[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[Mike Sellers]

Sean Howard wrote:
> "Mike Sellers" <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:
> > You're confusing two different things.  Behaviorism as a theory (that
> > internal cognitive states are irrelevant to psychological inquiry) has
> > fallen out of favor for very good reasons.  But operant conditioning
> (the
> > companion to classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is *extremely* useful
> > and reliable.
> 
> Operant conditioning... that sounds familiar. I think that's called
> brainwashing.

No... you're joking, right?

> > As above, the question is do we reward them extrinsically for
> > fundamentally un-fun behaviors ("oooh, watch me press the 1 key over and
> > over to 'attack' this thing"), or do we find ways to create situations
> > and player behaviors that are intrinsically rewarding?
> 
> There's that word again... "fun". Is that the only kind of rewarding you
> know? Because I've felt plenty rewarded for simply hanging out with my
> friends watching bad movies and eating pizza, exploring my neighborhood on
> foot, or writing an email. Give me a wall and I'll paint on it. Give me a
> mountain and I'll climb it. Give me a door, and I'll go through it. Give
> me a friend...

I think perhaps you didn't read what I wrote, or didn't understand it.  What
I described as "un-fun" behaviors are set against those that are
intrinsically rewarding.  Here I'm using intrinsically rewarding in a
physio-psycho-social sense.  Not everyone reacts to the same stimuli or
situations in exactly the same ways, but there are strong regularities:
within limits (an important proviso I'm going to leave to the side for now)
we react positively to colors that are sufficiently bright, to shapes or
sounds that occur in patterns, to physical movement, to the proximity of
others, to problems solvable within the span of working memory, and to a
host of other psychological and social situations.  These are the same as
what you describe in your last few sentences above.  

The situations you describe are exemplars of *inherently* rewarding
activities -- a slight superset of those we can "fun."  Activities that are
not fun can still be rewarding, but the rewards must be extrinsic --
expressed in points, dollars, ranks, etc.  And even these rewards are
meaningful only because they refer back to an intrinsic basis.  

My point in this discussion is that games, and MMOs in particular, have come
to rely almost exclusively on extrinsic rewards, conflating activities so
rewarded with those that are *inherently* rewarding, and which thus require
little or no buttressing with extrinsic rewards.  

 
> > To the degree that we can do the latter, we will also reward
> > various forms of socialization, as humans are inherently motivated by
> > positive social interactions.
> 
> Yes, but they don't need to be rewarded for it. The action is its own
> reward. You could hogtie a group of people, blindfold them, stick them in
> the dark, and they will STILL find a way to interact with each other. You
> don't have to reward something that people will dying trying to do anyway.

Exactly my point.  

Last week my family went to an amusement park.  We rode a bunch of rides,
some of them several times.  There was no external, extrinsic reward for
doing so -- we did not accumulate points or move up on a leader board or
something like that.  The activity was so inherently rewarding (fulfilling
physical, psychological, and social motivations) that any such external
reward would have been superfluous.  

How many such activities are found in current MMOs?  

Mike Sellers