Everybody knows about the Skinner Box and operant conditioning. Everybody knows our brains have a soft spot for prize boxes that deliver rewards at random intervals. Most people seem pretty okay with that. I mean, a box that delivers, say, delicious candy to you ALL the time would seem like some kind of kiss-ass. A box that delivered no candy ever would just be some dumb, judgmental asshole. We KNOW it has candy, and yet it never shares! Like it's so great. The best boxes deliver candy sometimes, when it seems reasonable, is what we seem to agree on. The problem for capitalism's aspiring b-list villains has always been how best to dress up the box that delivers candy sometimes and sell it to an eager market, noses pressed up against glass, miming the pressing of an air lever to see if we follow. Yes, they want candy is what they're trying to say.
Some attempts are less subtle than others. Gambling has been around far longer than B. F. Skinner and his research, but in the modern era they've made good use of his work. Have you been to a casino lately? Slot machines have evolved in the last 20 years or so. Gone are mechanical reels coupled with the simple, if exciting, plunk plunk plunk of sometimes change with a perky jingle to let you know you'd won. Now most are touch-screen games, with embedded mini-games, a bevy of exciting sounds and animations to let you know that SOMETHING is happening. Sometimes, when you hold your mouth just right as you pull the lever, that is. The end result is still a machine, that sometimes, when the moon is right and you believe hard enough, delivers money to buy candy. It's just now, instead of more or less being a naked "random rewards machine" it's been given a nice cozy cover of a "game". It's nothing to be ashamed of, pulling a lever for sometimes candy, it's bonafide entertainment! It's an arcade where the game periodically spits quarters back at you. It's a mini-soap starring you and a cartoon frog. What's not to love?
Of course, somewhere along the line, traditional video game makers reached the obvious question. What if you could not only put chocolate in peanut butter, but also put peanut butter in chocolate?! What if what kept a player playing a given game was not intellectual or physical challenge, but a series of increasingly subtle skinner boxes, delivering sweet digital candy? Let's face it, delivering fresh physical or mental challenges is challenging work, why not work smarter, not harder? I mean, you can create what you think are clever puzzles and get nothing but critical disdain, but you put someone in front of a friendly machine that dispenses sometimes candy like a regular joe and they'll thank you for the opportunity! And on a day that is still lauded in the halls of b-list villainy came the realization that you don't have to actually deliver anything more substantial than the cartoons and fanfares when "rewarding" players! As it turns out, there is a market for delivering an intangible version of the sometimes candy experience and people will line up and pay you real human dollars for the privilege. Some will even become connoisseurs of lever pressing, bragging about the random candy dispensed like they did something special to EARN that candy, "I mean yeah it was just a lever but I really PRESSED it you know? I pressed it a LOT."
Of course, since aspiring b-list villain is not a commodity we ever seem to run out of, it became important to dress the skinner box product in a distinctive, well-branded way to distinguish it from the ridiculous swarm of competitors. Recently, I've been pleasantly addicted, really just the tiniest modicum of discomfort, to what I call the 4-D Skinner box: Diablo 3 and Destiny.
Diablo 3 is the third skinner box in Blizzard's popular skinner box series where you beat up the devil and candy comes out. Now, you can't actually eat the candy so it is necessary to invest the players somewhat in order to make the rewards meaningful. You are given the task of creator in this tiny universe, and given a little man you mold out of pixels to care for. He's a bit of a schlub to start. A little shit in the impressive levers and candy department. You are given a single lever to start, a basic attack, which you aim at a monster who is hiding all the candy from you. You hit the lever, which attacks the monster, which delivers candy at a reasonable and not shitty interval: sometimes. The candy in this case, is clothing and weapons with which to hang upon your tiny creation, to reduce the total number of whacks needed to hit monsters and get candy more or less. And to prevent monsters from demolishing your little man and ruining what should be a pleasant candy experience. Of course, to keep it interesting, the monsters get harder to whack as time goes on, requiring you to hit the lever more and get more candy to get better at killing monsters who are, lets face it, only becoming more difficult about coughing up the goods.
At regular intervals you will get more levers, like a cone of fire, and a meteor strike, with which to crack these pinatas. Blizzard, god damn and bless them, has made the gathering of candy extremely pleasurable, if you like whacking pinatas with an increasingly insane variety of sticks. You can burn the with fire, call meteors from heaven, whirl spinning hammers, do super-punches, shoot pointed sticks of all varieties and all this candy will keep coming out, and sometimes really good candy with blue or yellow or orange wrappers that the skinner box only delivers sometimes sometimes, or sometimes sometimes sometimes OR more rarely sometimes sometimes sometimes sometimes. That's the best candy of all: sometimes^4. And doesn't it look nice on your little man. And don't the monsters fall over so nicely now! And doesn't it look shit 15 minutes later when after a session of persistent whacking nothing better has fallen out. The game is a gorgeous, engaging, skinner box with so many cartoons and fanfares and flashy things that it's easy to forget it's an incredibly calculated and complex collection of reward ratios tied to a complicated multi-lever system. This is a deluxe skinner box and it will deliver the candy that you never knew you wanted.
Hot on its heels, is Bungie's new skinner box model Destiny. Where Blizzard gets you popping out candy like a seasoned lover, Bungie's attempts at skinner boxing seem clumsy and shy. It's not sure where your buttons are but damn if they aren't trying to get you and your brain off as best they can. What actually seems to be holding them back is some kind of, how do I say it, dignity? That seems to want their game to be an actual game of some sort, and maybe some kind of MMO and, oh yes, a consensually addictive skinner box experience for the whole family to enjoy. You also have a little man to dress in this one, but where D3 plays out like the fun adventures of a cartoon man and the candy-ripe hordes of the apocalypse in a 3rd-person isometric point of view, destiny is much more of a traditional "shooter" with manly shooty men and blocky armor. For anyone who's been hit in the head recently, a shooter is a first-person experience wherein the player is given a variety of guns with which to caress the world. In Destiny there is also punching and a couple of superpowers for when the shooting begins to create a sense of ennui about the limitations of self-expression in a violent post-apocalypse. Make no mistake, the shooting is fun. The punching is satisfyingly punchy. The powers are glowy and boomy and very impressive. These are the smoothly contoured levers of the Destiny experience.
The skinner box itself seems to need a little work. The first addiction in any skinner box rpg is generally "leveling your mans" which means getting him from a dumb baby with a rags to a big-boy totally grown-up space where the only excuse for not having a nice outfit and a bigger stick is an inexcusable lack of lever pulling, which the growing up process should have instructed the player in adequately. But once the story, such as it is, has finished and leveling, such as it was, is over, players still need some flimsy excuse to keep pressing the lever. No one likes to see the man behind the curtain pulling the lever and stuffing candy in his face like any old schlub, they like to see a prince among princes in his finery whacking monsters until candy comes out for the good of all, in what is agreed to be a worthy and compelling exercise. For a purpose. If there's one thing you don't want in a skinner box experience it's a moment of existential self-reflection.
But Destiny does try. When you successfully shoot a monster the candy, in a perfectly sometimes way, will spill out in a glowy white, green blue or purple orb. It is really a very sensual, pinata-like experience. But it doesn't seem to happen as frequently as one might hope, or rather as one's brain might crave. The reward ratio doesn't seem "sometimes" enough, you know? After the leveling is done and the story is over, the only thing to really do is re-run all the story missions or randomly roam the world whacking monsters and hoping candy spills out. D3 has a similar post-story mode, but it somehow seems more satisfying. Probably because the candy flows so fast you rarely have a moment to ask why you're still doing this. In destiny you can spend a day and not find better candy, and the candy flows so slowly there is plenty of time to reflect on what you're actually doing with your time, which, as discussed, is death to the skinner box experience.
Which isn't to say Destiny isn't fun, it is, but for more traditional reasons. I get very little upgradeable candy when I play, but caressing the world with bullets is still as fun as it was in the first 5 minutes and the environments are very pretty, except for the cubicles. Which is to say, the core gameplay in Destiny is actually kind of fun, independent of the skinner box addiction mechanics, which is not something I'm sure I could say about D3. But it also means once you've run out of new enemies to shoot, or get tired of the environments or juveniles tea-bagging your corpse in pvp, the skinner box ratios may not be enough to keep people pulling the levers in numbers large enough to satisfy the b-list villains who funded it. I assume. I am strictly the rube and never the mastermind in these scenarios.
The interesting thing about these games is some players are purely in it for the uncluttered skinner box experience and will focus all their efforts on reducing the extraneous "game" crap and try to arrange an experience that is more or less just pressing the lever without any distractions. In Destiny this was accomplished by identifying a cave that spawned enemies frequently, and then standing in front of it, shooting more or less continuously, watching the cave fill up with brightly colored candy cubes. People loved it. Bungie, with a tinge of mild embarrassment removed the cave, because while they want people addicted, they don't want people ADDICTED, if you know what I mean. Standing in front of a cave shooting mindlessly for hours is a tad too reminiscent of dead-eyed retirees plunking pensions into slots all night, every night hoping for some kind of transcendence, which in the religious parlance of the area is called "the jackpot" I believe. But here in lies the problem, where Bungie wants to be in bed with the devil, but doesn't want to smell like hell. It's like creating a funpark for heroine addicts with promises of delicious heroine and being surprised when junkies start flipping the tables and screaming about how stingy they are with the needles, or worse, the growing suspicion that this shit is methadone. METHADONE. You don't tell a junkie how much is enough, you know? It's difficult to make money half-assing addiction, because junkies aren't great at moderation by definition.
Not that Bungie won't make a zillion dollars. I believe it cost $500 million human dollars to make and that they more or less recouped that on the first day. And, methadone or not, there's rewards ratios have certainly been strong enough to keep myself and many others playing more than we no doubt intended to. It's a fun game, and sometimes there is candy.
Everybody knows about the Skinner box and operant conditioning. But who doesn't love candy?
Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness by Christopher David Carter
