[MUD-Dev] Are gratification-based (online) societies doomed to being immatu re?

[Sasha Hart]

[Shren]

> What a lot of players miss is that the medium and the system has a
> huge effect on who they are in the online world.  Certain
> behaviors are rewarded, and all other behaviors are punished
> simply by not being rewarding.

To be a little persnickety.. technically they're not being punished.
Yes, in the sense of reduced in probability by competition - No, in
that the effects differ comprehensively (This is the kind of jargon
difficulty which leads to the often equally confusing usage of
"reinforcement," "positive reinforcement," "negative
reinforcement..."  it's sisyphean because most of us translate
"reinforcement" to "reward" anyway.)

With regard to reward/punishment - same end, different side effects.
Punishment suppresses behavior fast but causes other behaviors to
pop up which are often very bad. You can increase misbehavior by
actively punishing in ways which would be controllable by
rewards. You can easily drive people away from the game by punishing
them. Think electric shocks ;) Basically, you can get some behavior
by pulling you can't get by pushing, and vice versa. This is the
cause of all kinds of argument among dog trainers. But it is
asymmetric because once the player leaves, what else he does is moot
to the game. For the same reason, when your dog is bad and you want
to punish him, you'll be better off if you don't call him to punish
him (and then punish "come").

  (I hope no one finds the comparison offensive - that people keep
  track of what is bad and good for them, just as dogs do, doesn't
  make them stupid, but speaks to their capability. I remember Ola
  reacting quite violently to the comparison between rats and people
  - though rats are an extraordinarily successful species, hard
  workers and fast learners, even if they are only rats to us. So I
  don't mean to say here that players are idiots in the same way
  that dogs are.)

I might add a third, which is neutrally valued feedback which gives
information. If I learn early on that NPCs don't react to anything I
say, then it seems like I'll be a lot less likely to assume (all
else being equal) that if I am punished after talking to an NPC, it
was related to the NPC. Likewise, if I learn in the first 5 minutes
that they seem to respond really well, I might spend the next 5
treating them as human beings, or probing for their prominent
departures from humanity. Rats aren't that stupid either, for the
things they are made for - they'll learn the layout of a maze well
even if they is just wandering around it without food reward, this
learning is exhibited for food reward later but at the time of the
learning he wasn't being rewarded or prodded in a pavlovian sense.

Whether or not this boils down to a complex system of associations
is just technical nitty-gritty - for the present purposes it's worth
saying that players' behavior in the game is also shaped by the
models they have of the real world and the game world. Arguably this
aspect is somewhat less understood but I think quite evident anyway.

> I really think that the game enviornment shaped the way he
> behaved.  All of the little rules that add up to a rules-set
> encourage us to act one way, discouage us to act another, and the
> little changes add up to a big difference in the way people act -
> fundamentally, who thier characters turn out to be in an online
> world.  Just like you can't really analyze a person independantly
> of thier cultural enviornment, you can't analyze the way a person
> acts in a MUD independantly of each individual MUD.

This is so spot on it's not even funny.

For the benefit of people who don't care about the technical
nitty-gritty, it is worth thinking also about the influence produced
by how the game and its parts are framed and understood, what they
mean, etc. If you make a game in which you get points for beating
prostitutes to death with a lead pipe (Kingpin) - you don't just
reward that and competitively decrease slightly some other behavior,
but you change the way players explore, you change _how_ they
achieve the ends which get them rewards or escape the ends which get
them punishments... even their interaction. if you wanted to, you
could say that all of these influences on behavior together build up
a social system, a culture of that game.

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