the experiment conducted on me should give me some grounds to speak on the topic. Whether it’s grinding and farming for some piece of equipment in an RPG, scavenging for a better weapon in a battle royale, or trying to pull a new character in a mobile gacha game, many games are using operant conditioning to keep players in games longer and more regularly. So, what’s the trick?
What are Skinner Boxes?
The concept was created and named after Burrhus Frederic Skinner, and psychologist with a focus on behavior. The proper term is “operant conditioning chamber”, and if Skinner was to have his way, it seems he would’ve preferred the chambers kept to that term, but Skinner box rolls of the tongue a bit more easily, so the name is stuck.
There are plenty of set-ups for the box, but the simplest version would be something like this: An animal is placed in a box, which contains a lever that will dispense food when pushed. Different animals can be used, it could be using a button, and the dispensed thing could be something more luxurious or a treat, but these are the basics, and how they could vary. Now that this is set-up, we can now use the Skinner box for its intended purpose: trying to change the subject’s behavior.
Pushing Levers
Let’s say we have a mouse in the box, and food is dispensed when a lever is pushed. If the level is super reliable, and it dispenses food every time the lever is pushed, the mouse will press the lever until it eats its fill, and then will only return when it gets hungry again. But let’s say our goal is to make the mouse press the lever more frequently. A simple change would be to require the mouse to press the button five times for food instead of once. And this does need to be a change: the mouse needs to learn about the lever dispensing food, and then have the lever’s payout decrease. The change may confuse or frustrate the mouse at first, but it will eventually adjust to the new rate of food, and press the lever more often. But the mouse will catch on to this pattern, and will return to pushing the lever only when it gets hungry.
The counterpart to this in video games would be something like collecting 100 coins in Mario for an extra life. You may start off actively collecting coins, never passing one up, but once you have a nice stockpile of extra lives, you probably don’t go out of your way to collect them anymore, and only get the ones that are directly in your path. So, what can be done to make the mouse push the lever more consistently, or make a player navigate toward more coins consistently?
Variability
There’s a lot of ways to do this, but one of the simple changes would be to add randomness. Now the mouse may need to press the lever 7 times for food, and then 3 times the next time, and then 13, and so on. The mouse never finds a pattern, and as a result, it will likely just keep pressing the lever. It doesn’t know how much work it needs to do for the next drop of food, so it will pace out the work and just keep pressing the lever. There’s a lot of counterparts to this in video games, but the first that comes to mind is grinding for rare equipment to drop. If killing an orc in a fantasy game has 1% chance of dropping some rare, valuable piece of equipment, you can statistically reason that you would need to kill 100 orcs before you get that equipment. But this is still a random chance, so you may only need to kill 10 before it appears, or maybe you don’t see it until you kill 200 orcs. The chances are bad, but you’re not going to get the equipment unless you’re fighting orcs. So, you start grinding, and because you don’t know how long you’ll be there, you pace yourself.
Comparing video gamers to rodents being duped into pushing levers may not be the most charitable comparison, but this is contemporary comparison. When Skinner was initially doing this research, he was comparing the mice to gamblers. The Skinner box, at its core, isn’t dissimilar to slot machine: there’s a lever, some sort of prize gets dispensed at random intervals, and in many cases, you keep playing after you win. There may be some questionable ethics behind this design, but if the goal of some video game developer or publisher is to keep people engaged in their game for as long or as frequently as possible, there’s a lot to learn from Skinner boxes. And on the player’s side, I think it’s important to know about these experiments, this style of design, and be conscious of what you’re doing in games. Make sure you’re playing the game because you are actively enjoying it, and not because something is enticing you to push some buttons well past the point of it being fun.
References:
These two articles have a lot more to say on the topic than I do, and I highly recommend them.
Thumbnail from here.
And some nice videos on the subject!
