[MUD-Dev] DGN: Reasons for play [was: Emergent Behaviors spawned from...]

[Yggdrasil]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 11:07:50 +0000
cruise  <cruise at casual-tempest.net> wrote:
> Damien Neil spake thusly...

> Can this be down entirely to game design? It seems that xp has
> become like money - intended as a representation of something
> (ability or work done, respectively), but has become the ultimate
> goal.

> Do we need to perhaps think about re-educating players somehow,
> rather than forcibly removing or hiding the xp/levelling? Current
> game-fashion seems to be favouring sandbox-style games, yet might
> it be necessary in some situations to enforce certain gameplay on
> players? It's well known that players make bad game designers -
> but can we say players make bad game /players/ in that they don't
> always know what they'd enjoy when given the option?

Two front points to make first:

  1. Personally speaking, I firmly believe that to some extent, the
  players behaving as described below are behaving as they have been
  trained to behave by the games themselves.

  2. In many ways, I think this list and game developers and game
  researchers and whomever else is involved or might be involved are
  trying and have been trying to answer the question of what fun is,
  which I'm not sure is a definable truth, and I'm pretty sure it's
  not a universal truth.  It's also not a question that other fields
  of research have been able to answer even adequately - ethologists
  are still not certain of the entire constellation of answer for
  why animals (including us) play.  I only mention this because I
  think that the "what is fun" question, while fun in and of itself
  to try to answer ( ;) ), can distract from the more practical
  questions that are more directly in front of us.

Real meat:

  I mentioned this today, briefly, on my site - it's been making a
  new appearance in several readings of mine lately, so it's on the
  brain somewhat, and I'm working on some longer posts pertaining to
  the subject, but I think it's a potentially intriguing thing to
  post here in answer to the below.

  Games are, for all of their nuance (which is less nuance than I
  personally would like to see, but that's another subject), are
  very close to your classic Skinner boxes.  Game systems are almost
  extreme in their representation of behavioralist ideas and ideals,
  dealing almost entirely with inputs and outputs and almost not at
  all with motive or emotion.

  As such it may be relevant to mention a notion that turned
  behavioralism on its head when it made its first appearance in the
  70s.  In fact, it ran so directly counter to the popular theories
  of the day that it was not truly explored until the 80s and 90s.
  Various experiments showed that it may be the termination of
  seeking (or "SEEKING" as Panskepp insists on writing it) behaviors
  itself that "feels like" the reward, rather than the actual
  consummation of the reward.

Several things have been proved by a number of experiments:

  - Seeking behavior increases within proximity of a reward.

  - Termination of seeking behaviors results in behaviors that are
  extremely similar to the behavior of a subject that has just been
  rewarded.

  - Given the opportunity, animals will self-stimulate the seeking
  behaviors *alone,* without the rewards present at all, until
  physical collapse.

It may also be the seeking behaviors that drive the neurological
development of the circuitry that actually teaches us about reward
and punishment.  Furthermore, seeking circuitry is hardly at all
specialized, another fact that astonished the neurological
researchers.  What that means is that while an individual will
prefer to seek certain kinds of stimuli if those stimuli are
available (there are food-seekers, and love-seekers, and
water-seekers, all within any given species), if you remove the
preferred stimuli, not only will those animals switch, readily and
quickly (overnight, as it turns out), *the animals will subsequently
often display a preference for the NEW stimulus if the old one is
returned.*

My point to all of this is that I think we have focused overmuch on
the punishments and rewards and not nearly enough on what triggers
us to "chase" those rewards.  This research may also go some way to
explain why we keep seeking the seeking itself, despite the fact
that nearly everyone expresses dissatisfaction with the rewards
themselves.

I personally believe that we seek to seek, and that in the absence
of other stimuli, seeking the shortest distance is a rewarding
aspect in and of itself.  I just don't think we do a very good job
of offering compelling other stimuli, by which I mean alternate
seeking patterns and ultimate rewards.

I can't really do the subject justice in such a brief post to a
mailing list.  If you're interested, pick up Jaak Panskepp's
Affective Neuroscience, they have it at Amazon.  That's the best
introduction to the research itself, though there are other books I
can recommend as well.

babylona/katie

--
http://www.babylona.org
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