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[In this article, designer Chris Birke takes a look at research, examines what's going on in the social games space, and argues for an approach that puts creative ethos before data-driven design -- but without ignoring the power that game designers wield over players.]
A little over 10 years ago I read an article titled Behavioral Game Design written by John Hopson. Now, looking back, I see what a huge influence it's been on my game design philosophies. I have been following psychology and neuroscience ever since, always uncovering new ways to incorporate them into an ever-growing design toolbox.
Technology is moving very fast, and 10 years is very long in internet time. Wikipedia was launched 10 years ago; Facebook, World of Warcraft, and Gmail have been around since 2004. The iPhone was born in 2007, and FarmVille recently turned two. Science is moving just as quickly, and behavioral theory is now being underwritten by neuroscience, and the revelations of high resolution, real-time brain mapping (fMRI). On top of this we now design with the aid of analytics, the real-time data-mining of player behavior. We can roll out a design tweak once a day, if necessary, to maximize profits.
What are the ethical implications? As a curious proposition, "Behavioral Game Design" seemed innocent enough. Now that design toolkit verges on a sort of mind control, and the future is promising only refinement of these techniques. What are we doing to players, and what have we left behind in those innocent days of chasing "the fun"?
Personally, so long as I can make enough money to eat (and maybe have a good time), I feel obligated to design socially responsible games that benefit the lives of players, not just exploit them. I want to explore ideas of how to use these new technologies in a positive way, and to encourage those who feel the same.
I would like to share some of the neuroscience that attempts to explain how conditioning behavioral conditioning works in games, and go into how this can be used in the context of analytical game design to maximize player compulsion. Then I will go into some ideas for how to use these tools ethically, and hopefully inspire discussion in our community. But first, a brief review of behavioral conditioning.
"They're waiting for you, Gordon, in the test chamber..."
Most behaviorists don't use the words "Skinner Box." Skinner himself didn't want to be remembered as a device, preferring to call it an "operant conditioning chamber." It is a cage used to isolate the subject (usually a pigeon, or a rat) with only a button to operate and a stimulus (a light, for example) to be learned. Pressing the operant (button) releases a reward (food), but that's reliant on pressing it correctly in response to the stimulus.
It was with this that Skinner explored the nature of learning and, further, how to maximize or disrupt the compulsive behaviors of his subjects. The results, in short, showed that the schedule of rewards in response to stimulus greatly affected how animals (like you and me) responded to their training. The most compulsive behavior was not driven by "fixed ratio" rewards, where a stimulus meant a consistent prize for correct actions, but instead by a semi-random "variable ratio" schedule. Maybe you would win, or maybe not. Keep trying, just in case -- you'll figure it out eventually.
If you have been designing games at all in the past few years you ought to be familiar with this. Applying and combining the results of these studies have been proven to work. No one can deny the incredible feeling you get upon hearing the familiar "ting" (YouTube link) of a rare ring dropping off an enemy in Diablo. It's the combined reward of the long term chase for better stats with the instant gratification of a high pitched chime over the clank and groans of battle. It's rare and semi-random.
You can't argue the benefit of front-loading content onto the learning curve like in Rift (or any other MMO) either. Dishing out rewarding content more slowly in the late game not only maximizes its use, it's fitting nicely to the documented results of the most compelling reward scheduling. Just add some compelling random combat encounters to keep it fresh. Reviews (for example, Gamespot's Review) call this out as good design, because it's more fun that way, right?
Since I'm being such a depressing reductionist, let me tell you I believe there is such a thing as "fun." It's a specific brain activity within us, electric and chemical. It lives in there, and you can probably graph it with powerful magnets, sales, focus groups, or the staggering 275 million daily active users playing Zynga's games on Facebook (AppData). Even if you don't think current Facebook games are fun (and I'll suggest how that might work), someone out there does.
What is fun, anyway?
In my opinion, neuroscience is quickly extending behavioral theory as the most effective means of manipulating people (players). There are a few different theories of what's happening in the brain to create the consistent results found in behaviorism (and FarmVille), but I'll only share my favorite for sake of brevity.
If this isn't the true mechanism of fun, I'd at least like to warn you: it will be discovered soon. A early paper on the topic entitled "Predictive Reward Signal of Dopamine Neurons" is the sort of thing that makes me giddy. This research describes in detail how the behavior of a particular type of neuron in the brain specializing in the neurotransmitter dopamine works as the "reward system" to drive learning and motivation. It's fairly simple theory called "incentive salience," and the key is novelty.
All of our brains are similar. Just as the average person is born with the same sorts of cells in the fingernail cuticle on their ring finger, so, too, do we all share the same brain areas. They work to perform the same tasks in all of us (moods, facial recognition, Counter-Strike, etc.). They've specialized.
An important central structure, the ventral tegmental area (VTG), is made up of neurons that specialize in the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. It stretches out into other brain areas, lining them and waiting for a queue to act. By releasing dopamine, this structure can intensify brain activity in those areas, acting as a sort of throttle. And what's controlling the throttle? Reward.
(Fig. 1) The reward system.
These rewards are the same sorts of delicious rewards given in Skinner's Behaviorist research, as well as other things we're wired up to like. (Social status, pleasant noises, sex, explosions, epic loot, etc.) These things trigger the signals dopamine neurons are carefully monitoring, and each expects a precise level of expected reward.
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It is particularly satisfying to hear the connections between neuroscience and design, before moving on to the lasting impact over the previous decade and the implications for the future. It is good to hear behaviorism isn't dead, perhaps just repackaged. Because this portion of the article correlates, it would be very interesting to hear how this 'paper' [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/GlennStorm/20091203/3706/Sentiology.php] compares to your favorite theory. Motivation or "fun" theory, system of experience, psychology for designers; whatever you call it, it treads the same ground and draws similar conclusions regarding novelty, chance and attention, to name a few.
One thought on, "It's a bit surprising that Vegas hasn't figured out how to turn gambling into more of a social game for people besides the high rollers." Note their advertising campaigns of late center around how the act of going to Vegas, and being in Vegas, effects your social standing and shakes up your persona. And when Vegas was founded, all the popular games were social ones. They continue to play up that social aspect in designing the floor. With all that is invested, Vegas is likely not to miss a beat.
My only aside would be that the dopamine system and ice cream bell example you give is essentially a neurological example of classical conditioning (think Pavlov, bells, and drooling dogs) rather than Skinner's particular flavour of Operant Conditioning. In fact your graph on the shift of the dopamine reward could easily be a graph in any first year psych book showing the creation of a "conditioned response". Although this distinction doesn't really effect your point at all.
Oh, and I know plenty of (radical) behaviourists (including myself when I am wearing that hat) that call operant conditioning chambers "Skinner Boxes". Perhaps I hang around with a disrespectful crowd though! Sorry Skinner ;)
Fortunately I managed to make it to this sentence:
"I'd recommend that if I was a tool, that is, and unfortunately it's already happening."
Now I have to write a congragulatory comment and struggle to say something wittier(which is always alot more difficult then just being angry).
I just want to say Chris, and I mean this with all due respect, I have never read a better parody of pseudoscience bull$hit in my entire life.
That said, I'm certainly not pushing this as the proven explanation of "fun"; we all know it's just a stab in the dark. I personally know a neuroscientist who disagree with me on what "fun" means, even though we're on the same page for the rest of the theory.
Moreover, debate continues - if you're interested, please check out some further research from "actual scientists" on the topic that I've collected here for your convenience:
http://www.chrisbirke.com/neuroscience/
And, thanks for reading the whole thing! *phew*
@Gerald: I had exactly the same experience 3/4 of the way through, and the same sentence kept me going.
@Chris: playerAnalytics.org is a great idea. The site www.infochimps.com is a step in that direction. Developers can share -- freely, or for a price -- any data they choose, on any subject, all sortable by tags.
I had the same "hey this guy's a sociopath" kind of reaction that people tend to have reading this, and have had to my own writing about these kinds of tricks and traps (epic Doom II level, embodied some behaviorist principles). Then I caught the ethics footnote.
Now, I'm going to line up the mirrors.
You get giddy at finding a paper about the systematic process of how people get giddy, that's kind of funny right? Where's the semantic underlying the chemical signal? Or is the semantic just another thing we invented to feel better about context-dependent scribbles and screeches we call language?
Likewise, when we think: "ok, I'm playing with mass-scale manipulation of human minds, but I'm going to be ethical about it" are we just deluding ourselves with pat rationalizations?* I could segue into a comment about organized religion here, but instead I'll say, I deal with these very same considerations myself, and I don't know. This comment is intended to be empathetic rather than critical.
*Of course, any rationalization I make is a Pat rationalization.
(Be sure to emphasize the impact of the ellipsis in your head as you read.)
So! My giddiness is of course the result of my accumulated experiences finding an unusually accurate positive in the mapping of this framework upon my little corner of our world (such insight having been linked to positive reward through education, if nothing else, and thus my love of theory.) Paradoxically this is both ironic and predictable. It's fitness driven evolution. Let's not get so ahead of ourselves as to take credit for having invented "context-dependent scribbles and screeches" either. All of this well calls that into question, too. ;)
What it comes down to, as usual, is the hope that my ethics (under constant review) are more worthy than the ethics of others in the grand scheme of things. I like to think they are. In this case it's really just populist ethics for the good of us all vs the I can get rich really fast and I don't give a shit about people "ethics." I mean, that's how I put it to myself so you can imagine how motivational it can be.
More seriously, I hope ethical corporations who do what they can to support the people they provide for will grow to outcompete the parasitically amoral ones, if only for sake of having more consumers at the end of the day. These (hypothetical?) ethical corporations will need the teeth and claws of their amoral cousins every bit as much, and certainly that's what these sorts of manipulative tools represent.
I probably won't be able to make much of a difference alone, but every drop in the bucket counts, and getting the information out is really one of the best things we can do.
The issue of tailoring a game in real-time is interesting to me, and I wonder, why not the other way around? Let people express more radical content and try to measure the dynamics. I think there's more profit in that, monetarily and otherwise, in that because you get the social re-verb effect, you don't want to solipsocially insulate people too much, just enough to make them feel comfortable with participating.
On the other hand, your suggestion speaks more to procedural content, dynamic difficulty, and whatnot.
I put the referendum out on Play This Thing a while back if player-created or machine-generated content would have more traction in the future, one interesting comment suggested the latter will be more commercial and the prior will be more niche. Makes sense, and fits well with the examples we've seen on FB and mobile, where limited customization in iso-grids is boiled in a sheep's stomach with the heat calibrated just-so.
That's a brave new world in the particular sense that you frame the question, but put differently it's the same as it ever was. None of our products exists in isolation, and all of the buzz, thought, website creation, and angry forum commenting that occurs is at heart just a bunch of data bits like the code itself. I definitely think (agree?) that designing more to that realisation (the realization that players are not just capable of making in game content, but that content is everything in the ecosystem surrounding the game) has a lot more reward potential than procedurally driven gameplay responses.
It's not a race, though, and these sorts of things will be working together.
As for the commercial vs niche conclusion - hmn - I suspect that's more a result of the ways these things have been used and the conservatism of publishers. As the realization that "virality" is not something that happens due to Facebook wall posts catches on, I think the fusion will intensify represent itself across the whole spectrum.
..."If this isn't the true mechanism of fun, I'd at least like to warn you: it will be discovered soon."
To state the obvious, knowing how the brain reacts when "fun" is experienced is a far cry from knowing what fun is. It's also a far cry from being able to divine what novel game to create next that will be the next big thing. And perhaps forging ahead with this mindset lighting the way might actually inhibit your company from being able to innovate.
Seems to me this sort of reductionist thinking which encourages some companies to spend gobs of money trying to create "games" that play people (as opposed to the other way around) can only result in the same sort of crappy "social" games we see already. To them I say have at it Hoss.
Everyone is always trying to get over on someone else... that's what analytics driven games are all about... It's not new. It's exploiting human psychology and human weaknesses to get over. This isn't the mindset of an artist, it's the cynical mindset of the con artist who sees suckers with money being born every minute.
edit: but i do agree with some of your concluding thoughts particularly on raising awareness amongst gamers and shining a light on the man behind the curtain.
edit: and there was a brief bit about experimenting on your unsuspecting customers and having _secret_ differences between copies depending on their demographic... i'm not even sure what to make of these ideas but I don't think they should go unchallenged. Seems to me to contemplate these things suggests a lack of respect for your customers as human beings. Imagine if you discovered that the box of frosted flakes your family ate was different (even though it was in the exact same box) because your grocery store was in a less afluent part of town. Damn, Amazon got my zip code wrong and sent me the ebonics version of The Hobbit. Finally shedding all pretense, no longer are we talking about making a *good game, we're talking about how to maximize profit in the guise of maximizing fun. Again, not the mindset of an artist.
*they might counter that they werent selling a game product, but some sort of fun service and that their service can be tailored to the customer. I can hear the patent applications transmitting now...
Does this appear to be an article about marginalizing creativity? Is there a strong belief that art is not psychological manipulation of a sort? Respectfully, these are honest questions for all.
a) a sub heading of the article was "What is fun anyway?" and it's text took up ~25% of the article.
b) It's not about manipulation or influence. It's about intent, malevolent dishonesty, and exploitation.
The magician street performer is not trying to turn you into an addict and fleece you. And a magician is a pretty good example of a benevolent liar.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYjgeayfYPI
See my reply to you down below.
Researching and using all these functions and metrics to measure games and their design appears to me as an attempt to turn "fun" from an abstract and subjective concept (which makes games hard to design, since there's no way to know what "works" and what doesn't) to a discrete and quantifiable one (which can let you know what "works" and also lets you compare games to each other in an absolute way). While it could provide some interesting and useful data, sadly it can be misused, resulting in risk-adverse game design and literal interpretations of analytics results, which in turn might alienate some users in order to appeal to other, more profitable ones.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing/
(Note, they claim it isn't a "buzzword" (hah!))
Psychologists are explicitly prohibited from doing these sorts of unannounced experiments on people, but no such moral restrictions apply to marketing. Rogue psychologists can make well for themselves (alone?) doing this sort of work for business.
Mark Pinkus on Metrics:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing/
Zynga stakes their success on testing, and also something they call "minimum viable product." Minimum viable product? That's the sh*t you kick out the door as soon as testing suggests it might be profitable, and as long as you keep your engineering drones happy it's gravy. A lot of those engineers don't give a shit about games or people, and it's pretty sad to see them make so much money on something people call a game. Just like the slots. There's a huge supply of adequate mediocracy too, as it's perhaps not the most intense sort of engineering to hack together a flash game.
Good engineers will do better with good companies, but it will take longer.
I'm also inspired to see the 80's movie where Pinkus is dropped into an actual ghetto. In reality, he'd probably do quite well with his savvy (so long as he isn't shot in the short term.) The strategy works, just like selling meth works, it's just not good for society. Selling a milder form of digital meth* legally is much smarter, and especially if people are unwilling to believe such a thing can really exist. ; )
*Actually, wasn't this a plot point in Robocop 2? Fine cinema, that.
Not a fan of marketing either...
but i wouldn't quite take it this far...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsHXWTDUnZ0
Seriously though, it feels as though we've been turning the corner from honest game development to a form thats been heavily co-opted by greed. Alas this is what happens to every sub-culture that generates enough business to be dubbed an industry. Look at the music industry and top 40 radio.
And a lot of people are frankly so indoctrinated with the status quo they don't see anything wrong with their way of doing things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEgu7jdc_fs
Then keep fighting for more ;)
I think with f2p business models it s easier to fall into the trap of just building a system that s blindly optimised for the largest short-term financial gain (there are definitely good f2p examples out there, too, like LoL).
Finally, about the analytics, I am a big fan of making decisions that were informed by solid empirism. However, sometimes I get the impression that you can go blind from information overload. Having more information is not the same getting better information...
TED Talk "Lauren Zalaznick: The conscience of television"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIqABIcKIvs
Unfortunately she doesn't own up for her industry's manipulation of society's collective conscience or collective psyche by virtue of their (TV Execs) programming decisions, she doesn't talk about social responsibility (which is what Ethos before Analytics is all about), and she infers causality between social issues and conditions of the times with what people "want" to watch. She neglects to mention that TV does it's part in framing issues and social conditions and influencing minds and opinions with subtle and some not so subtle lies which could in turn influence what people decide to watch. (given the selection of shows available to them... ).
At the end she talks about how we're "just animals" (despite first noting the differences between humans and other animals) and I think this gives further insight into the attitudes behind an analytics driven world; that people are just animals to be controlled and shaped and used...
(another TED talk). About 3 minutes in, the speaker addresses the problem of "Arousal Addictions". TLDR: exposure to the Internet is rewiring boys' brains to crave constantly changing content -- particularly movies, porn, and video games.
Strikes me as a dopamine-driven syndrome.
As a psychotherapist I have tried to get patients and colleagues to rethink the concept of game "addiction," as a lack of cultural competency. Your article is another example of how we need to keep it complicated, that some people in the gaming industry are more concerned with operant behavior than ethics, but a whole bunch are not. I'm not sure the same could be said for the tobacco industry for example.
My theoretical bent is not primarily behavioral but rather psychodynamic, and I encourage people to not reduce the user experience to biology. Games as art forms are metaphors, and meaningful in a way that I suggest can reveal a lot about our particular context, desires, anxieties and conflicts. And this also means that games often contain the language, metaphor and structure to help us heal and gain insight.
This has been a great week for gamers: The MMO Foldit successfully maps an enzyme that may counteract HIV, and perhaps we've just read one of the first ethical treatises on gaming!
cognitive flaws (no patches exist..) for the benefit of the gamer is one thing (imagine design a calculus based game for middle schoolers utilizing these techniques), but creating a game which does nothing but line the pockets of the game company is another. One is mutually beneficial, a true exchange, the other merely (and disgustingly) parasitism. Hacking the human to no good end. The knowledge which psychologists and neuroscientists have and are discovering is being turned into technology, and it is high time that there is serious discussion of the moral hazards that learning the true human APIs will certainly bring.
As a design student and a daily examiner of Gamasutra, let me start by saying this is one of the best written articles I've ever read on this site or any other. During each day in school we must dissect and construct games and we can see what you discuss in the final part of this article. The industry wants to be thought of and protected as an art form, yet sometimes it "lends" itself out to the highest bidder and degrades the image of art. The final section confirms there are still people who believe the industry can still be saved and held up to this lofty standard, but I fear enough of the same industry may have "gone to the dark side"; much like the law industry (where every law student wants to help people and uphold justice, only to become billing machines for a giant corporation) every design student wants to create a game filled with fun (some of us want to create moving experiences via interactivity, but we're few) only to become burnt out machines striving for the next dollar (or maybe a career change).
I for one applaud this article, be assured it will ring in my head as I continue forward.
Thank You.