Introduction

I've been gaming a lot recently, so this has been on my mind.

Reinforcement and punishment

In operant conditioning, behavior is modified with reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement and punishment are defined pretty much exactly as you would intuit:

  1. Reinforcement uses a pleasant result to encourage behavior.
  2. Punishment uses an unpleasant result to discourage behavior.

In formal terms, both reinforcement and punishment can be “positive” or “negative.” Note “positive” and “negative” do not refer to goodness. Here, by “positive” we mean “giving,” and by “negative” we mean “taking away.” Positive reinforcement gives a pleasant stimulus; negative reinforcement takes away an unpleasant stimulus.

As a rule of thumb, people generally consider positive reinforcement most effective and agreeable.

Partial reinforcement

One lever we can pull to change how reinforcement modifies behavior is the reinforcement schedule. That is, when do we actually reinforce the behavior?

Our schedule can be based on time intervals, e.g. per number of days, or on ratio of responses, i.e. per number of times the person behaves as desired. Also, our schedule can be fixed or variable. For example, reinforcing every 7 days no matter what would be fixed interval, and reinforcing every 1-3 instances of desired behavior would be variable ratio.

Variable ratio schedules experimentally prove to be strongest in 2 ways:

  1. They result in the most instances of desired behavior.
  2. They result in the most persistent long-term patterns of the desired behavior.

Application

So why bore (hopefully not too much!) you with these psychology concepts? Well, we can see the effects of variable ratio reinforcement all around! The most notable, and perhaps most controversial, occurrence of it is gambling. By design, gambling relies on the strength of variable ratio reinforcement to make money, often from vulnerable people.

Gambling doesn't just occur in casinos. Increasingly, I've noticed gambling in video games: from paid loot boxes with random equipment or skins to paid character rolls with an ultra-rare chance to get an ultra-effective or ultra-cool character for your team. Just as you might feel iffy about casino gambling, you would feel analogously iffy about these game mechanics.

The line

So where does a video game cross the line? Of course, the answer depends on your personal standards, and perhaps experience. On one hand, you can say people are just having fun. And video games are not cheap to make; developers have to make money. On the other hand, it's easy to see how someone could waste money on in-game gambling instead of basic goods, or even worse, instead of the people they should financially support.

Empirically, with optionally paid games, most people pay nothing and very few people pay a lot, so the costs are concentrated toward a potential for harm. For me, a video game's gambling mechanics become bad when 3 conditions are simultaneously met:

  1. The gambling is paid with money (as opposed to time).
  2. The results of the gambling significantly affect gameplay.
  3. The game's interface strongly encourages the gambling with little to no safeguard.

Conclusion

I actively avoid games like what I just described, if not in principle, at least for my own benefit.