This is Your Brain on Video Games
With the uber-creepy news that a Korean couple let their real baby starve to death at home while they obsessively tended to their virtual child on Second Life in an Internet Cafe, it’s perhaps time to revisit the subject of video game addiction.
This article by one of the top game designers at Microsoft argues that addictive game design is basically about seeing players as rats in a Skinner Box.
Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players.
Gaming has changed. It used to be that once they sold us a $50 game, they didn’t particularly care how long we played. The big thing was making sure we liked it enough to buy the next one. But the industry is moving toward subscription-based games like MMO’s that need the subject to keep playing–and paying–until the sun goes supernova.
Now, there’s no way they can create enough exploration or story to keep you playing for thousands of hours, so they had to change the mechanics of the game, so players would instead keep doing the same actions over and over and over, whether they liked it or not. So game developers turned to Skinner’s techniques.
This is a big source of controversy in the world of game design right now. Braid creator Jonathan Blow said Skinnerian game mechanics are a form of “exploitation.” It’s not that these games can’t be fun. But they’re designed to keep gamers subscribing during the periods when it’s not fun, locking them into a repetitive slog using Skinner’s manipulative system of carefully scheduled rewards.
One wonders about people playing for 8 hours a day for virtual food pellets dropped into their skinner box, but as Frontline’s Digital Nation has shown, there are a lot of folks whose virtual lives may be more interesting that their real lives.My guess is that as true Highband proliferates in the U.S., we may be having more conversations about setting up game addiction clinics like they have in Korea.
There’s food, and then there’s junk food. The one keeps you alive, the other will choke your system to death.
I had a girlfiend, way back when, whose social conscience drove her to volunteer at a place called “The Lighthouse.” Which is where a slightly more prosperous-feeling, minutely kinder and gentler pre-Nee society housed young bodies (they never lived to be much past mid-teens, physical age) of “humans manque,” born with a brain stem and part of a cerebellum, let’s say, but nothing of the “higher” functions. Life in diapers, or as nicer nurses say, “briefs,” hand- or tube-fed.
And what did these bodies do all day, all night MaryAnn? Masturbate, to the point that one of the pricipal medical challenges was to try to stay ahead of the skin breakdown at the pertinent points.
Who’s gonna clean up the shitandpiss from this new crop of functionally anencephalic cretins (page on down the link to “Archaic Terms” before going all politically correct on me)? And gee, if these brain parasites, reminiscent of that thing they stuck in Sulu’s ear in “Star-Trek/Kahn,” was it? are going to make money off the mentally ill by sucking out their gray matter and replacing it with Skinnerisms, how are they going to find anyone able to pay for the joystick jerk-offing fun and games?
Just asking.
Is this an investment opportunity?
Young ladies be careful what you wish for. I work in a small town library. We have quite a few computer stations for the public. I get a kick out of watching teen girls hang on the arm of their boy friend while he plays a video game and ignores them. Soon they will be sucked in. I also have worked with a couple young ladies who complained all the time that their newly wed husband did nothing at home but play video games. Yep the habit goes on and relationships are in danger.
The games have been perfect training for the drone aircraft pilots who feel nothing except elation when they hit that red button and, as we say, “blow shit up.” Kids at weddings? Just “collateral damage”…no big deal.
Just a little something for any of you folks who think it is “inappropriate” to apply “the law” to Cheney and the rest of the folks who did what they did:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/03/09/waterboarding_for_dummies/index.html
I picked this off Yglesias’s blog, which ends up,
“The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:
“NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”
There’s a book called “Auschwitz.” Gee, I wonder if the kids would read it before, or after, fucking over avatars of their fellow humans, and whether it would just be good for a laugh…
Fucking stupid MEAN humans…
As has been pointed out before on this blog, there is no new news about games and applying behavioral science other than the fact that the game industry is starting to fess up to it. Otherwise, user interface design varies only by degree in any system. Don’t believe it? Try to consistently push the brake pedal in your car with your left foot while driving.
Obama’s campaign advisors applied exactly the same thing to the last campaign. Now the country is starving while Rahm Emmanuel and Nancy Pelosi try to raise a virtual President. Where is that brake pedal?
And this is your brain on YouTube:
? How the younger see the older? BACK OFF!</ a
? How the older see the younger? SHUT!
See, it’s all just good clean fun — “You want some a this? I still got a right…”
I still play video games. Sometimes I go for long stretches without playing, then I get back into it. I got an XBox 360 back in November and started playing Halo online. I’ve enjoyed playing the game by myself for years, but I burned out on that. For the past several months, I’ve had fun, and gotten some stress relief, playing online against other people. I’ve made friends with a group of other, non-crazy, older guys and we can have a lot of fun together. Mostly laughing about how badly we did, occasionally celebrating when we go up against a group of rookies and do well.
Yes, as Jon points out, the nature of the games is changing. I doubt that I’ll ever buy another console, because they want to use consoles to track and watch and follow you, and sell you crap during the game, and only give you that “reward” if you’re willing to be nickeled-and-dimed to death. I can only accept a certain level of stupidity and then I won’t go any further. Plus, without question, they are crafting the games to be increasingly sadistic and mean-spirited, like getting points for doing hookers and then shooting them. Weird. Ugly. Awful.
But to be honest, what bothers me the most is the way people talk to each other in these games. The large majority, 90% or more, either say nothing, or they’re just friendly, or at least normal and non-crazy. (Good-natured trash-talking included in this category.)
But there is a significant number of people you run into who spew racist, sexist, homophobic garbage of the most vile sort. I’m not easily offended. I’m talking about people describing in extreme detail what they plan to do with certain body parts to certain body parts, or exactly how they plan to extinguish the life of “all you [expletives]” with rusty knives or battery acid or whatever. As soon as a game “room” opens, they leap onto their microphones and start ranting this stuff out.
I would suggest that this is the terminal point of the tribal state of affairs in America. “Socialist Obama” with a mustache mutates into this weird, brain-dead ranting. But whatever the source, I’ve found that, to play the game, I frequently need to turn my headset off, or at least be ready to dial down the volume when one or two of these cretins appear.
I just can’t imagine what it must be like to be black, or gay, or female, and listen to this crap.
A thought just occurred to me. Another sign of the zeitgeist. I’ve heard just a very, very few remarks of the “towelhead” variety, even when a player name indicates a Middle Eastern origin. None about Hispanics. The racist rants are focused on black people. That’s where the hate is directed.
One other brief, and amusing, observation. Whenever someone speaks in a foreign langauge, you can count on somebody saying, “This is AMERICA, speak ENGLISH.” Apparently they don’t understand that the internet extends outside of US borders.
Jon,
50 Mbps UPSTREAM is silly. It is boondoggle. 99.999% of America doesn’t now and wouldn’t have anything to use it for.
IF you really want to get on the tech edge, really champion something meaningful early, we need to forget TCP/IP as the transport protocol and move towards some LDPC codes…. basically error recoverable UDP.
This one change achieves NEAR LINE SPEED which has a magnificent effect on the actual surfing experience.
I’ll say it again, there’s basically nothing my grandma or you would do in your own home that someone else needs to see 50Mbps worth of.
Also, Net Neutrality is a very very bad thing.
“It is boondoggle. 99.999% of America doesn’t now and wouldn’t have anything to use it for.”
Is that really Mr. Free Market speaking? You’re going to decide what bandwidth everybody “needs”? Shades of Karl Marx! Did I really read that right?
The whole PC bang (public gaming rooms) phenomena in South Korea is fascinating. They are generally filled with young men who spend whatever free time they have playing online games, usually Starcraft, and just hanging out. South Korean culture is intensely collectivist and competition is a way of life. I have 5th graders who spend hours on end in the PC bangs and they show little interest in anything else except watching tv. Fueled on junk food and canned coffee (weird stuff) some actually hope to make it to the professional level such as that of Lee Ji-hum who makes over $100,000 a year. This is one crazy country. As for the racist comments, I can only guess they are South Koreans making them. Waygooks (foreigners) are low on the pecking order in this Confucian state, but blacks are at the bottom of the heap. Even though we have the highest broadband penetration in the world (I love my rural internet connection) young people still feel the need to congregate in the relative safety of a PC Bang and away from the constriction of the family. What bothers me most about the story that started this discussion is the lack of much discussion about it in the South Korean social media.
I forgot to add – great Wikipedia article that gives you an idea of the intensity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_professional_competition
Dan,
The market decides what everybody needs, not Jon (thus my point). As soon as a client side application can make use of 50Mbps and people want it – the pipe will accommodate them.
Again, I had a pretty good insider view at Kazaa, and the truth of the thing was how little demand there was across the WAN.
Imagine that there are 100K songs that everyone is searching for 99.9% of the time.
P2P’s original form required a Napster like model, because everyone only had 20 songs a piece. So you needed a central server to run a directory of who had what. They turned off the server, Napster went kaput.
Kazaa was able to exist because the average collection of mp3s was so massive, that your search request only had to be passed along through one of two supernodes, before you found the IP with the song. Even then, MOST of Kazaa’s traffic:
1. was local – you were likely getting everything not just from inside your city, but likely from inside your local headend. So telco’s and cable could show TONS of traffic on graphs, but in fact they didn’t have to pay for any of it, because none of it ever left their “LAN.”
2. was search calls. tons and tons of traffic was essentially worthless pings, saying “got this?” “got this?” Meaning much of the traffic wasn’t even file transfers.
—–
Again, when you weed out P2P, it becomes really hard to invent / imagine applications that even use a couple of Mbps UPSTREAM.
I mean maybe like holodeck VR – something that captured a bunch of data in your living room and then transmitted it to someone else’s living room.
It’s just REALLY hard to imagine, let alone want to let the government get involved with the web to support.
I have no idea what Jon’s group was thinking.
It’s very risky making bold predictions about future technical requirements. History is littered with those who look foolish for having done so.
Media companies would love everyone having such capability – it would make actual centralised metered media and application subscription on demand services practical.
The ability to have EVERYTHING digital reliably on demand (the reliability of fibre is another reason why people want it beside it’s versatility) without delay makes the provision and consumption of metered/subscribed plans conveinent enough you could actually sell them to everyone. Unlike now when spotty performance, delays, haphazard infrastructure and splintered offerings discourage digital nirvana.
Legislating it might be because regulation would probably make a nightmare of competitive provision of infrastructure.
But if everyone had fibre to their doors open to competitive ISPs it’d be a non-issue because customers would always buy the neutral service on offer.
Napster was not a P2P service, Peeer to Peer applications were popularised by the vulnerability of Client to Server applications like Napster to assualt.
Fibre to the door gives media companies an opportunity to compete more evenly with P2P sharing. Today technology like BitTorrent is used not only because it dodges authority but also because it resolves network bottle necks and distributes bandwidth use and costs.
If practical instantly available services could be delivered over reliable high speed connections media companies sane enough not to overcharge and dleiver non-lame services could compete with ad hoc P2P infrastructure. People will pay for good service.
Fentex, all thats the download side. I can make good use of 100Mbps down. But up? Not so much.
I’m not kidding either about replacing TCP/IP with a one way transport like LDPC. The sudden improvement in surfing experience is big win. Pages can load like powerpoint slides.
TCP/IP will never accomplish it.
Actually it sounded in your post that *you* decide what everybody needs.
Morgan: You’re thinking one dimensionally or at least, retro-apps. The web is a hypermedia not a monomedia. The more I load up a real-time world with avatars and streaming media, the easier it is to bring local lines to a crawl. Sooner now than later, we’ll have scene graphs sitting on top of WebGL. Yes, most of the compute intensive work is on the client these days for such worlds and considerable effort goes into crunching down the state, but lag is still the enemy of real-time. You’re talking file transfers and asnychronous updates.
The more interesting question is who beyond the walls of CAD-driven design companies or big file burner farms wants that kind of real-time simulation/game/social-meet-and-greet tech these days. The gaming industry spent the last two decades creating evermore complex and graphically stunning 3D virtual worlds and gaming engines only to be surpassed in popularity by casual games of very low complexity and asynchronous interaction on Facebook with Flash because the time slicing of an office drone or a stay at home Mom only enables minutes in-game at a time and no tolerance for a learning curve associated with the rich environment games.
Dan, it seems you are starting to *GET* Avatar Worstler.
len, what an interesting phenomenon is, I guess you might call it, “particularization,” or maybe “intensitization.”
“Rich” virtual worlds? A Go-Kart used to be a couple of 2x4s, a chunk of half-inch plywood, a Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine and some bike gears and chain and cobbled-up kiddie’s wagon wheels. Maybe you would find a broke-down chair you could nail on, to sit upon. Steering by a rope to a crazy center-pivot axle. By the time the particularizers got done with the “pastime,” you had pro drivers of things that were as complex as a Formula open-wheel race car, costing $100k to field, and driving the kids right off the course. Same, even today, with Soap Box Derby racers. Same with slot cars — high-tech-chemistry “rubber” formulas for the tires, specially wound motors with early rare-earth magnets, tiny ball and roller bearings everywhere, and “controllers” that looked like a Buck Rogers raygun. Same with radio-controlled model aircraft competing in “pattern’ events. And golf clubs?
So the next step, after the Excelsior types got done spoiling the games for everyone else, was for that same “return,” often, to a little more simplicity. I guess by definition, patterns repeat.
What’s the end-game model for those who want to make a killing off those complex avatar-inhabited worlds? More people doing like the unemployed Korean couple that is featured at the start of this post? I guess they spent every hour, except for short breaks, because apparently they did not know about urinary and fecal catheters and G-tube feeding that would have let them, OMG, you know, REALLY concentrate on what’s important. At some point, somebody has to plow the earth, sow the seeds, reap the harvest and bake the bread — we can’t all be grasshoppers, at some point the ants are gonna say “Warstler says you just have to starve.”
Extremely fast up-stream connections might not benefit media companies but software companies will love it.
Having noticed for sometime that selling people software that is good enough is not as profitable as selling fashionable or consumerable products that wear out, tire out or get consumed software companies have been trying hard to get people to subscribe to their products, to lock them in and create gauranteed revenue streams.
But it doesn’t tend to work because it’s not inherent in the nature of the product.
Today however ‘cloud’ computing holds out a hope of a product that naturally suits subscription models. It remains just a hope while the performance issues of web browsers and two way communications speed and reliability fails to suffice.
But put a very fast fibre connection everywhere and you’re living in a world where connected computers don’t need to have an operating system at all, just a network boot loader.
If PCs start talking to servers anywhere in the world at speeds not incomparable to accessing a hard disk the software titans of the world will drown in their saliva.
Dan, then you weren’t reading carefully. Did you actually READ Jon’s proposal? He is advocating something 50/50 Mbps up/dn – which has no good reason to exist – accept maybe to try and champion fiber for no reason being mentioned.
I’ve used 100Mbps – guess what? Web pages don’t load any faster. The issue is TCP/IP. Speed won’t fix it. HD Movies come down faster, so there is an advantage there. But that doesn’t justify 50Mbps UP.
Anyhoo, onward…
len, what exactly would be being rendered and broadcast from an end user’s machine to do 50Mbps up?
In any case I can imagine, you’d still have most all the worlds / game scenes on everyone’s box or at least pushed to the edge server in their head end – so they could use a thin client.
I just can’t fathom what 50Mbps would be for. I don’t even think most personal computers can serve that much data.
I can totally see 100Mbps down. Hell even more. I get the thin client / network boot loader, but why all the up?
I think it’s so apt that the title of your post echoes an anti-drug ad from the 80′s.
You know, back when the war on drugs was going oh-so-well and president Reagan was just about to pose under a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner while his wife told inner city kids to “Just say No!”…
Really, I get that video games seem scary.
I even get that they’re addictive. They are. I’ve got a Mafia Wars habit myself that keeps me on the internet for at least an hour daily – mindlessly clicking away.
But if you have to reference a news story from half the globe away and a culture that you know nothing about, just to show us how bad video games are – then maybe you shouldn’t…
It’s pretty obvious the subject of video games is foreign and scary to you. Trying to frame it in terms of the Totally-Failed American War on Drugs is just sad. On so many levels.
Years ago my brother, fresh from a Robin Williams performance in San Francisco, told me almost breathlessly that Williams had said (and I’m sorry I have it third hand), “Make no mistake: Nintendo is kiddie cocaine.”. That hit my brother quite hard at the time, and I must say that as a father he acted accordingly. (perhaps isome don’t remember when Williams still could cut an edge.)
Yesterday, Nintendo. Today, textpaging. Cocaine. Rock cocaine. Crack & Crystal Meth.
Aliteracy & Death
Armand,
This probably will piss off a lot of you, but my impression is that the “Just Say No” campaign actually worked. In my diseased mind I’ve always contrasted that possibility with the Sesame Street experiment, which promised literacy but which instead addicted children to television and thence to video games, etc.
I never understood how Sesame Street could beget mall stores competing with e.g. Disney and the others. Shouldn’t the proceeds from the show’s popularity have been returned to taxpayers? How can PBS have it both ways? Those randy perverts!
Hugh, where would it be that the “Just Say No” campaign has worked? I think that rather than that, there may just be a limit to how many people want to live their lives fucked up, and maybe we’re near that limit. I’ve been in the music industry in one way or another as a pro since the early 1960s, and I’ve seen it all…and I’ve seen a few die, quite a few more do irreparable harm to their bodies and minds, but I’ve seen even more people turn the corner and decide to live at least relatively clean and sober. Some have gone the extreme route of AA, many others have simply filed away their really bad habits in the archives drawer and gotten on with being able to smoke a joint or have some wine with dinner, etc. NOBODY has refrained from anything because of some government inspired insipid phrase, and NOBODY has refrained because of fear of the law unless they’re on weekly monitoring. Anyone I know who says NO to drugs these days does so because they want to be clear headed most of the time. Of course there are those who seem not to be able to say NO, and they’re all over the Internet as corpses and melt-downs. They’re the addicts who need a lot more than a silly phrase.
The funny thing (please allow that comment) is that many of those who do get sober turn out to be assholes sober as well as loaded… There may be a 13th or 14th step missing in the program. I’ve seen a fair amount of that, too…
“len, what exactly would be being rendered and broadcast from an end user’s machine to do 50Mbps up?”
Video, audio, textures. Dead reckoning is still used to calculate movement rather than sending position data. I tend to agree that 50 mbps up is a lot for mom and pop, but I heard the same thing about 56kbps because no one believed video and music would be exchanged bi-directionally. There is always a way to waste more bandwidth.
I tire of life online occasionally and I wonder if more and more people are. There is a certain hollowness to it just as it has widened my view of the world. I spent the weekend finishing up a new recording of an old song from me folkie days to send to the woman for whom it was written when she was a girl. That’s the fun of the online thing, IMHO.
http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/SongForKim.mp3