Reward vs. Punishment and Success vs. Failure

I'm going to start out with a lot of generalities here, and then work my way down to a more manageable level. By the end, I'm going to make some points about the games industry, especially MMO games.

First off, most of life is about success and failure. For most animals, and for early humans, it was survival vs extinction. Now for a lot of humanity, success and failure are defined more by profit and loss than life and death. As a side note, I'd say that's a basic and logical argument for us being at least slightly more civilized on an absolute scale than we used to be.

Obviously, we all want to succeed, and we don't want to fail. Ever. However, success and failure can not exist without each other. Our society - in a way - uses failure and loss to inform people that they are making bad decisions. And in order to get people to change their behavior, we punish them for failure, and reward them for success. However, when you take these methods to an extreme, or simply use them a lot, people react differently.

Some may stop trying anything, forgoing rewards in order to avoid punishments. In terms of games, this has shown up in recent years by players only wanting to play games where they are rewarded more and punished less, until you get some games that feel like one long sugar high; constant rewards, no punishments. Unfortunately for the players demanding for and playing those games, they feel less of a reward the more of it they get.

And that is the problem: players want only success and reward, and don't want failure and punishment.

The second topic I'd like to tie in is the little thing called a Skinner Box. Basically, it's a container housing a rat, that has various ways of rewarding and punishing said rat. Using it, Skinner could train various behaviors in rats.

Various parts of the world we live in can be described in ways linked to the Skinner Box. We all respond to stimuli, and when we learn that a certain behavior is linked to a certain reward or punishment, we either do that behavior more or less depending on the stimulus.

MMOs have been described as Skinner Boxes as well. In fact, they're probably a little better at that function than most people realized initially. To the point that a large portion of the player base has now been trained to have certain behaviors in games. For instance, most players are extremely risk-averse. If they don't have an obvious advantage, there's a good chance they won't do anything. They also tend to quit if they lose.

However, I think there's an opportunity here. We have these players who only want to succeed and be rewarded, and don't ever want to fail and be punished, and we have them playing in a Skinner Box that has been doing just that. Then we have a few people who came up with games that were Skinner Boxes that had more chances to fail and be punished. Obviously, that's not going to work if we want some more interesting action.


So how about disconnecting reward from success and punishment from failure? Expose players to a game that specifically rewards risk-taking, does have failure as a potential outcome, but doesn't simply punish that failure. I'm not saying "give a big new sword to anyone who dies". I'm saying "If someone just lost a battle, don't have them die, give them multiple interesting ways out."

Planescape: Torment is my idol here. Another game I've heard about that might go the more interesting route is Heavy Rain, though I don't know a lot about it beyond the standard description. In 90+% of games, MMO or otherwise, if you fail at a task, you die. Game over. Insert coin. Try again. Punishment. Many games over the years have worked to dilute this outcome, by making the game easier, or failure less costly. Some RPGs have some way of respawning with minimal penalty so that you don't have to reload from a saved game. But aside from the two titles above, they haven't made failure and death into a part of the narrative of the game itself.

When you fail at something in real life, what do you do? You might complain a little bit, say it wasn't your fault, blame somebody or something else, but at some point you have to do something different. Sometimes you can try again, other times you can't. When you can't, you simply move on. The story of life continues.


Say that forces are fighting for control of a town. One currently controls it while the other invades. If the invader is repulsed, he tries again. If he fails to much, he has to try something different, or retreat for a time to lick his wounds before trying again. Then, he succeeds, and captures the town. What about the defenders? Well, once it was clear they were losing, they made their own retreat. Where do they go? Into the countryside, where the invaders had previously been. The former defenders now become a guerrilla force, striking from a hideout, and gathering their strength and waiting for the opportunity to take back the town.

Basically, what we need is to start creating games that act as Skinner Boxes, but not to reinforce the obvious formulas. Instead, we need to teach players new behaviors, and new values. We need to teach them to value risk taking, not by removing punishments, but by making the standard failure-state lead to new and unseen opportunities.

Imagine fighting a monster in a cave, and if you beat it, you get some treasure, but if you fail to beat it, while fleeing for your lives, it knocks down a wall leading to a never-before-seen cavern leading to perhaps different creatures and treasure.

If you treat the player to enough unusual and inconsistent outcomes instead of "game over", you will begin to teach them to value risk and the potential for failure.

Ready... Go.

How hard is it to learn something on your own? The few things I've taught myself on my own don't even deserve mention. To be fair, I haven't had any real reason to learn something on my own before; I figured that time would come after I had got into my main career. However, one of my classes this semester made me feel just a little bit like I was teaching myself something new. Now obviously, it wasn't entirely on my own, but our excellent professor was very good at forcing us into situations where we had to work very hard to figure things out, and it paid off in buckets. I now have a decent grasp of the Verilog language, and a better feel for how to learn on my own.

So today will mark the beginning of a mild experiment. I don't have much time right now due to term papers, projects, and finals coming up, but we'll still consider today to be the start. I have no idea how far I'll get, or even how well I'll maintain interest, but I think I've found a pretty good source to get started from. Let's see what happens.

Whatever happened to Demos?

I remember about... 10+ years ago, almost every game that came out had a demo you could play as well. What happened to that little policy? Nowadays it seems the only way to find out what a game is like is either to look at the ridiculously funded ads or to ask someone who's already played the game. And that doesn't solve the problem I just ran into.

Last fall my computer died. I lost a lot of files, and some money replacing it, but the important thing is that my new computer is substantially more powerful. However, it's not bleeding edge powerful, and has an integrated graphics card. So I'm finding myself able to play some games that I previously was unable to. But at the same time, I'm finding that it's very hard to determine what games I can play when I have a great processor and plenty of memory, but crap for a video card.

This is where the lack of game demos comes in. If I could obtain a demo of some of the games I'm interested in playing, I could be very sure that my computer can run them or not. Instead, right now I'm stuck trying to decide whether I want to risk $60 on a game that may end up being useless to me. So what options to I have available to me? Risk buying the game, which with my limited income right now is a bad idea. Or pirate the game and test it that way, which has obvious legal and moral issues, and frankly takes a long time these days due to the gigabyte size of recent games. Or just save my money for the day when I can afford a computer that can definitely play the games I want, which is the best decision both financially and academically. Plus, there are lots of games out there I've found that don't have tough system requirements, and are way cheaper to boot.

Listening in, game industry? You just lost a customer because you can't prove your games will work for him. =P

The Gathering Storm

I've been pretty busy with stuff lately, but managed to find the time to read through the latest book in the Wheel of Time series, The Gathering Storm, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. To put it simply, it was awesome. I'll write some more about it later, when I have more time. Probably in mid December. For now, I'll try to write a few thoughts without including major spoilers.

The big question for this book was whether it was going to feel like WoT with a new writer, since Robert Jordan died before he could complete the saga. I'm glad to say that Sanderson lived up to my expectations at least. While there are parts that don't quite feel the way I would expect RJ to write, (simple exampe: the descriptions are not quite as long-winded usually) in general the story itself felt right, and the characters felt right. As well they should, since RJ set up very extensive notes so that the story could be completed. He supposedly even wrote out a few of the major scenes himself ahead of time, most notably the final scene (or climax scene, it's not entirely clear to me).

So I think the very minor complaints I have about the book probably should be directed more at RJ than at Sanderson, and that's something I can accept.

Fair Distribution of Profits

Tobold decided to branch out a little the other day, and wrote a nice post about some general economic thoughts. His metaphor is pretty good, but the really interesting stuff is the discussion running in the comments.

Mistakes and the Economy

Gevlon has a post over on his blog about the common concept often referred to as "Mistakes were made (but not by me)". Usually, I'm not a big fan of his positions, though his thoughts can be very illuminating in attempts to understand different points of view. However, I think he has some interesting points, even he was a bit undiplomatic.

To summarize, when a human is presented with a contradiction, they generally have to solve it in some way. True, sometimes they simply avoid it, but that's not always possible. One of the most typical contradictions is the concept of being wrong. We're generally programmed to be confident; in fact, I would argue that it's a survival instinct. Few people get stuff done by doing it half-heartedly, so when we do something, we need to be confident that we are doing the "right" thing. However, if it turns out that it was the "wrong" thing to do, we're faced with this contradiction.

There are many ways that people deal with it. Generally, they either change their paradigm in some way, or they don't. If they do change, it could lead to a lowering of confidence, perhaps depression as an extreme example, or it could lead to them simply changing their behavior and knowledge, and moving on. However, some people don't change their paradigm when confronted with a problem. The most common instance of this is avoiding responsibility. If they can claim that it wasn't their fault, then their view of themself, their self-esteem, is preserved.

That tactic pisses me off. My beliefs stem from the omnipotence of knowledge, and to see someone willfully avoid knowledge in order avoid risk to their self-esteem is beyond frustrating. However, there is a caviat to that: a politician saying "mistakes were made (but not by me)" is a special case of this to me. In other words, in the current climate of politics, it's virtually impossible for a politician to admit having made a mistake, and not be harmed politically by it. In that case, even if they say it, it is possible that they are still admitting to themselves that they made a mistake, they're simply not allowed to admit it publicly. So in that case, my ire is not directed at the individuals, but at the system that forces that sort of behavior.

Which segues somewhat to the next connection I made (with some help from the end of Gevlon's post), which was to the economy. Milton Friedman once said (as I'm sure a lot of economists have said too) that the economy is not just a profit system, it's a profit and loss system. He implied that the two functions are equally important to the economy; I'd like to argue that they're not, loss is more important.

Another way of putting it is this: there are lots of things being done in the world today that make it a better place. Some of them are for profit, some are not. It is possible to get people to do things for the good of all without encouraging them with money. Price and money is a useful tool to encourage activity, but it is not strictly necessary. However, if someone makes a mistake, it's often difficult for them to admit, even to themselves, that they made a mistake (we're talking about large scale stuff here, like building a bridge for a town in the developing world, and it collapses). What makes it worse is that it's not usually considered a morally wrong act, or at least it isn't by the one who does it. If I steal from someone, unless I'm seriously messed up in the head, I know it's a morally wrong thing to do. However, if I convince myself that something wasn't my fault, that I didn't make a mistake, I don't usually have my conscience frowning at me.

That's where money comes back into the picture. No matter how well I've convinced myself that my idea/company/investment is a good idea, if I'm losing money, it doesn't matter. Because profit is (at least in this respect) a completely objective measure of success. And that's what makes it effective even in the face of mistakes, blame games, and self-delusion.

Day/Night Cycles

I have two points to address here. The first is a proposal or hypothetical idea, and the second is a question about one detail of that proposal.

First: what if day/night cycles mattered in an MMO game world? What could you do with that goal? How might you make them matter? Part of the line of thinking that I'm following here is the idea that disruptions to a simplistic static stability are a good thing. This doesn't mean the world is inherently unpredictable; the basic mechanics are still there, players just have to learn and adapt to a world that is in motion, rather than standing still.

In fact, having various things like the time of day and weather affect things like combat could make it easier to do away with simple random number generators for things like dice rolls. In other words, if there are a host of conditions in the world around you that could modify the outcome of various things such as a spell, is there as much need for relying on simple randomness? Instead of throwing a virtual die, and deciding what happens when that mage throws a fireball, how about looking at the sky, seeing that it's raining, and deciding that his fireball fizzles down to half it's starting size by the time it hits the target?

We can discuss weather another time; this is about day night cycles. I came up with a list of some basic things that could be modified by whether it's day or night out.
- Stealth
- Dodging (can't see it coming, can't dodge)
- Aim (can't see the target, can't hit as easily, especially if they're far away)
- Animal movement (nocturnal creatures come out, such as wolves hunting)
- People sleep
- Guards become more alert (more dangerous, and attacks are more common at night)
- Magic (light-based magic stronger during day, weaker at night)
- Movement (slower at night, faster during day)

I'm sure there are more creative effects out there, but those are some simple things off the top of my head.

Now for the question: How long should a day/night cycle be? My thought is that it shouldn't follow the real world's time. True, it's a nice feel to see it night outside for real when its night game, but if the world is going to change based on this simple cycle, I think it'd be better to shorten the cycle so that someone playing at the same time each day could experience different times.

To this effect, I determined that a multiple of 5 hours per cycle would be a pretty good number. Why? Because multiples of 5 do not divide evenly into 12 hours. In fact, it's a regular unevenness. If you're curious, just go look at the remainder, add that into the next division, and see the remainder after that. If you keep going, you get every remainder possible from 0 to 4 hours if you divide by 5 hours. Different multiples have different remainders, but they all have the same pattern: the same time in RL each day will be a different time of day in the game world, and the pattern won't repeat until at least 5 days later.

Note, a 5 hour day/night cycle would mean 2.5 hours for a day, and 2.5 hours for a night, while a 10 hour cycle would be 5 and 5. I nearly confused myself while writing this, and ended up having to replace a bunch of 2.5s with 5s, since I definitely don't think having 1.25 hours each for a day and night would be a good idea. An hour just seems a bit too short. I could be wrong though.

The downside to this shortened cycle is that it makes coordinating times between players a bit harder. You could have a "game time" and "server time" to make it easier, or just let players figure out their time zones on their own. The other potential problem I can think of is that 5 hours is so short that players could get disoriented, or upset at the fact that the world is changing so quickly on them. This could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing. I think it is a potentially useful mechanic to force players to vary their playing, and keep them on their toes.

That aim can be viewed as a negative thing if players don't like the implied hostility directed at them. I'd rather this wasn't a mechanic that was only popular in Darkfall-style games. However, I think forcing players to adjust regularly could be a good way to help keep them engaged in the game. Plus, if you have 2.5 hours for a day, a large battle might last for a whole (or large part of a) game day. This would create certain potential imperatives to finish fights before factors change in a way that might put the initiator at a disadvantage.

Perhaps 5 hour cycles could do that, but perhaps 10 hour cycles would be better.