Feeling Defeated

[Urthdigger]

Saying the game has too many skinner boxes is not quite the right way to put it. A skinner box rewards the test subject with unconditioned stimulus for performing the conditioned action, and can eventually condition a subject to continue to perform the action even without the stimulus.

Operant conditioning, which is what the skinner box researched, are in fact vital to gameplay. When you learn to play a game, you are essentially being conditioned to perform those actions. This usually occurs first in easier areas, where the benefits of an action are more apparent, and as the player progresses the process doesn't always work, or is not as effective as before, but if properly conditioned they will try anyway, because they know it can work. Long story short, operant conditioning is essential to teaching players how to play a game.

The reason I'm being anal about this is that if we want change, we need to use the right terms. I know what you guys mean when you say a skinner box, but someone unfamiliar with the connotations might think you're asking for less conditioning... and with no conditioning, there would actually be no real game. What you should be asking is for the player to see some sort of reward or progress for victory, rather than entirely luck based mechanics. This gets the point across clearly, and effectively, and shows what we all want. We want to be rewarded for our hard work. We want our stimulus for doing our operation.

[Hulan]

Saying the game has too many skinner boxes is not quite the right way to put it. A skinner box rewards the test subject with unconditioned stimulus for performing the conditioned action, and can eventually condition a subject to continue to perform the action even without the stimulus.

Operant conditioning, which is what the skinner box researched, are in fact vital to gameplay. When you learn to play a game, you are essentially being conditioned to perform those actions. This usually occurs first in easier areas, where the benefits of an action are more apparent, and as the player progresses the process doesn't always work, or is not as effective as before, but if properly conditioned they will try anyway, because they know it can work. Long story short, operant conditioning is essential to teaching players how to play a game.

The reason I'm being anal about this is that if we want change, we need to use the right terms. I know what you guys mean when you say a skinner box, but someone unfamiliar with the connotations might think you're asking for less conditioning... and with no conditioning, there would actually be no real game. What you should be asking is for the player to see some sort of reward or progress for victory, rather than entirely luck based mechanics. This gets the point across clearly, and effectively, and shows what we all want. We want to be rewarded for our hard work. We want our stimulus for doing our operation.

I completely agree, and I should have been more clear. I do not think that the Skinner box is a bad thing (all the time). I do, however, think that they are using the premise behind Skinner's work as a cudgel instead of an instrument - and for completely valid reasons as far as I am concerned. As long as they ween themselves away from black and white operant conditioning with an emphasis on random chance as a motivator in the days following 2.0, I have absolutely no complaints with the current direction.

At most, I was trying to inject a plausible explanation for the large number of pRNG based content into the conversation. And while I admit that psychology is not my field of study (though I do have a friend who does study psychology and often talks about it) content like Ifrit seems to be exactly a Skinner box. If it is not, what is the difference? As I understand it, a Skinner box, or rather the behavior induced by a Skinner box, is characterized by an choice (to try Ifrit one more time) induced by secondary motivators (gear) which has been shown to have the strongest effect when the reward has an element of chance (pRNG).