Atomic Nerds

Gamers Crack Protein Folding Problem. The proper journal article is here.

More accurately, this would be titled “clever biochemists induce a population of people who do spatial reasoning puzzles for fun to solve their spatial reasoning problem for entertainment and bragging rights”.

The journal article is worth digging into; if you can read around the biochemistry jargon it’s a pretty interesting description of the approach the group took and in what ways the Foldit players- non-professionals all- were not as good at the top-performing computer models, and in what ways they were better. More interesting yet is the way the researchers directing the whole thing analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of their players- and what they were succeeding and failing at and why- and re-tweaked their presentations of the problems in order to bring out the biggest strengths of their players. As an end result, they wound up solving a problem in three weeks that had been outstanding for ten years.

Even in the paper the researchers credit “human intuition” and “the ingenuity of gamers”, but what I see here is people being given a toy to play with that builds very specific cognitive skills and then being directed- quite skillfully- to sharpen those skills on successive levels of difficulty. All for the pleasures of teamwork, competition, and the sense of accomplishment.

Reminds me of nothing so much as the Calutron Girls, a pool of young women in Oak Ridge, Tennessee hired to operate the electromagnetic uranium separation machines at Y-12 during the Manhattan Project. They explicitly were never told what it was they were doing or why- for national security reasons- but they were able to outperform the PhDs who understood all of it, because their entire skill set was in the process and they practiced constantly.

You learn what you do, no matter why you’re doing it.

Find of the day: there’ll be a talk in November on the subject of cognition and learning in MMOs, by a member of the PopCosmo research group. In the most literal sense it’s taking place in Australia, but since in effect it’s taking place in World of Warcraft within the Ironforge Library on the Saurfang server, the cost of travel is pretty cheap. I plan to be there if I can manage.

The usual reflexive reaction to a research group that studies games, and does so specifically to learn how our approaches to education are working or failing when we get kids who are completely uninterested in school but deeply engaged with games, is to pass it off as a too-hip shallow diversion into something irrelevant and unimportant. Games are games, shiny flashy play and time-wasting, and learning is learning.

The thing is, though, that what game developers are essentially in the business of is making learning such a fun and organic activity that people pay in real money and real time in order to do it. It doesn’t matter how basic the game is, all that any of them offer is a chance to master an activity at progressive levels of difficulty; Tetris is a spatial puzzle that speeds up. You can see rotation of objects through space as a challenge on many, many different IQ tests. Pac-Man is another spatial puzzle- track yourself and several other moving objects through a maze, complete the maze within a time limit and without running into any other moving object. Any of the original simulation genre is complex systems manipulation and mastery, and the flight simulator became so detailed that its devotees can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on equipment and the software to do something that has no game goal but is just as complex and difficult as flying a real plane, minus the g forces and fatal consequences. The later Sims games are a combination of resource management, virtual architecture, and learning how the AI works. Portal is another spatial puzzle, speeded up and with extra dimensions and physics problems added.

MMOs take things to the next level; something like Portal is meant to be played out over a certain number of potential gameplay hours, but an MMO developer has to make the game interesting enough, and content extendable enough, that players remain interested and engaged with the game for years. Depending on the game and the size of playerbase it’s looking to command, there are usually multiple layers of gameplay to learn and potentially master; a developer’s challenge is to make the transition between “kill ten rats, get ten silver” to “level up (gradually increase in complexity)”, to “master your class and take part in competition demanding great knowledge of the game and your role in it, teamwork, practice, and research” fun enough to be worth paying money for- and the fun is in the learning process; even very achievement-oriented players walk away if there’s no challenge to it.

EVE Online is probably the most extreme example; the point of the game is participation in a player-driven economy, which rather than being centrally controlled by the parent company is entirely player-organized and run, to the point where fantastic acts of economic sabotage that nearly any other gaming company would put their foot down on is merely part of the game experience. It’s also the only game with a player-created and elected governing political body, the Council of Stellar Management, which exists to represent the playerbase to the developer team. It is, in essence, a virtual state with virtual corporations and virtual militaries and mercenaries who do what is in nearly all respects work, with the difficulty curve to match and little effort made to make it more accessible to newer or more casual players. The work IS the point of the game. In essence, people pay real money for a non-real job with far fewer protections and benefits than a real job, except for the freedom to experiment.

There are two possible reasons for why this should be a viable and ongoing business model for the game developers:

1) People are inexplicably stupid.
2) The game developers are in the business of making even a very steep and punishing learning curve, covering multiple aspects of cognition and driven by cutthroat real intelligences, appealing and rewarding enough to pay for.

Personally, I’m betting on 2. Play is already a somewhat murky domain; we know that organisms seem to need more of it the more intelligent they get, that it is always self-driven and self-rewarding, that it seems to carry far more risks to it than just leaving well enough alone would, and that it doesn’t solely consist of aping out real-world skills and motions, though it seems to help somewhat. Games in general and MMOs in particular are play gone professional, at least in their creation; developers compete to offer something customers are internally driven to do that takes up a lot of their time and cognitive resources.

I think there is probably a great deal to learn about learning, motivation, and cognition in there, particularly as the process of development and development cycles themselves break down the moving parts in the system, and the way players interact with them, by small pieces.

I will cop to being at LEAST this vengeful when playing. Evidently I’m not the only one either.

The reality of the internet allowing you to participate in multiple different cultures at once without going anywhere or changing your outfit is fantastic, but it does produce some odd effects time from time when you slide from one set of mores and assumptions to another.

Google ads that tailor themselves to what they think the purveyors of the content on the site they live on want to see are a case in point. When the ad on the sidebar or popping up from the text offers to help me BUY GOLD, I need to check the site I’m at and determine if it’s a geek site or a Wookie-suiter site before I can determine whether the gold in question is virtual and farmed by Chinese political dissidents, or metallic and farmed from retirees with low-appraising jewelry.

It’s when the site in question has a foot in both that I may as well just flip a coin, because hell if I’m clicking an ad like that either way. I don’t need a keylogger.

1. Has anyone else been getting a persistent error on all Blogger hosted/platformed blogs wherin opening the comment box gets you nothing but the error message?

2. What the hell, it worked last time, raids running on time make me shameless. Looking for a healer and one or two more DPS. Resto druid or holy pally would be completely ideal, as would hunter or boomkin for DPS, but anything is good outside another rogue/kitty. Raids run 8:45-11:00 server time. Apply within. (There is no actual application as we’re still trying to figure out how to edit the damn thing. Tag an officer.)

3. I knew Rob Liefeld had his laughably bad moments, but I had never fully digested HOW bad until this. Set aside a bit of time as each panel/cover takes a few to fully drink in all the things that are wrong with them. Often my first reaction was something completely other than the author covered, and I found the same was true of friends as I shared them around. Drink it in, folks; the most celebrated comics artist of the nineties, and he can’t cope with anatomy, perspective, hands gripping things, feet, women between the knees and head, or depth. At all.

Sam Keith was so much, much, very much better. Why isn’t HE a fraction as famous?

Work: bad. You know it’s bad when you’re reduced to screaming variants of “CHRISTBALLS WHAT NOW??!!” every time the phone rings.

Play: ironically stressful. (For the Warcrack players among the readership that aren’t already with us, geared ranged DPS that can walk and chew gum, and are potentially willing to hop servers/faction, will be welcomed with big sloppy kisses. Apply within.)

Pets: being a collective furry pain in the ass, probably reflecting the tension back at us.

Blogging: therefore somewhat neglected. Sorry about that. Go here for at least one hearty laugh, which we sorely needed. Be sure to watch the video at the bottom for further and greater laugh. My favorite part is the way the guy freezes, as though being attacked by bees. The rest of the strips are funny too.

Upside: buddy coming down soon. We’ll drink a bathtub appropriately modest amount of gin, eat a bellyful of red meat (love having occasions to bust out that rib roast), and hit the range, which should do us a powerful amount of good.

All right, this one is all about a video game, so if you’re not on board with all this new-fangled clicky-bloopy movin’ pitchers them kids are always on about, come back tomorrow.

Right then. For the rest of you, if you’re not into the survival horror genre, you might want to do the same.

Anybody still here? Besides Pyramid Head? First, put down the internet and go buy a copy of “Alan Wake”. Yeah, it’s a damn good one. Lemme get it out up front, all the criticisms that follow are just picking nits. This game really did not let me down or unduly frustrate me at any point. Overall, the thing was solid from start to finish, and well worth buying or borrowing a copy (I’d advise buy because I’m torn but generally in favor of a sequel, borrow because unless you’re an achievement freak or really interested in one of the in-game mechanics, there’s not much replay value).

The basic jist of things is that you’re an author, with some writer’s block, and a case of the Personal Issues. He and his wife go off on a vacation to an idyllic lake-side town in Bumfuck Nowhere, which is about to celebrate their annual Deer Festival, whereupon the wife-entity is immediately kidnapped by the lurking darkness. No, seriously. Your main enemy is darkness itself, and those possessed by it, and it works really really well. Yahtzee correctly points out that there’s a lot of love for Stephen King in this game, but honestly it’s nowhere near as overpowering as he goes on about. The Twin Peaks/Twilight Zone vibes were much heavier in my opinion, and still executed very well.*

This is a hard one to describe the contents of without veering rapidly into spoiler-land, so let me cover the mechanics side a bit and see if I can come up with a way to say which creepy person is not to be trusted without giving anything away (hint: all of them).

The game is broken up into six chapters, each between two and three hours long. Playing it using those as the starting and stopping points works really very well, and sets it up so you’re basically playing a TV horror mini-series. One that doesn’t care about ratings because if you’re like me you’ll probably spend a shitload of time wandering around looking for ammo and optional items that can get a little monotonous if you’re not me. Alan serves as the narrator, doing so as if he were writing a book, which given the premise works very well. This continues in the combat sections of the game, which can get a touch irritating if you’re just trying to explore an area and not start the generator until you’re sure you’ve found all the ammo and flashlight batteries, but is never too intrusive.

Each episode starts out with some non-combat exposition and exploration, then because it’s a pretty boring game if you just walk around your apartment turning on the coffee pot in a flashback, you wind up for Various Reasons, in the dark in and around Bright Falls, the vacation town in question, armed with various strengths of flashlight and various pieces of weaponry. Once the lights go down, you’re opened up to attack by Taken, local archetypes (and one or two specific individuals as bosses) possessed by the darkness. Dark broadly not liking light, you can slow them down with your flashlight- though it’s not a total stunlock like Yahtzee claims; they will keep coming and will fuck you up- and you must do this for a certain amount of wearing down before they’re killable.

There are various strengths and flavors of these, naturally, and their appearance is usually fairly predictable and handle-able. One thing the game does to heighten tension, and believe me, this game does amazing atmosphere and tension, is yank camera control away from you and go slow-mo if the new baddies are coming in from behind. Unfortunately, the action does not stop while it does this, though it does slow dramatically. Usually that has the effect of “ohshitoshitoshit they’re getting closer let me fight or run or SOMETHING DAMMIT GIMME THE CONTROLS BACK OH GOD I’M GONNA DIE” in a good way, but sometimes it kicks in when they’re too close and you just get your face eaten. The other type of enemy are poltergeists, in which the darkness animates file cabinets, spare tires, wire spools, threshing machines, etc, which then fly through the air at your face and can only be killed sufficient application of light. This led to a few moments of “Dammit! How can a fucking refrigerator be HIDING?!” but again, works very well, especially when combined with regular taken for a cool dodge-fight-duck-beam-bullet-dodge-SHITSHITSHIT experience. The final type of enemy are ravens. Fuck ravens, and that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

Targeting is sort of iffy, but certainly managable. Enemies are anatomically sensitive, if you can manage to hit the right spots. A leg shot will bring one down to get some breathing room, a headshot will kill the lesser taken in one go, but all that hinges on being able to actually make those shots, which is more of an art than a science. I had a good run in episodes three and four of being a surgeon with my default revolver and having a huge surplus of ammo for bigger fights, but then in five and six I was doing good to even hit two shots in a row to the torso.

The combat sections for a whole episode are sometimes stretched out enough to get monotonous and veer somewhat to boring, but more often the individual segments between safe areas with mechanics puzzles are just about the length to give a good relief at finally finishing the segment and having a bit to catch your breath. It’s balanced very well for the impression “No, it’s just some guy from New York, not a hardened combat vet doing this,” although for just some guy from New York he’s pretty damn handy loading a shotgun** and thumbing rounds one at a time into a revolver cylinder. And if I could change a flashlight battery that fast, I’m pretty sure my hands would catch on fire from the air resistance.

So, the story. Well, after the darkness kidnaps your wife, you wake up at an accident scene and have to make it back to town. As you go, you begin finding pages of a manuscript, one which apparently Alan himself wrote, though he has no memory of doing. As you go along, you find more pages of things which are going to happen, mini-spoilers for the game really, but not large enough to hinder the scene they describe when it rolls around. Some are easy to miss (some are damn near impossible to miss, on the flip side of that coin), too, so you don’t necessarily get a complete picture, and some are only findable on the game’s hard mode- that’s the mechanic I mentioned that might really fascinate some people. Pushing on through the combat sections, you find that the town has always been rather weird, and there have been other disappearances in the past, which become extremely relevant later. In the early episodes, if you find yourself asking “Is this foreshadowing something?” the answer is yes. Yes, even that. You’ll see. I can’t really say too much else, except that the rest of the game centers around figuring out where the manuscript came from, finding an end to it, and that finding your wife becomes less important than rescuing her (it’ll make sense when you get to it).

There are no “Press A not to die!” quicktime events, which is a blessing, but some of the combat can lean a little that way, leading to the aforementioned “Just some guy from New York” mechanic having slower than ideal reflexes and cries of “I SAID DUCK YOU STUPID YANKEE SHIT” and the like. If you’re better at these games than I am, it probably won’t even be a problem.

The writing in this game is very solid. Alan is very much a somewhat-to-largely self-absorbed famous author, who really does love his wife. And the townfolk are all very convincing small town characters who’ve known everyone and everything in the town for decades. The moments where the dialog seems forced or unbelievable are few and far between, and just about every conversation has at least one little thing that will make Just. One. More. hair stand up on the back of your neck until your hackles are all the way up and you didn’t even realize it. A lot of the tension is built slowly enough that I found myself a couple times standing in the well-lit safe zone at a checkpoint telling the TV screen “Y’know what, no. Fuck your ideas, I’m staying right here until morning, and you can’t do a damn thing about it!”

Then the light bulb broke.

*The obligatory “I hate everything” style he’s cultivated harps that the game name-drops Stephen King OMG FOUR TIMES! He doesn’t mention all the shout-outs to Raymond Chandler, James Joyce, etc. Yeah, there’s a lot of King in this, but until he started sucking, he defined a lot of the tropes as tropes for a reason.
**There’s an achievement for killing 50 taken with the shotgun. The achievement text is “Now 50 Taken know it’s not just a typewriter too.” I laughed, hard.

I realize these posts are of interest to a relatively narrow slice of our readership, but the subject sure as hell is interesting to me, and I’ve been stuck running around all day and this is the most interesting thing I’ve found, so there you go.

I’ve found a fascinating group blog linked to an ongoing longitudinal research project by a group of social psychologists studying the social dynamics of online MMOs using World of Warcraft, which directly addresses a lot of the questions and curiosities I’ve had about the demographics of the game and why people play the way they do, particularly the choices they make in character and activity. With twelve million players in that game alone and growing, social patterns become more and more interesting to me.

To make the post somewhat more comprehensible to non-gamers, a brief lexicon. Some of these are local terms to WoW, but most of them represent concepts common to most MMORPGs even if the local terminology varies.

DPS = damage dealer/damage dealing. The term itself stands for “damage per second”, the metric by which players in that role are measured, but has come to stand in for the role itself, at least in WoW.

Tank = Damage soaker. Players filling this role have to get and keep the attention of the monsters and absorb, avoid, or mitigate the force of attack. Usually a heavily armored melee class, though some games have some other tank models based more around total avoidance.

Healer = Exactly what it says on the tin. These players make health bars full or stop them from going down in the first place.

Melee = DPS that does their job at close range, the alternative being ranged DPS.

Guild = alliance of player characters sharing a common chat channel, resource bank, and calendar. Various forms of these are found in nearly all such games, be they guilds, linkshells, corps, or other. Often also have a Ventrilo or Mumble server/channel for voice communication.

Main = the character an individual player considers their first priority and plays the most. Nowadays in most games leveling is fun and easy enough more players have more than one character than don’t.

Alt = any character “alternative” to a player’s main. Varies from other characters played for the sheer fun of it to banking or crafting mules.

Mob = hostile non-player character or monster. The mob is what you’re aiming to kill. Term dates back to DikuMUD, where it was short for “mobile”.

Dungeon = instanced (each instance a group enters is temporarily its own world rather than part of the shared overworld) encounters involving small groups of players clearing mobs and taking down bosses. The most basic unit of group play.

Raid = group of players ranging from 10, 25, 40 people gathered together to defeat game content tuned to be impossible without everyone knowing their job and a high degree of coordination. Other than PvP and just generally having someone to talk to, the main reason guilds are formed.

PvP = Player versus Player. Activities organized around fighting other players, whether in complicated ruled games or straight one on one gladiatorial matches. As distinguished from PvE, Player versus Environment, which raids and dungeons are.

The upshot of the current PlayOn study is that, rather than taking data strictly mined from the characters actually in the game- which is pretty easy to do if you have some search engine skill, and in the original study was accomplished with census bots- it connects individual players with a large amount of real-world data on age, gender, country, and personality survey with their characters and tracks them that way. There are several different types of findings presented, though there’s on the whole more posts about gender differences than age or region differences… though there are evidently some fairly significant gender differences between regions. Since, like I said above, I have limited time tonight, this will be more a scattershot selection and commentary on some of the more interesting findings than a serious analysis.

Average age: Thirty years old. Not surprising, and probably fits in with my theory about the generation that were children when home video game consoles became widely available is also the generation playing the most games now. What’s a little more interesting is that the Hong Kong and Taiwan cohort is dragging that average age down some- they’re significantly younger on average than the Americans. They also log a lot more hours.

Gender demographics: Roughly a quarter of WoW players are women, though I’ve seen higher figures. Seems to be trending upward more over time, though male players are the very solid majority and their gamer culture tends to reflect that. I’ve also seen, at least in my experience, that female players tend to form alliances and centers of density on servers- some guilds are either all-female, majority female, or at the least have a much higher proportion than represented in the game demographics over all, whereas being “the girl” in other guilds is inherently cause for drama. Lot of self-selecting assortment going on here, I suspect.

Gender bending: Of players using characters opposite their actual gender, they are almost all men, and they are mostly the older men, which is interesting to me. The big majority of male players has the most to do with that “almost all men” thing, but by proportion they’re still three to four times more likely to roll a female character than women are to roll a male character. The biggest going theory is the “nice butt” one- to paraphrase, men are the more likely to decide that if they’re going to be chasing around an animated backside for awhile, it might as well be hers rather than his. I suppose the “older” thing is probably due to older men being more secure in their masculinity than younger ones and therefore less likely to feel they necessarily need to be represented by a bristling slab of beef.

The in-game stereotype is that all female characters are men. (And, in fact, that all players are, though that’s mostly running gag by now.) Apparently by the numbers, if you meet a female avatar, she’s 55% likely to be played by a man.

I’m more interested in why so many fewer women choose to play male characters. Do women identify more with their characters than men do? Do they just have an aversion to not being a “pretty” character? They find the male models just flat uglier to look at in general?

Player role: The in-game stereotype is this: men tank, women heal. There are fewer stereotypes for what the DPS do, but when the game zeitgeist as a whole admits that women play, it generally assumes that the actual chick is the priest back there in the robes healing the group.

What it turns out the data actually breaks down to is this: men tank (three to four times more often than women do), men and women heal, men play melee DPS, and women play ranged DPS. There’s a significant regional difference, though- if you’re in Hong Kong or Taiwan, the stereotype IS true and by proportion rather than raw numbers, more women heal than men. If you’re in America, healing is an equal-opportunity role and men and women choose to do it just as often. American men like to melee more than Hong Kong and Taiwanese men, and American women like to tank more than Hong Kong and Taiwanese women (though it’s a tiny proportion of both groups of women overall). More American women like to melee than the Pacific women, to the point where American female melee outnumber American female healers, but Hong Kong and Taiwanese women have a huge majority of healers over melee. In both regions, female players overall would really prefer to be standing in back slinging pain over anything else. The stereotype shouldn’t be “the priest, that’s the chick”, but “the hunter, that’s the chick”, apparently.

I suspect a combination of gender role and the kinds of fantasy role models men, women, boys, and girls are given has the most to do with this. I’m not intimately familiar with Hong Kong and Taiwanese gender dynamics, but my overall impression is that gender roles are a fair bit more rigid there than they are in the US; women heal more there because it’s by far the closest offered role to what a woman is supposed to fill out in fantasy that doesn’t threaten any traditional notions of gender role. It’s also possible I’ve just gotten southeast Asian gamer culture horrendously wrong and it’s actually because healing is a prestigious role that offers the most obvious path for achievement for female gamers- the Hong Kong and Taiwanese gamers are also much more achievement-oriented than the Americans.

As a general rule in an RPG or traditional high fantasy story or movie, if you have a woman in the party- and you usually do- she’s one of two things; either the nurturing cleric, or the roguish and faintly wicked sorceress, with an occasional option for ranger. (There is an obligatory scene where she takes off her hood and you realize it’s not a skinny guy.) The character in the heavy plate charging in not caring if they get hit and relishing in being in the middle of the things is nearly always male, and if it’s a female character taking a role vengeful or psycho enough to be in-your-face, it’s usually as a more roguelike character than a warriorlike one.

I can’t say I’m surprised that most women overall, given a choice between the standard two “womens'” roles in fantasy fiction, go for the damage dealer over the cleric. It was usually a choice between a nauseating passive-aggressive martyr and her much more fun counterpart…

PvP: The only finding released so far is for arena battles, which are matches between teams of 2, 3, or 5 players. Last team with a member still standing wins. It’s the most intensely competitive environment for PvP. By age, younger players are far more likely to have tried arenas, but age made no difference in whether or not players chose to stick with it. Lots more men play arenas regularly than women, but American women are more likely to be regular arena players than Hong Kong or Taiwanese women. BUT… by win ratio, American men win significantly more often than American women- while Hong Kong and Taiwanese women win no more or less often than their male counterparts. So the women I just painted as potentially being gender-conforming delicate butterflies above, are gonna kill ya. That might be the effect of the greater achievement drive in the Hong Kong and Taiwanese players I mentioned earlier- a greater ethos of “if you’re going to play, play to win.”

I will be very interested to see what further findings come out of this project, and one or two of you readers may even be too.

Friend Peter (who understands fully that this is nothing personal, love and kisses and Van der Hum) has posted an article and commentary that is profoundly alarmed to discover that computer games employ the sinister principles of… operant conditioning. It is very, very alarmed to discover that the principle of variable reinforcement is being deliberately designed in to computer games, that this is the same principle that makes slot machines appealing, and therefore games might actually be addictive. Gosh.

The problem with this premise is that operant conditioning in general, and variable reinforcement in particular, aren’t so much sinister hacks to the human psyche that cause dysfunction as they are basic principles of how organisms learn, particularly mammals. Variable reinforcement works because it encourages us to persist in tasks that we may fail at and to deal with a certain amount of environmental randomness; without this particular feature, foraging behavior would essentially be a non-starter. Even with this built into us at an extremely basic level as a feature of behavior, foraging animals don’t spend all their time foraging; other mechanisms related to that same complex of learning behavior kick in to discourage it, like exhaustion, satiation, and boredom. Likewise, animals don’t spend all their time seeking mates (no matter what a few wild-eyed evo-psych devotees would have you believe), playing, or otherwise engaging in rewarding or potentially rewarding activities.

The article mentions an experiment that is a classic in behavioral psychology because it serves as proof of principle and has been a classic in alarmist circles of varying flavor ever since, which is the discovery that if you give a rat a lever to press that might or might not reward it with a food pellet, it will become obsessive about pressing the lever. It’s a beautiful demonstration of the power of variable reinforcement, but it doesn’t translate to a 1:1 effect in the real world. The key point understand about the experiment, and the reason it’s proof of principle rather than a demonstration of a universal effect of food pellets and levers, is that the rat has nothing else whatsoever to do with its time. It can’t work for its food other than by pressing the lever, water and bedding and potentially mates are all provided for it with no relation to anything it does.

Rats are popular laboratory subjects for behavioral psychology precisely because they are very intelligent and social animals, by rodent standards; a normal wild rat is a generalist predator with a socially and behaviorally complex life. A laboratory rat spends most of its time bored out of its ratty little skull, which is why it’s so easy to get them to perform behaviors by tugging on various aspects of operant conditioning; the question isn’t “what will the rat choose to do” so much as it is “will the rat choose to do this over the option of not wasting any energy whatsoever”. Another factor complicating how the results of the study should be read is the large body of research conducted subsequently in stress and (yet more) learning behaviors- it turns out that organisms have a massive bias to being in any way in control of events, in interpreting outcomes, in choosing behaviors, and in coping with stress. Not only is the rat obsessive about pressing the lever because variable reinforcement works, it’s obsessive about pressing the lever because that is the one and only event in its life it has any control over whatsoever- which is probably also giving it a lot of stress relief*.

Dog trainers know the principle of variable reinforcement, which is why it’s good advice when training a behavior to start varying the timing and size of the proffered reward so the dog doesn’t start treating you like a vending machine and declining to perform the behavior whenever it’s not powerfully in the mood for the reward. They also know that variable reinforcement is far from enough; it helps maintain interest, but the dog may still decline the behavior if it has anything at all more interesting to do, if it’s simply not in the mood to pay attention to you, is bored with the exercise, or any other of a dozen reasons. (This is where other principles of dog training come in, like “I am your leader and what I tell you to do is not optional“, for behaviors that are already learned but the dog may be tempted for a host of reasons to blow off.) Variable reinforcement helps encourage behavior and encourage learning, but it’s far from compelling, let alone addictive. It’s just one of many principles of conditioning- or, in everyday human language rather than technical terminology, learning.

Do game designers deliberately manipulate the principles of operant conditioning? Absolutely, and some companies actually have psychologists employed for exactly that purpose. They also do it on a far more sophisticated level than the alarmist article suggests- someone with a good working knowledge of behavioral psychology can see a broad variety of techniques, patterns, and principles employed, and can also see through phases of redesign how developers put more pressure on one area or lighten it on another. Of course, someone with a good working knowledge of behavioral psychology can also see this done (or not done, and how it’s failing) in corporations developing and adjusting a management culture, teachers in a classroom, a sports team trying to have a winning season, and for that matter the structure and tenets of major religions. Behavioral psychology isn’t a way to hack humans, it’s simply a good thing to know if you want to work successfully with them. Games only stand out because the designers are in the unique position of having to design a reward system that people pay them in money and time for that gives no concrete currency. (Unless, of course, you’re a gold farmer…)

On a personal note, I find the whole phenomenon of alarmism over video games (or television, and believe it or not radio and even theater got exactly the same response in their respective times) and how they’re going to addict us and corrupt our personalities kind of bitterly amusing not just because I’m a gamer, but because I was and am an avid reader. Sure, I get all sorts of benefit from reading nonfiction and you could even conjure some from the fiction, but at the end of the day I don’t read because it’s good for me, I do it because it’s fun for me and rewarding in that operant sort of way. Finding a particularly good turn of phrase, an unexpectedly good story, a new author whose words sing for me- all of these are powerful variable-reinforcement rewards. I even had a problem with it when I was a kid; I’d blow off my homework to read a book that held my interest more, even get caught in class reading because the lesson was boring (or unpleasant) and I’d snuck in a novel. Everyone treated this as an adorable phase because everyone “knows” reading is good for children, but the truth was I was absolutely using it as an escape and socially isolating myself in the process. Now I’m an adult, much better adjusted with a much more active social life, and my gaming hobby- which is partly responsible for that greater sociability- could ruin my life! Horrors.

Now for the bit of Peter’s post I agree with:

In counseling situations, I’ve frequently encountered individuals who were socially dysfunctional, their relationships deteriorating or collapsed altogether, because of the time they devoted to computer games, either stand-alone or online. Of course, some would argue that they were dysfunctional to begin with, and their use of computer games was thus a symptom, rather than the disease itself. That may or may not be true . . . but what I think is true is that computer games will aggravate any tendencies like that.

Well yeah, it will, and if you know you have problems with time management or something to escape from, then absolutely you should not pick up an immersive game. Neither should you drink, and neither should you gamble, or party, or do anything else you have major difficulty walking away from. Not everybody with an addictive personality will latch onto the same sorts of things, they all tend to have their own individual poisons, but an easy reward mechanism is an easy and destructive way to self-medicate when you’re in psychological trouble- or, like the rat in the cage with nothing but a lever, nothing else in your life is rewarding.

All that said, I’ve got to say I find alarmism about operant conditioning and the power of variable reinforcement coming from a blogger, who is in the business of constantly trawling the web looking for something in the sea of noise worth thinking or writing about… as pure a self-designed variable reinforcement mechanism as I can conceive of… just a little bit ironic.

With all love, of course.

*Fun fact that has nothing to do with the subject of this post: stress research as a field in psychology was pioneered by a psychology researcher named Hans Selye when he observed that his population of rats in an experiment were experiencing markedly different changes, but in ways completely unrelated to the variable he was attempting to test. He managed to make the connection that the changed rats were the ones that weren’t as docile for handling that, since he was a bit of a klutz, often escaped and had to be chased down to get the injections involved in his current experiment. The bad handling and chases were stressing them out and that was a much bigger variable than the one he was testing.

Title of article: Avid Online Role-Players Do Not Fit Stereotypes

The content of the article, describing data gleaned from Sony’s sharing of demographic game data and recruitment of players by treating the survey as an in-game event, boils down to “online gamers’ demographics roughly match general population”. Most players are adults in their thirties rather than kids, most are about as fit or not as the population generally rather than all being hideously overweight, most are pretty much functional Americans.

Which, if you treat gaming as any other popular hobby rather than a mysterious phenomenon akin to a bizarre technology cult or pixel-delivered drug, is absolutely to be expected.

Why are most online gamers in their early thirties? Because they are the same generation that grew up when home video game consoles became advanced enough and cheap enough to be popular. They’re playing now because they’ve been playing their whole lives, and the age games were marketed to rose as they grew up because there was no reason to stop as long as there was still appropriate entertainment available.

Why do the older players and the women play more and longer than the adolescents and the college students? Because online gaming is an ideal hobby for a parent with a young child. Once the kid or kids go to bed or down for a nap or settle in with a kids’ movie, you can’t leave the house, but you ARE left largely to your own devices for entertainment- but an online game presents you with the opportunity to spend the evening hanging out with adult friends while still being available to step away the moment your kid needs you. It’s also a much more compartmentalized life- a student has homework, but the average adult leaves work at work and is more free to choose what to do with their time when work is over.

Why are there somewhat more mentally ill people but paradoxically lower levels of anxiety among the gamer population as a whole? Because gaming offers an environment that is predictable and controllable- which are two factors that have a massive lever effect on our stress levels. As the article notes, it’s a good way to self-medicate whether your stress levels are normal or pathological.

Why aren’t they all fatties? Because people play games because they’re fun and not because they’re actually addictive in the way that we understand addiction to operate; they’re able to walk away from the keyboard and choose to do something else in the same way gun nuts are able to walk off the range, birdwatchers are able to come inside, and bowlers are able to walk away from the lanes.

Why isn’t research that treats gaming as a normal hobby that operates in patterns non-unique to video games but shared with other leisure activities more common? If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably because the people with tenure are largely older than the generation that grew up with a Nintendo pad in their hands. Expect this to change.