Atomic Nerds

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.

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