Guild Wars 2

Hands up who knows what a skinner box is?

Hmm, don’t see any. But then, there’s no hands up button on the keyboard. Still I’ll tell you anyway – An operant conditioning chamber, or, “Skinner box” after it’s inventor, is a piece of lab apparatus used to train small animals for behavioral research.

Typically, the animal will be given some task, a light comes on, and when the task is performed correctly it receives a treat, this could be pulling levers, or opening a latch. As training progresses (or sometimes from the outset), the treat is coupled with a punishment – usually the floor of the box dispenses an electric shock. So it behooves the furry critter to do the task correctly every time it comes up.

Once the animal knows the routine, the treat can be withdrawn entirely, and only the punishment administered in the event of failure – unsurprisingly, on the threat of an electric shock, the creature keeps doing the task to avoid the pain.

So where am I going with this you ask?

MMO’s are often built around the same principle. To start off with they feed you a steady drip of positive experiences, new gear, new skills, new experiences, while slowly ramping up the pain – higher penalties for failure, harder tasks.

By the end-game of a standard MMO, you’re largely playing for the sole purpose of punishment avoidance; “if I don’t play, I won’t earn my dailies, I’ll fall behind in the gold inflation; I havn’t done my raid this week!”.

GW2’s manifesto promise was that GW2 would be un-grindy, you’d have many pathways and options to achieve your goals and can do so at your own leisure. But this isn’t true anymore is it? – There’s an increasing checklist of time gated content that you must play and do if you don’t want to fall behind…

• Have I done my laurel daily?
• Have I done my daily dungeon runs for the tokens I’d like?
• Have I done a fractal daily today?
• Have I collected my charged quartz today?
• Have to done the living story grind for my achievement points?

If you don’t do all of the above, you’ll fall behind in the game and essentially be punished for daring spend time away from the game – or spending time doing things you’d rather be doing in the game that don’t overlap with these goals (WVW? PvP? – Exploring, RPing, chatting, having fun?).

This is why, personally – when I’m playing a game, i like to stop and ask myself “Why am I still playing, am i playing because I’m having fun pushing the buttons, or is it simply that I’ll be punished if I don’t”. At the end of the day, the same psychological conditioning you see in rats works equally well on humans, and MMO’s can be your own Skinner Box.

It’s something to think about, and a good way of keeping MMO’s in perspective

/End Public Service Announcement

TL;DR
Play games to have fun, if you arn’t playing for fun, consider playing something else

Ryuujin.8236:

TL;DR
Play games to have fun, if you arn’t playing for fun, consider playing something else

MMORPGs are big Skinner boxes, you are right. The thing is, those who are playing GW2 are MMORPG players; ArenaNet mentioned they wanted to make a game for people who didn’t like MMOs, but they failed, and so the GW2 community is mostly players from other MMOs.

In other words, the people you are talking to are those that want the Skinner box design; or worse, those who are addicted to it. You are wasting your time telling people here to play in order to have fun, when what they want is to grind for rewards, and who cares about “fun”.

Haha, I liked the TL;DR section of your post, as I completely agree with it. However, I love GW2 precisely because I don’t see it as a Skinner box. If I don’t log in and get my daily, I haven’t fallen behind anything. Most of what laurels buy me I don’t want, and if I’m a day later getting my Ascended trinket I don’t mind because I don’t really need it anyway and was only going to it as a fun diversion (I like checking off the “list” of daily achievements as they go by).

The people who see GW2 as a Skinner box have, IMO, made it one for themselves, though I’m not at all sure where the heavy punishment comes in. Because you don’t miss anything, except a couple of achievements and a couple of weeks of story filler for not logging in. Nothing comes out that will simply destroy you if you don’t own it. An increased delay in getting some piece of armour that was going to take you 30 days to put together anyway but that you don’t actually need really isn’t a punishment. Why see getting it slower as a punishment when you didn’t really even want the reward anyway?

But insofar as your general point, OP, I completely agree. Play a game because it’s fun. The moment it’s not fun, log off and come back when it is fun again.

Ryuujin.8236:

By the end-game of a standard MMO, you’re largely playing for the sole purpose of punishment avoidance; “if I don’t play, I won’t earn my dailies, I’ll fall behind in the gold inflation; I havn’t done my raid this week!”.

Well this is nice and all, but your analogy sucks.

A better analogy would be that if you don’t play, you will actually lose progress, which you really don’t do. You just don’t gain any.

In your analogy, most MMOs never take the treat away. Sure, they might make the task harder and/or take longer, but the treat will always be there. Why?

Because there is no punishment in MMOs. Not anymore. There used to be a penalty for failing, for dying. But today there is none. Whatever you do, however you do it, will slowly and steadily take you closer to that treat. There are no setbacks.

And why is that? Because the MMO players do not want setbacks. They want rewards. They want to work towards the treat at their own pace and not worry about never reaching it.

And it works.

In fact, a much better analogy to modern MMOs is a treadmill that accelerates a number display next to it. Whether you tread fast or slow, the number will keep increasing, at the pace you choose to put the effort in it. But the number will never decrease. Even if you don’t run in the treadmill for a year, it will stay the same and you can get back on and get running again.

Tom Gore.4035:

Well this is nice and all, but your analogy sucks.

A better analogy would be that if you don’t play, you will actually lose progress, which you really don’t do. You just don’t gain any.

Depends on the frame of reference in which you are observing it.

When GW2 came out, you could buy 200 gems for 50 silver and precursors were around 50g. While technically you may not “lose” anything by not participating, the world and economy marches on without you. Your gold is worth proportionally less when you return.

As for dungeon rewards, they are time gated by the diminishing returns. If you really want say… Balefire’s Cozy Pink Slippers from CoF, but today you’re too busy to play – you can’t run CoF twice the next day to make up for the missed daily – you’ll have less tokens than if you spaced it out over two days. Therefore you are somewhat compelled to run the dungeon to their schedule if you want to obtain the items in a timely fashion, and it’s my opinion that you shouldn’t have to schedule a game into your appointments list in real life

Anyway, as CrossedHorse points out, this is all very much subjective. One person’s grind is another persons fun (And there’s nothing wrong with that!), I figure that a fresh perspective might help some people who’re locked into a cycle of grind re-evaluate their reasons for playing like it did me in the past.

You’re absolutely right, it’s a perspective thing. I think the biggest problem is that people set their in-game goals too high compared to the time and effort they’re willing to put into the game.

In most cases it’s a simple matter of “I want it all” combined with “Too lazy to do anything” that creates the whiny posts on the forum that something is “too hard to get”.

Tom Gore.4035:

You’re absolutely right, it’s a perspective thing. I think the biggest problem is that people set their in-game goals too high compared to the time and effort they’re willing to put into the game.

In most cases it’s a simple matter of “I want it all” combined with “Too lazy to do anything” that creates the whiny posts on the forum that something is “too hard to get”.

Hit the nail on the head! :p

TC – It’s probably the reason I barely play now and when I re-install it’s lucky if I don’t uninstall again within a day. I keep lurking hoping for a change after years of GW addiction but for the most part when I play GW2 I feel like the folks in this picture.

http://files.harrowakker.webnode.nl/200000058-28fec29f90/EscherOmhoogOmlaag.jpg

I never felt like this with GW in 5+ years but as people on these forums are so fond of reminding us GW wasn’t really a MMO. Maybe that’s my problem, I’m just not a fan of typical MMO’s? All this hoop jumping/button pressing could be why this game doesn’t hold a candle to GW for me.

Someone else mentioned this too, the skinner box thing. It made me think “Why am I actually playing?” and was I even having fun? Turns out I wasn’t, I was just going through the mundane motions of jumping through Anet’s hoops and pressing the Pinata buttons (to give a specific example) for a treat and of fear of falling behind (silly in a “horizontal” game I know but it’s how I felt).

But that’s just me. I think it’s obvious that others enjoy it because Anet keep pumping it out and they keep doing it.

Your title is kind of misleading. There are many things in this game that could be called Skinner Boxes, but every thing you listed:

Have I done my laurel daily?
Have I done my daily dungeon runs for the tokens I’d like?
Have I done a fractal daily today?
Have I collected my charged quartz today?
Have to done the living story grind for my achievement points?

Not one of these is a Skinner Box. Skinner Boxes specifically consist of task/reward systems where the reward is given randomly and infrequently. All of these things you listed are “If I do X, I am guaranteed Y” not “If I do X, I have a small chance at Y”.

Throwing rares/exotics into the mystic forge for a chance at a precursor is a Skinner Box. Mobs dropping loot randomly is a Skinner Box. Black Lion Chests are Skinner Boxes. But none of that other stuff you mentioned is.

TL:DR Nothing in your list is a Skinner Box.

Ryuujin.8236:

If you don’t do all of the above, you’ll fall behind in the game and essentially be punished for daring spend time away from the game – or spending time doing things you’d rather be doing in the game that don’t overlap with these goals (WVW? PvP? – Exploring, RPing, chatting, having fun?).

Your statement is incorrect – not moving forward is not the same as falling behind. Other MMOs constantly reset the game – old raid dungeons become obsolete and raiders must begin their grind over again for a new tier of gear, for example. While “losing” a laurel just means it takes 31 days instead of 30 to get the piece of ascended gear you want. Eventually you reach the goal and there is no reset, no new tier of gear to get once you have it.

This is not punishment, it’s patience. All things in the game is available to anyone who wants them, whether it takes a month or two months or six months depends on how much effort the player wants to put forth. It is not determined by the devs who keep moving the goal posts, as in other MMOs.

A couple of points:

First, I think whether or not any given person sucumbs to the skinner box reward system, it’s objectively there. So you can’t really say it’s a box of your own making. ANet set the rules and constructed the box. The only reason to construct such a box it because they want people to obsessively try for the reward.

Second, adding ascended gear makes exotic gear no longer BIS. The minute they added it everyone slipped from having BIS gear to not having BIS gear. Every laurel you get makes up some of the ground. While you are not falling further behind every day you don’t get a laurel you are also not progressing back to where you were before this gear was introduced.