What's with all the Skinner box bullshit that's in every videogame these days?

What's with all the Skinner box bullshit that's in every videogame these days?
What ever happened to playing a videogame for no other reason than because you thought it was fun?

Because the money isn't in just selling a whole game anymore, it is in DLC and microtransactions. Behaviorists showed that you can condition an animal to do something after repeated trials, the new generation that play games won't know what a full game really is and will happily enjoy these mechanics.

holy shit stop being so entitled you goy

You do realize that ALL video games are skinner boxes, right?
You perform task - you get rewarded - repeat.
There is no basic difference between single players games and mmos.
What is fun? A feeling of satisfaction gained from reaching some goal, and in all games goal is getting reward for completing a task.

Because having all the choices available at once is overwhelming and you'll fall into the same bullshit every time because people are creatures of habit.

With restrictions in place, you are forced to adapt, manage resources, and build towards a strategy or goal. Ironically, NOT playing a skinner box game (a meme term by the btw), you are being more entitled

Every game is a skinner box.
The only thing that's changed is that the prize is underwhelming for the completed task, and/or the task is typically "throw more money at us even though you already payed for our game"

that's your problem. The only proper way to play multiplayer is couch co-op.

The point is to milk as much money as possible from people which is why so many companies have went the free to play route. Have you ever rationalized, or heard someone else say, "Why don't I just play another game? Because I put so much time into it. I might as well finish (or get to a certain rank) now that I've invested so much time."? This is the type of behavior they want from people. Even if 97.8% of people don't put much, if any, money into FTP games. There's that 2.2% that will spend absurd amounts of money. They're also trying to make gambling easier these days with games. Loot boxes are the biggest offender.

Unless you're addicted and are just fooling yourself that you're having fun. Everyone still plays for fun or to pass time. I don't know why you would think otherwise. If you're talking about on a publisher's point of view. It's business. If you mean in a dev's point of view, they are trying to make a fun game but they must also do what higher ups say. And that could be their publishers telling them to add on-disc DLC and such because the charts say it'll make them 3x more cash (which is usually true. It stays because it works).

I believe many video games have way too many variables and ways to tackle some situations to be considered a skinner box. Like Tetris just wants you to clear lines. The combination of actions you have to perform to do this is massive and can change at any point if you're fighting against something else. Skinner boxes are made to study conditioning. Video games have so many variables and sometimes lack the information to make people understand what went wrong and they'll end up making the same mistake again. And sometimes, a mistake actually works out for the better. A skinner box needs a simple punishment/reward system and the goal of games is to get past a level or win somehow. The way to do that can be very complex though.

Whales.

Holla Forums is her FATHER, you double nigger

Every game worth its salt will condition the player to behave in a specific way. This is how challenges and the skill needed to overcome them are cultivated. Consider pic related, these little bastards will appear at the edge of the screen, turn away from you, and fire the missile from their back towards you and diagonally. This little guy exists to test the player's reaction time, memory, and technique. It tests your reaction time because the enemy's missile will fire off quickly, such that the player will only have a small amount of time to react. It tests your memory of the course's layout because these enemies are only placed in specific areas on the course, and it tests your technique because there are a few things the player can do to avoid taking damage and kill the monster while also maintaining their momentum (i.e. you can quickly press the D-pad down in order to roll through the monster or you can use the insta-shield to i-frame through the missile and land on the monster).

If you don't remember where these things are, if you don't react quickly enough and in the right way, you will not have learned how to effectively deal with these monsters, and you will likely be punished with either a loss of your current stock of rings of a swift death.

Now, this type of conditioning isn't what you're talking about. You're talking about reinforcement of a singular, and most likely repetitive, action which is achieved through a RNG-based reward schedule, something like random loot boxes or enemy drops. The sort of quest in which you must collect five rare baubles that are only dropped by lvl 5 Forest Pigs and at a 4% drop rate or some other absurdly low number. Such actions will force the player to trudge through hours of boring and repetitive tasks in order to satisfy the requirements of their objective. I think the obvious answer is that a multitude of quests can be produced using this simple method of reinforcement. You can turn that rare bauble into anything, given the right context and incentives, and it can be used to rationalize anything that both controls your progression and keeps you playing. In addition, is right about the idea that this technique can be used as an easily implemented and maintained revenue stream.

TL;DR (learn to fucking read you faggot)
It's simple, 1) it's easy to use such techniques to produce a whole fuckton of things for the player to do, and 2) they can also be used to produce yet even more revenue

Yes, and?

there better be a screencap of a good reply to these threads by the time this thread's done


1. "games are to kill time."
2. "chance is an aspect to life and all games"
3. "games, especially competitive games, should be skill-based, and beating someone just because you clocked more hours isn't fair"
4. cosmetics

jej

Yes there is. One is a sense of accomplishment for skill and the other is the game giving you a useless item for playing it X amount of times not dependent on skill or reward based on it.

Single player games try to do this too with perks and random drop shit.

I still play new games. I had a lot of fun with Resident Evil 7, Nier Automata, and Wipeout Omega Collection this year, but for the most part I am sticking to to older games for these same reasons.

There is much to discover from the past. Ever played this shit? Gave me an excuse to finally try my Dreamcast mouse. Never heard of it before until the fat sweaty dude told me about it.

Dont tell me that man, ill have to go outside or something

You don't know what a skinner box is. Classic conditioning exists and always has but Skinner specifically put random elements in it to reward a mouse for doing something over and over it doesn't matter if it did it well or not.

Didn't we have this exact same thread with these exact same responses like last week?

Well yea, half the posts here are from a Google neural net AI and it is training itself to be more aware.

Try 30 years ago with RPGs, trolo.

Yeah but not every game was an RPG until now where they all have level up mechanics.

tell me, user
what ISN'T a skinner box, is it only passive entertainment, or could even that be called a skinner box?
also I'm not defending loot boxes and such

...

...

A game that gives you reward based on your skill, not if you do the same skillless task over and over and then rewards you at random times for doing it. That is literally what a skinner box is. Getting a reward for doing something note worthy isn't a skinner box.

Leveling up has nothing to do with skinner boxes. An action game where you can level up still requires you adapt to the situation, make decisions on the spot and test your reflexes by acting with skill.

That all depends on how they implement it. Leveling up based on doing something useful isn't. Leveling up because you did a certain meaningless action is. For example leveling up for playing the game for X number of times or leveling up simply for collecting X number of bullshit on the map.

Then why did you bring it up at all? Isn't it completely irrelevant?

What chink shit game where you playing where they replace experience points with collecting things on the map, and why are you generalising that to "every" game?

Many games do it user. They might not call it leveling up but
Almost every open world game has it.

Oh and fucking Nu Thief had something like it as well.

Play better games Jesus Christ

Again, that has nothing to do with RPGs, RPGs don't do that, at least the majority don't, so I don't even fucking know why you call it levelling up.
As for the relationship between collecting things and Skinner boxes, I'll give you they're related unless the collectables are well hidden.

Because they literally call it leveling up. They literally do. Minecraft, Ark, ect all do. They aren't RPGs but they take the leveling up and grind from the worst of them.

This thread is a Skinner box.

Nice! I won a token:
(You)
I wonder what would happen if these digits repeated…

This shit doesn't hold up as well to time as well as solid complete games, so we're going to see a considerable drop in games worth remembering as time goes on, especially since alot of these grind2win games don't have a true ending per say, you're just encouraged to continue the grind so rather than have a satisfying finish that makes the player want to share the game, they're left with a empty feeling of incompleteness

It's a way to separate skill from success.

monster hunter has been doing the exact same shit for nearly 15 years and nobody bats an eye.