Guild Wars 2

There was an interesting story on NPR this morning about the trend (and perils) of reward-based marketing and gameplay. It’s not specific to GW2, but the story definitely struck a GW2-related chord when I was listening and I imagine the connection will be obvious to those who potentially feel the same.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/24/204621796/ONLINE-REWARDS

“Ask yourself: Are you addicted to technology — any technology? Do you check email obsessively, tweet without restraint or post on Facebook during Thanksgiving dinner? Or perhaps you are powerless in the face of an iPad loaded with Angry Birds?

Many of the most popular technologies of our time tap into powerful reward mechanisms in our brains. And while most researchers , there’s that these technologies alter how our brains work and change how we behave."

Haha. I caught a little bit of this, and GW2 was the first thing i could think of. When they were talking about the power of “unexpected rewards” vs “expected rewards” i couldn’t help but think about how many rewards in this game are RNG and hard to anticipate receiving.

edit;

""An unexpected reward has much more power than one that is regular in driving behavior," says Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “This has been known for a very long time.”

More than 60 years ago, the famous American psychologist B.F. Skinner demonstrated that unpredictable rewards created obsessive behavior in lab rats. The rats would click and click and click again on a bar, hoping to trigger a random reward.

“We are not mad scientists trying to figure out unexpected reward systems that Skinner predicated in theories decades ago; that’s not us,” Uber’s Kalanick says.

Still, random reward structures are built, sometimes unintentionally, into many of the technologies we use everyday."

MMO’s in general are known for this kind of stuff.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/intrinsic-or-extrinsic

The “maybe today is my lucky day” mentality is why people gamble and play the lotto.. all for the hope that one day, you’ll win something… anything…

Works perfect in video games in the right dose.

It’s like they’re in our heads… watching… listening… watching… seeing, reading our minds smelling our thoughts.. what was that? Did you see that I think I saw something… heard something… are you my Mummy?

As someone who has done research on the dopamine reward system they write about, the article peeves me in one way… Quote:
“most researchers stop short of calling video games and modern tech addictive”

Yes, there are reasons they stop short. Please stop calling strong reward motivations resulting in frequent repetition “addiction.” It is not the same. The differences are not simple to explain but, please, reporters, if a researcher in a technical field refuses to use a term like “addiction” to describe something, don’t describe it that way!

[end rant]