[MUD-Dev] Finding What a Gamer Lacks in Their Day

[Sasha Hart]

<EdNote: Please ensure you keep the attributions.  I added this one.
Please don't rely on me to do that>

On Sun, 3 Feb 2002 18:22:56 -0800 
John Buehler <johnbue at msn.com> wrote:

> So lacking a perfect function that can translate between oberved
> behaviors and actual needs, this entire thought experiment is
> fundamentally flawed?  I don't buy that for a moment.

If you look at it as a thought experiment, then I apologize.  It
sounded exactly like you were in fact making a strong claim, which
could be interpreted as

  A) an (unsupportable given the mountains of work on the topic)
  assertion that all behaviors are controlled exclusively by
  scarcity (of something)

  B) an untestable assertion that all behaviors necessarily are
  driven by scarcity, such that it is impossible to find any
  behavior otherwise - in essence, a post hoc device for
  "explaining" phenomena after the fact, rather than predicting or
  changing them.

There is always

  C) A more complicated, but testable, assertion about how behavior
  works that is founded on some concept of what need is that you
  have not elaborated.  Maybe some variation on the theme of the
  Premack principle?

For starters, you might qualify your statement somewhat: I think you
are probably talking about "motivated" or "voluntary" behavior,
rather than all behavior (e.g. sneezing.)  You might even be talking
about a subset of this behavior, rather than all of it; that would
certainly reduce the needs of your theory to some loose observation,
rather than perfect accounting for every datum.

You might also explain just a few of the findings which most of us
find ordinary, but become unusual in a framework which gives primacy
to scarcity: there are about a million of them, and many are quite
simple and robust. E.g., rats preferring sweet saccharine to bitter
quinine completely regardless of how much quinine (or bitter things,
or nasty things) they have had recently.

This might be done by saying that there is no need for bitterness,
but there may be a need for sweetness.  (Although, by itself this
would not be much more helpful than simply saying that rats tend to
choose sweet things over bitter, a literal description of the
finding.) You would want to account also for the failures of
scarcity manipulations to exert perfect or even overwhelming control
over the consumption of sweets, rather than the modest control it
does exhibit (e.g. sweet preference may go down slightly after a
little bit of drinking/eating, more with satiety, but will spring
back again pretty rapidly to a relatively fixed level - it isn't as
if forty years without sugar, followed by its availability, would
result in the eating of an amount of sugar proportional to forty
years.)

> To postulate that our behaviors are a result of a desire for
> stimulus is a perfectly valuable working theory, despite the fact
> that we cannot perfectly observe behaviors.

If I am wrong about what this working theory predicts, (e.g. one
factor determines behavior - scarcity of something - and thereby we
expect to see no noise and no variation as a function of anything
else), then it would help if you spelled out what it does predict.
Even if this takes the form of more elaborate rules about what needs
exist, and how they interact to produce mind-bogglingly complex
behavior.

Otherwise, I don't have any reason (as I would love to) to think
that this theory is anything but a post hoc "explanatory" device,
which makes behavior seem simple, even though the wielder of the
theory doesn't have any better ability to predict than the next guy.

> I'm supplying a working theory, not a proof.  I leave it to others
> to look at the world around them to see if their observations
> match this theory.

That's fine, but to be a practical theory it needs to be testable
*in principle*. This boils down to making at least somewhat definite
predictions that could at least approximately be tested against the
real world (nothing about perfect observation here; rough-and-ready
backyard experimentation will qualify, as long as it is
experimentation and not after the fact explanation.)
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