= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
rysade comments on LessWrong gaming community - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (44)
Sure. The main thing is that, empirically, they tend to hijack peoples' motivational systems by providing fake utility functions and a constant stream of well-tuned rewards, to make them play for many hours. Those are usually hours that could've been spent on something much better. Some formerly-well-adjusted people end up spending a large fraction of their waking hours this way, particularly people who got suckered into setting up social reinforcement for their gaming habits (MMORPG players who meet friends they can only interact with through the game, and Facebook/Zynga game players who constantly receive and generate notifications to and from their friends about the games.) Even if you're only losing a small number of hours, though, video games are dangerous as a procrastination activity because they're immediately available and more tempting than most other procrastination activities, and they're hard to transition back from.
I can say that the 'reward system' is laughably easy to defeat as long as you are aware of it's existence. Hint: the winning move is not to play.
Your typical game based on a reward system will cater to those who are playing the game for the lever, while other games will cater to other other audiences. They are pretty easy to spot.
I consider the primary use of video games to be a kind of virtual sport, with rules for victory, guidelines for possible and impossible actions, etc. Other wonderful uses are as a storytelling medium, a virtual world to explore or exploit, or three dimensional puzzles.
A fairly obvious heuristic, and one that tends to distinguish both Zynga "games" and MMORPGs from more traditional video games, is that the traditional game has a relatively high but fixed upfront cost, whereas the Zynga and MMORPG offerings tend to be cheap to start but require constant infusions of additional funds. The differing incentives for game design are readily apparent.