Behavioral Reinforcement: An Analysis of What Makes Pokémon Addictive

April 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

For one of my previous blog posts, I wrote a brief explanation of dopamine and its significance to the videogame experience. For this post, I plan to continue in a similarly scientific fashion, and explore what it is besides dopamine that makes one of the most iconic games with which I grew up so wildly and mindlessly addicting.

Pika-Pika!

That game is called Pokémon, and that “thing besides dopamine” is known as behavioral reinforcement.

Pokémon is a game that makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s primarily about building a magpie-like collection of things for no reason other than the fact that those things exist to be collected. Yes, battling those creatures is fun, and doing so amongst friends can quickly become both very challenging and very rewarding as a result, but how much time playing Pokémon did you honestly spend battling with friends, especially “back in the day” when you’d have to tether your Gameboys to one another with those clunky little link cables?

The answer, probably, is significantly less than you spent playing through the game on your own, exploring the Kanto region (or the Johto region, or the Hoenn region, or many subsequent other regions, but we won’t go there), leveling up, and collecting various things. The primary draw and motivation of the game remained the desire to “catch ‘em all,” to scour tall grass for hours on end waiting for a freaking Chansey to appear again in the Safari Zone, just to accidentally scare it away and have to start all over like some sort of stupid idiot.

Just look at that smug little smile.

In the second semester of my freshman year, I was enrolled in General Psychology (PSYC 100) in order to fulfill one of my general education requirements. As is to be expected, we eventually came to a unit on reinforcement techniques used to motivate and train lab rats and other subject animals in the clinical environment. While studying one night, I found myself sketching out a little Pikachu in the margins. “This is Pokémon,” I thought I as I skimmed through the descriptions I had written down. “Behavioral reinforcement is what ensured I played those games for so long.”

Reinforcement is any sort of consequential action that results in a behavior being repeated with greater frequency. There are various different types of reinforcement (positive and negative, and so on), but for the sake of this blog post, I am going to be focusing on reinforcement schedules in particular, as they are the most pertinent to Pokémon.

There are many different types of reinforcement schedules, the most simple of which is referred to as a continuous reinforcement schedule, in which every occurrence of a desired action (such as a dog sitting down when told to do so) is followed by a reinforcer (the dog receiving a treat). However, the most effective and addictive reinforcement schedule is actually the variable ratio schedule, in which the number of responses necessary to produce a desired outcome varies from trial to trial. For example, if a lab rat presses on a bar ten times, on average, a pellet of food would be dispensed every tenth time. The reason the variable ratio schedule typically results in the highest rate of responses in the subject is because the subject quickly learns that to get the desired result, all he or she has to do is perform the desired reaction a certain number of times to achieve it.

Because treachery, that's why.

With the above in mind, consider my previous example of my trying to catch a Chansey. The only reason I was willing to spend so many hours trudging around in little circles in that one particular path of tall grass in Safari Zone was because I knew there was a chance that I would run into a Chansey again, because I knew, even as a child, that that one particular path of grass was coded by the game’s programmers to include an encounter rate of more than 0 for the particular Pokémon I wanted, because that was the way the game functioned.

I’ll admit that I was sort of an odd kid when I was little, but unnecessary autobiography aside, if it weren’t for Pokémon’s heavy use of and dependence on the variable ratio schedule in its games, I do not think it would continue to be such a successful franchise today. Simply put, without encounter rates there is no challenge to the end goal of collection, and without a challenge to the end goal of collection, there is no Pokémon.

Although I touched on a similarly technical in my previous post regarding dopamine, I really do think it is important that we continue to study games not only within their cultural and mechanical contexts, but also in relation to their psychological ones, as it is only through the exploration of what makes games entertaining to the masses in the first place that we can better understand why we as consumers have any desire to play and study them at all.

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Webcomics and the Infinite Canvas

March 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Please note: though this blog post contains no comics examples within its text due to the logistics of space, please see the hyperlinks provided for relevant examples of each webcomic mentioned.

There’s already been some discussion on this blog about memes and rage comics as they relate to electronic literature, but I think it’s interesting that no one has yet to touch on webcomics as a medium yet, considering the promise they hold for analysis.

Plenty of webcomics are perfectly capable of being viewed both on and off a computer, but there are many that simply can’t be printed, as they were created with the specific intent of being viewed digitally. The Wormworld Saga is perhaps the most well-known example of what’s commonly referred to in comics studies as the “infinite canvas,” or the idea that comics presented to a viewer through a computer need not adhere to any dimensional guidelines at all, as scrolling is such an easy and intuitive way to move about the page. Instead of being broken up into pages, Wormworld’s panels extend all the way down until the end of each chapter in one long, unbroken column, creating an experience entirely unique to the digital medium, as such a thing would be impossible to print.

There are other webcomics that normally don’t utilize the infinite canvas, but will upon occasion whenever they have something more extended or complicated to discuss. XKCD has done this multiple times in the past, as has a lesser known comic called Nedroid*, but I mention these two as examples because they’ve both put out books of prints in the past in order to better monetize their franchises.

The general rule for electronic literature is that for something to be considered e-lit, it has to have been “born digital,” or created with the specific purpose of being viewed on a computer. Under such a definition, I am sure I would meet little resistance in asserting that Wormworld shoult be considered e-lit. But the question remains, how should we classify webcomics that oscillate between making use of the infinite canvas and ignoring it completely? What about what I like to consider to be “hybrids”—what about webcomics like XKCD?

Although not all webcomics demand to be read on a computer and on nothing else, all webcomics do have one basic thing in common. Although not necessarily “born digital,” each is still created with the intent of being viewed on a computer monitor—even webcomics that don’t experiment with the idea of the infinite canvas at all, like Dinosaur Comics. I would assert, therefore, that all webcomics should be considered, at least peripherally, as forms of electronic literature, if only for the fact that they were created for the digital age.

*The actual name for Nedroid‘s comics is technically Beartato Comics, as Nedroid is actually the artist’s pen name, but Nedroid is much more widely recognized as an overall title simply because “Beartato Comics” appears nowhere on the comics website itself.

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Studying the Prince

March 2, 2012 by 1 Comment

This post marks the final draft of my creative project, entitled Studying the Prince, which can be found and played here! It was created in Twine and is fairly simple, but I’d like to offer a brief introduction regardless regarding my intent:

Hypertext is a medium very much concerned with the availability of choice. For this project, I wanted to show, through initially providing the player with multiple choices and then slowly stripping them away, how the player might be made more aware of what it’s like to not have any options at all.

In summary, Studying the Prince is a short, exploratory hypertext “adventure” in which, as a result of the prince being late to a private meeting he’s scheduled with you in his study, you are left unsupervised to explore his apartments as you choose (or choose not to). You start off knowing nothing about the prince besides his social station, but your movements through his private quarters reveal progressively more–not only about what kind of person he is, but also about his greatest fear.

There are two endings to Studying the Prince: one true ending and one that’s sort of a throw away. Specifically, if you swallow your curiosity regarding everything else and wait patiently for the prince in your chair, your resulting interaction with him will be decidedly dull, as you’ll have learned next to nothing about him. Go into his room, however, and things will be much different when he finds you.

For Dr. Whalen’s reference, I’ve included a zoomed out image of my Twine map below:

Twine Map

Enjoy!

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Behold: Thy Graphics!

February 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

 

Thy Dungeon Man 3

I wrote sort of a technical post for the last checkpoint, so for this one I wanted to do something a little more fun. Earlier this semester I tweeted a link to Thy Dungeon Man, which is a basic text adventure game from Homestar Runner, but for this post I decided to formally explore Thy Dungeon Man 3 instead, as it’s a little more substantial (in keeping with homestarrunner’s sense of humor, of course, there is no Thy Dungeon Man 2). Thy Dungeon Man 3 is interesting not only because of its “state of the art” graphics, but also because of the facetious homage it plays to Colossal Cave Adventure, as well as the text adventure genre as a whole.

 

Fat, Fat Friar

The most important facet to Thy Dungeon Man 3 is the fact that although it remains primarily a text adventure (there is some timed clicking required at the end), it also uses graphics in order to illustrate the environments you move through. The game includes an image above the text field for every different “room” environment, and each image is stylized to look as if it is being displayed on an old monitor, which works to give each physical space within the game its own character and memorable elements. Also, items described in the textual description will actually be shown to you so you’ll get more of a hint that you should try to “look” or “get” them, and so you won’t forget they’re there while you’re trying to “look” or “get” something else. Characters with whom you’re allowed to interact also become more memorable, as they are occasionally given full facial sprites that dominate the screen, as seen to the right. That particular character’s name is Fat, Fat Friar, and he tries to eat you because you look tasty.

The most difficult thing for me about Colossal Cave Adventure was being forced to imagine a visual world with such parsimonious description. Of course, it doesn’t take much description of a forest to let me know what I’m in a forest, and I don’t have a problem with that—it’s when I have to start remembering directional orientation and the places of things that I get a little lost without pictures for the sake of visual reinforcement. For example, remembering that X room lies south of Y room, which is west of B room, which is directly outside the room that I’m currently in, is difficult to mentally retain at all times without some sort of visual trigger to jog your memory. Since Thy Dungeon Man 3 not only has different pictures for every area, but also a crossroads with a signpost reminding you where everything is, it is much more accessible to a modern audience.

Thy Dungeon Man 3 also does an excellent job of criticizing, while still celebrating, the medium in which it exists. If you walk behind the poultry sandwich shop, for example, the graphics screen goes completely blank, and the text reads, “Check it out. This street is totally empty and does not continue EAST. There is no PERSON here, nor is there a FLYER on the GROUND. The sammich SHOPPE is to the WEST. Some words are in CAPITAL LETTERS.” The back alley contains no people, no interactive objects, no memorable or relevant characteristics at all–much like the forest in Colossal Cave Adventure–and if you start trying to explore it anyway, the game asserts, “No really, there’s nothing here. It’s almost as if this area were only added to artificially extend the length of this game.”

When I first read this line, my eyelids sank as I realized how much time I wasted in Colossal Cave Adventure trying to find something relevant in the forest. Yep.

Not that I am disparaging Colossal Cave Adventure in any way; it was just funny to have the cause of my frustration pointed out on another platform.

But speaking of pointing things out, in Thy Dungeon Man 3, you’re also able to befriend a bird by feeding it, and then able to use to bird to defeat a troll. This is clearly a reference to the bird and the snake in Colossal Cave Adventure, only here, Thy Dungeon Man 3’s writers decided to pointedly emphasize the absurdity of using a bird to defeat anything larger than a mouse. Instead of the bird simply “defeating” the snake with no explanation whatsoever, in Thy Dungeon Man 3, the bird “attacks” the troll for you by chirping and being really obnoxious, which the troll decides he finds so intensely annoying that he throws himself into the river. The troll then drowns “immediately,” as soon as he touches the water, and the bird “winks” at you as it flies away. It’s absurd and it’s funny, and it makes very little sense, but Thy Dungeon Man 3 is clearly using such absurdities to draw attention to the similar lack of realism in Colossal Cave Adventure.

In short, Thy Dungeon Man 3 is an homage and a pastiche all at once, a fun textual experience as well as a visual one, and its graphics, as well as its humor, are what I believe make it the most accessible.

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Dopamine and the Neurological Benefits of Video Games in the Classroom

February 9, 2012 by 2 Comments

Ten dollars says you remember playing at least some sort of incarnation of a video game in elementary school. Whether it was Number Munchers, Museum Madness, Odell Down Under, Reader Rabbit, or even just productivity programs that utilized basic video game elements, such as Kid Pix or Storybook Weaver, chances are you played something.

To be blunt, this post isn’t going to be about any one specific title mentioned above, but rather about the benefits of the video game elements utilized in each, and how the utilization of such elements can actually be neurologically beneficial to a child’s capacity to learn. Though this post isn’t going to be looking at such educational “games” as any sort of “literature,” it is going to be examining them as both beneficial and instructive environments, and will hopefully provide a foundation for further exploration on the topic by myself. I would love, for example, to discuss “learn-to-type” games with some substantial depth, but I don’t think I would be able to do that without first prefacing such a post with a post like the one you’re reading now.

With that said, here’s the point:

In 1998, a team of neurologists, now known as Koepp et al, published a study through which they determined, through clinical trials, that playing video games increased a subject’s internal dopamine production level by 100%—effectively doubling it. Dopamine is an organic chemical the brain produces when it experiences pleasure, and is commonly associated with the brain’s reward system. Dopamine’s production can therefore easily be used by researchers (as well as teachers, trainers, etc.) to reinforce specific desired behaviors in a subject, since being rewarded for a specific behavior, whether it be clicking on a certain field or sitting down when told to do so, since it is such a strong neurological motivator as well as a desirable one for the subject to experience.

It should be noted that there was a lot of reactionary scuttlebutt to Koepp’s article claiming that since video games double the brain’s production of dopamine, they’re therefore clinically addictive and comparable to other things that release high levels of the chemical, such as drugs and sexual activity. It was falsely purported for a number of years that “game addiction,” as a result, was a real and dangerous thing that stemmed from the brain’s acquired dependence on increased levels of dopamine, but later studies proved that this simply isn’t true for a variety of reasons.

But with that disclaimer out there, let’s turn our attention back to practical applications in the classroom.

As a basic example, I’m going to focus on Number Munchers. Getting a kid to pay attention to flashcards is a tricky thing, especially at the elementary level; if the student is bad at math (and therefore in need of reinforcement the most), he’ll likely be rather apathetic regarding the proceedings, and if the student has a learning disability, such as ADHD or autism specifically, he’ll be even less inclined to want to work with you. However, if you plant that student in front of a computer and let him play Number Munchers for ten minutes or more, you’ll likely see a change in his attentiveness. Now all of a sudden, not only is the student being rewarded for solving mathematics problems on his own, but he’s being rewarded for participating in the experience: every input he has into the computer has some sort of stimulus response—a reward for his attention—either through the movement of his avatar or the little munching animation that plays when he selects a square on the grid with the appropriate answer. And every single one of those stimulus rewards releases a tiny little shot of dopamine to help him to continue working. It’s all about reward.

Is something like Number Munchers literature? I would argue it’s not, and I don’t think I’d be alone. But it’s clear that such games hold clear benefits to children in an educational setting, and should therefore continue to be utilized and considered critically, regardless of their lack of literary merit. It’s only when we’re able to understand why something’s considered to be entertaining that we’re able to properly analyze its benefits, which is why I thought this post was worth adding to our conversation despite its lack of focus on video games as literature specifically: literature that’s electronic is by nature a video game, and if we’re going to try to understand one to understand the other, I think it would be prudent to first gain an understanding of what makes video games so fun and addictive in the first place.
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Forces of Habit: Brain Worms in LIMBO

January 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

When I was a kid, I played the old Mario and Sonic platformers a lot. The old 2-D, sidescrolling ones, where plot wasn’t really an issue and you just sort of moved through levels because they were there. My friends and I even had a joke:

“How do you beat a sidescroller?”

“Hold right.”

Ten years later, and bam: I’m playing LIMBO. And suddenly holding right doesn’t sound very appealing anymore.

LIMBO is a creepy game, and one of the first things it does is force you to question your instincts as a gamer to constantly move to the right as soon as you start. It is a game that even goes so far as to punish you for doing so, a game that asserts from very early on that if you continue to progress as convention has trained you, you are going to die. Or drown. Or get sawed up. It is only through backtracking, stopping, and thinking about your surroundings as a whole that you’re able to advance, and only through your exercise of the freedom afforded to you that you’re able to succeed. LIMBO essentially forces you to consider your avatar (a young, nameless protagonist who looks eerily like a silhouetted Calvin, minus the Hobbes) not as a detached and passive psuedo-Mario figure, as is the convention, but rather as a vehicle through which you can interact with and redefine your environment. In short, a vehicle that represents yourself.

However, as soon as LIMBO teaches you to do all of the above, it turns the system around and strips you of everything it’s worked to open your eyes to by introducing a mechanic just as simple as it is sinister:

Brain worms.

They’ll drop down and burrow into your head, zombify you, and force you to march whether you like it or not. After all the pains LIMBO goes through to teach you to question direction, progress, and mindless playing, it forces it back on you, and as a player, you’ll find that you will not like it one bit. All of a sudden you’re no longer questioning or interacting. You no longer have any control. You can’t explore. You can’t brace yourself against death through careful forethought or planning, and it’s almost as if LIMBO is saying, “Hey, you. Gamer. You remember that linear way you used to consider all the sidescrollers you’ve ever played? Well, why don’t you go back to that for a bit and tell me what you think.”

If it weren’t for the brain worm mechanic, I don’t think LIMBO would be anything more than an ordinary puzzle game. But the fact that LIMBO’s developers chose to go out of their way to point out, multiple times, that having mindless directions imposed on you once you’ve gotten used to exploring on your own isn’t any fun, proves that they’re trying to tell you something. Namely, that LIMBO is challenging its predecessors as well as the conventions of its medium, and challenging you as a gamer to go back to the accepting, detached way you used to play sidescrollers as a kid, to see if that still feels fun.

And suddenly holding right doesn’t sound very appealing anymore.

 

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