The Hook: Behaviorism in Video Games

“You are just starting to play World of Warcraft. After selecting your class and customizing your character, you enter the world. Your user interface is fairly simple, with only a single button or two to push. There are wolves nearby, so you decide to fire off a frostbolt at a wolf and, with a couple more successful attacks, you kill the wolf. You decide to kill a few more wolves and then, suddenly,[BWIZZZH] your character is enveloped by gold light and a loud noise comes through your speakers. Exciting! You find that you have new spells to cast, you have more health, and hit harder – you leveled up! You want to do it again, so you keep killing wolves. But after killing the same number of wolves, nothing happens. Confused, you keep killing wolves until, shortly after, you level up again.”

Hey all,

The vignette above provides a rather rudimentary example of how one might begin playing an MMORPG. This leveling process pretty closely mirrors most games on the market that have leveling systems, especially online games. Leveling systems are just one of many ways video games make use of principles of Behaviorism to get players engaged in the game.

Behaviorism holds that, when beginning to shape behavior, the desired behavior must be rewarded frequently to establish a link between the behavior and the reward contingency. For this reason, it takes very little time to level up from one to two. In fact, the first ten levels occur very quickly, and can typically be accomplished in about two hours of playtime (I’m talking about brand new players, not people with the heirloom gear that drastically  reduces the time to level). With each level, however, the amount of experience needed to reach the next level increases, establishing a consistently-thinning, variable-ratio reinforcement schedule (Yee, 2006). Even after the player has reached the maximum level and begins to enter the end-game raids and dungeons, they receive new gear for their character on a variable-ratio schedule, which consistently reinforces player behavior (Madigan, 2009). It is a well-known principle of Behaviorism that variable-ratio schedules are among the most effective in maintaining target behaviors. Furthermore, behavioral systems are designed so that the reward schedule can be thinned out to reduce the subject’s reliance on reward (Cipani & Schock, 2011). Games like WoW, then, take advantage of these principles by rewarding players early and often with bright lights, victorious sound-bites, and new and interesting spells to cast. This establishes the player’s engagement with the game and their playing behavior is maintained through a thinning reward schedule until players are simply playing the game for the sake of playing it. Anyone who has played WoW for any significant amount of time could probably tell you about the ridiculous amount of time they spend running around their garrison doing literally nothing. By this point, they’ve been hooked. Video games are rife with behavioral systems such as leveling to shape and maintain players’ behavior, even to the point where they feel more like they are working as opposed to playing (Yee, 2006).

Taking a more general look at reward systems in video games, any single-player game that has various stages can be seen as its own reward system. By completing a stage, the player has “won” something. The next stage is normally a little harder, requiring the player to perform at a higher level to complete the stage and experience the satisfaction of winning again. Therefore, throughout the course of a game, a behavioral system constantly molds players behavior until they have mastered the game and can perform at a level that would have been impossible at the beginning (Hamlen, 2013).

When achievements – visual recognition for completing some special task in games – hit the market with the PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii generation, a new opportunity for behavior shaping was introduced. This may include completing stages, completing the game on different difficulties, finding hidden secrets built into the game, et cetera.  When a player completes the requirements for an achievement, a little icon flashes up on the screen and congratulates him/her on the accomplishment. The achievement reward specifies very specifically what behavior earned the reward and, as it does not provide any sort of tangible reward other than the acknowledgement, can be considered a form of direct verbal praise. This form of reinforcement has also been found to be effective in maintaining behaviors (Sharpley, 1988).

There is neuroimaging evidence to support the effect of behavioral principles on reinforcing player behavior in video games. One study found that striatal dopamine, which is associated with feelings of pleasure and reward, was released during video game play, particularly when players had earned some sort of accomplishment (Koepp et al., 1998). However, it is also clear that this is not due to the visual aspects of the game but rather by a feeling of being rewarded for performing in-game behaviors, as shown by evidence that striatal activity was only different for people actually involved in playing games and not those who passively watched the game being played (Katsyri, Hari, Ravaja, & Nummenmaa, 2013). It was this line of research that lent credence to the idea of video game addictions.

As can be readily seen, video games make frequent use of key behavioral principals in order to shape player behavior and keep them coming back to the games. The neuroimaging studies suggest that game play actually influences neuro-chemical functioning, which can lead to real feelings of excitement and euphoria that keeps players hooked. This was another topic that I discussed in that paper I mentioned several months ago [LINK]. Let’s throw it back to you all: what sort of things keep you engaged with games? What keeps you playing games long after you’ve “beaten” them? As another topic, what are your thoughts about the idea of video game addiction? Let me know your opinions. But that’s all for now.

See y’all next time!

References:

Hamlen, K. R. (2013). Understanding children’s choices and cognition in video game play: A synthesis of three studies. Zeitschrift fur Psychologie, 221(2), 107-114. DOI: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000136

Katsyri, J., Hari, R., Ravaja, N., & Nummenmaa, L. (2013). Just watching the game ain’t enough: Striatal fMRI reward responses to successes and failures in a video game during active and vicarious play. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 1-13. DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00278

Koepp, M. J., Gunn, R. N., Lawrence, A. D., Cunningham, V. J., Dagher, A., Jones, T., Brooks, D. J., Bench, C. J., & Grasby, P. M. (2013). Evidence for striatal dopamine release during a video game. Nature, 393(6682), 266-268. DOI: 10.1038/30498

Sharpley, C. F. (1988). Effects of varying contingency and directness of rewards upon children’s performance under implicit reward conditions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 45(3), 422-437. DOI: 10.1016/0022-0965(88)90040-9

Yee, N. (2006). The labor of fun: How video games blur the boundaries of work and play. Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media, 1, 68-71. DOI: 10.1177/1555412995281819

• Behaviorism
• Psychology
• Video Games