The idea of scheduling comes from operant conditioning, and the use of rewards and punishments to reinforce a behavior (psychstudy.com), leads to types of scheduling behaviors that condition a player to continue what is wanted by the game developers. I have talked about this early on in the life of this blog, but I wanted to go into more depth about scheduling and its impact on video game design. You know the feeling -- when you get the new gun, the length of time between leveling up, and when you get that nifty achievement: this is nothing more than showing those imaginary people that look at achievements as to how far you have gone.
Continuous reinforcement is a simple schedule you grow to expect (Wikipidea). The daily login quest for most mobile games is the perfect example of this. It's a basic type of scheduling that at its base is trying to reinforce your behavior of opening that app in order to cash in on advertisements. This is also the strategy being used with unlocks at set intervals: in League of Legends, you know when you can unlock a new character; you know the value of time vs. the cost of the character that is expected. You know what time it is, and how much all of this is costing you.
Like slot machines, another type of reinforcement adds a random element to the scheduling: this is exemplified by loot boxes -- these tend to be pretty successful upfront -- giving stronger than normal cards, then becoming more random. Every once in a while you will be rewarded, but not as frequently as you were before, but what is interesting is that it does not seem to matter what the reward is or wheater it is consistent. Is the reward a well earned one for taking down a boss or one that is shallow like rolling to earn a strong piece of loot? This dynamic in my mind is the difference between a well-made game and one just trying to exploit human psychology.
Continuous reinforcement is a simple schedule you grow to expect (Wikipidea). The daily login quest for most mobile games is the perfect example of this. It's a basic type of scheduling that at its base is trying to reinforce your behavior of opening that app in order to cash in on advertisements. This is also the strategy being used with unlocks at set intervals: in League of Legends, you know when you can unlock a new character; you know the value of time vs. the cost of the character that is expected. You know what time it is, and how much all of this is costing you.
Like slot machines, another type of reinforcement adds a random element to the scheduling: this is exemplified by loot boxes -- these tend to be pretty successful upfront -- giving stronger than normal cards, then becoming more random. Every once in a while you will be rewarded, but not as frequently as you were before, but what is interesting is that it does not seem to matter what the reward is or wheater it is consistent. Is the reward a well earned one for taking down a boss or one that is shallow like rolling to earn a strong piece of loot? This dynamic in my mind is the difference between a well-made game and one just trying to exploit human psychology.
posted cby jar jar binz (guest editor)
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