Is WoW a Skinner Box?

Community General Discussion
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Great reddit response to the question of MMOs being a skinner box. Not mine but I thought that GD could benefit from it.

Depends how you mean it.

Using the term Skinner box as a prejorative is wishful thinking. The best game in the world could be a Skinner box when you boil it down to its fundamentals; it doesn’t really mean anything. If you’re using the term purely analytically to describe the gameplay loop, that’s fine, but if you’re trying to imply anything negative from it, then you’re going to need to explain further. So many people call something a Skinner box because they think it’s a smart way of saying that the game is insubstantial but basically just tricks you into continuing playing, but those claims require justification and don’t follow automatically from something having Skinner-box-like mechanics. At its core, the Skinner box is a learning paradigm, not some inherently manipulative (in the negative sense) psychological ploy.

Likeswise, saying that MMOs “use conditioning” to keep you playing “long after you’ve stopped having fun” is kind of a leap—they’re not intending you to lose interest in the first place. They know their reward structure keeps people playing longer, but as far as they’re concerned that’s because their players are still engaged. It’s awfully presumptuous to assert that these players aren’t having fun anymore, and that they’re just conditioned . Skinner box or not, there’s nothing wrong with a game becoming something comfortable that you just do .

When someone becomes disillusioned with a game or genre, they mistakenly feel like their eyes have suddenly opened and they want to spread their enlightenment with the world. They suddenly feel like anyone who disagrees just hasn’t realized the truth yet. But they’re not enlightened—their preferences just changed, and they’re narrowminded to think no one else can truly be having fun just because they themselves aren’t anymore. These are the people invoking the Skinner box description most often, and I really wish they’d get more creative with their criticisms.

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I think you have to define what “Skinner Box” means, before your post will make any sense.

Because I think you’re talking about a leatherworking profession bag in-game, and it’s kind of confusing.

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I think it’s a shrinks way of calling it a carrot on a stick.

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So Solitaire would be a skinner box?

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ever since they tried to remove flying and implimented that petty vindictive pathfinder and tried to pass it off as a compromise instead of a skinnerian effort to drive players from seeking flying and fool the bean counters.

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Good post.

If you do think of WoW as a pejorative Skinner Box, then you better be willing to examine your real life in the same way.

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The trouble starts when people who are not behavioral psychologists use the term.

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I don’t see WoW as a Skinner Box, at least not more than “complete task, gain reward.”

WoW is more like a Casino. It has flashy lights, pretty sounds, and gives you a reward that they find profitable that you are happy to have.

Unfortunately, over the recent years they seem to be adding more and more “games” to the Casino that do not appeal to me personally.

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A Skinner box refers to a contraption built by the psychologist B.F. Skinner to study the phenomenon called operant conditioning, which is the idea that a behavior will be reinforced if positive consequences result from it, and curtailed if negative consequences result from it. It teaches animals to perform an action (like pressing a button or a lever) in response to specific stimuli (like a light or a sound) by rewarding them for correctly responding to said stimuli, or punishing them if they fail to.

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Stove hot, no touchy, big ouch.

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That statement is kind of a leap.

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https://img.memecdn.com/there-is-no-spoon_o_6416419.jpg

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Yes, it’s a Skinner box.

In WoW, just like in a Skinner box, you get “big” flashy rewards early on for basically doing nearly nothing (rat pushing a button every time, gets treat every time).

Later on, you have to repeat the same basic things to progress, but now it takes hours to get rewards, which are nowhere near as automatic as they were in the beginning (rat pushes button, reward doesn’t come, rat pushes button a million times and randomly a treat comes out).

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But there is. It’s the ‘I’ in “if.”

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Gonna need some example for this to make any sense at all.

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lol This game doesn’t have real punishments.

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I think people need to learn what the hell a skinner box is before throwing that term around.

I’ve actually trained rats to press levers in skinner boxes…

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But, unlike certain attic streamers, I’m not trapped in said box trying to maintain relevancy.

The best way I ever truly stayed with a game was maintaining it with a group of friends. This should be Blizzard’s focus not how can we make this more solo friendly.

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Let’s say you’re a pigeon, and I put you in a Skinner box. Inside the box, there’s a light, a button, and a food dispenser. I want to measure your capacity for learning a new behavior; specifically, I want you to peck the button when I turn the light on. How am I going to do that? I’m going to associate the light with food. Every time you peck the button when the light is on, the food dispenser will spit out some bird seed. You’re a pigeon, you love that stuff.

Here’s basically what’s going to happen. The very first time I put you in the box, you’re going to be very confused. You’re going to see a light and a button and a small gate, but you’re not going to make any sense of it. You’ll experiment with your surroundings, peck the light, peck the button, whatever. Eventually the light will come on, but you won’t know what that means. However, you’ll also eventually peck the button when the light is on, at which point the gate will slide up and bird seed will come out. Hooray! The light is still on, so you go back and peck the button again. More bird seed! Hooray! You love food, so you go back and peck the button… but I’ve turned the light off, so nothing happens.

Here’s what you’ve learned so far: Sometimes, when you peck the button, you get food. You haven’t yet made the association between the light being on and your ability to get food. My hope is that you will. Moreover, my hope is that the response time between me turning on the light and you pecking the button gets shorter and shorter. At that point, it’ll be clear that you’ve associated the light with food, so you’ll perform the appropriate action in order to get it.

It’s a bit simplified, but that’s the gist of how a Skinner box works. It’s a device that allows an experimenter to measure the effects of operant conditioning.

I was referring to an actual Skinner box, which may have a system in place to deliver, say, mild electrical shocks as a deterrent.

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Levels 1-10 are fast, easy, and provide predictable, tangible power increases for little to no effort. DING! DING! DING! Oh, my first green, that’s cool. Etc. You’re pushing the lever, and every time, a treat is coming out.

At level 120, you go to your weekly chest and cry every week, because all the work you did pushing keys was for nothing. And then you go run ICC a million times on your 50 alts for the 0.00005% chance of an Invincible drop.

But you still push the button, again and again and again, because MAYBE THIS TIME the treat will drop, like it did all the time when you were levels 1-10.

That’s literally a Skinner box.