Keeping Players Interested In Games Through Rewards

  Over 16 years ago an article titled Behavioral Game Design was published by Gamasutra and authored by a young grad student who would become the Head of Bungie Research and later a Senior User Research Manager for Blizzard named John Hopson.  A lot has changed in gaming since 2001 but what John Hopson wrote is just as important in game design today.  While not discounting game theory, Hopson took into mind the psychology of the player.  The behaviors well studied throughout psychology would be leveraged into creating games that feed the primordial desire for accomplishments and achievements thus adding more satisfaction to the player, or at least keeping the poor bastard hooked.

  In John's original article he asserts the importance of contingencies and scheduling. In reference to B.F. Skinner's  experiments on operant conditioning, he describes the importance of providing rewards to the player to keep them interested. These experiments were based on the previous work of John B. Waston's idea of classical conditioning (Saul McLeod 2007).  Operant condition can be thought of as and action being "rewarded" for a response therefore reinforcing that action.  For example if you push a button and a dollar comes out, we can reinforce your behavior of pressing the button by making sure a dollar comes out whenever you push the button.  In this way, you will begin to behave in the belief that every time you push the button, money comes out. If you are thinking ATMs, you got the idea.

  The practice of offering a reward in different intervals helps with the reinforcement in conditioning. It is something that is almost expected at this point in the video game industry. In fact this has become such a prevailing design of video games you can't seem to find a game that does not have achievements. Steam has ran so far with this as they have designed their structure around community and achievements. A meta game for games if you will.  Still these rewards are there to consistently remind us that our actions were a good thing in order to continue that action.  Playing video games.

  The schedule of the rewards and the consistency of the reward are shown to be important as well.  These are the contingencies. Players will tend to come back when they know they will be rewarded and can become agitated if the amounts of the rewards they are use to slow down.  I think we can see an example of this as it was one of the biggest issues of the MMO Knights of the Old Republic.  The game was constantly rewarding and giving you things to do until you hit the end game.  For the first few months of its life it really had nothing to do once you maxed your character leaving people to lose interest fast.  They were starved of the rewards they had been trained to expect.

  While the practice of rewards and scheduling are important, John does have a critique of people's perception of his original article. He believes while these facets improve a game they cannot be the only thing that makes a game good.  There still has to be story, gameplay, and graphics to back up these reward systems.  A prime example of this is a cookie clickers game.  While it fills in the essentials of rewards and reinforcement it fails to deliver anything beyond that, giving them substantially short lived lives.

  Two articles that I reference through out this post by John Hopson are definitely worth the read.
Behavioral Game Design
10 Years of Behavioral Game Design with Bungie's Research Boss

  These articles are great first look into game psychology and are also my starting point for better understanding why games have the pull they do.  I will continue to research these ideas and will use this blog to report back on my findings.  Maybe at some point making it more clear exactly why we enjoy video games or even what makes games good. That or just misinterpreting what I read making bad psuedo science, which seems to be in style these days.

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