The Proteus Paradox (6 page)

In EverQuest there were several folks in my guild who believed if their characters got drunk enough they would actually be teleported to a special location. I think this rumor started because somebody got so drunk they couldn't tell where they were walking (since being drunk warps the way the game draws the graphics) and got stuck in a weird place under Freeport or Qeynos. So these guys kept getting smashed on long camps to try and go to this “special” location, which really screwed us one time when the mob we wanted appeared but half of the group was too wasted to attack it. No matter how much others tried to convince them that there was no special place, they never stopped believing it was true.

[
World of Warcraft,
male, 36]

In the early parts of online games, and even after many hours of playing, players are often only tapping a few keys on their keyboard repeatedly. The game provides incentives for these repetitive gestures whether this is leveling up or finding a rare weapon on a slain monster. From the perspective of an outsider, who hasn't been carefully trained by the game to desire these virtual incentives, many online games may appear tedious and boring. In fact, gamers themselves have a word for the repetitive monster killing that slowly levels them up: they call it
grinding.

A well-studied psychological principle called
operant conditioning
helps us understand how a system of rewards can make an inherently uninteresting task appealing. In its simplest form, the principle seems obvious. If you reward a person for performing a certain behavior, he or she is more likely to repeat that behavior. The way you provide
rewards matters a great deal. Imagine training your dog. After a dog has successfully learned the “sit” command, you might use a fixed schedule and provide a treat every two times the dog follows the command. Or you might provide a treat after a random number of successful “sits.” Studies have shown that the latter schedule is best for maintaining behavior. If a fixed schedule is ever broken, even accidentally, it is easily detected, and the behavior quickly ceases. A broken variable schedule isn't immediately obvious, and the behavior continues.
¹

Another important lesson is that small, rapid rewards can be used to shape incremental progression toward a complex behavior. Your dog will never spontaneously perform complicated tricks such as jumping through a hoop and then running up some stairs to fetch a colored balloon. How, then, to provide a reward to a behavior that doesn't spontaneously manifest itself? To train the dog to perform this trick, the trainer first rewards the dog for moving toward the hoop, then another reward for jumping through the hoop, then another reward for moving toward the stairs, and so forth. Once the dog has learned all the steps, then the dog's owner can maintain the complex trick with just one reward for each complete run.

Online games employ many operant conditioning principles, through both historical trial and error as well as deliberate design. In the early part of the game, many small rewards help players understand the basic paths of advancement. A lowly level 1 character can kill a rat in ten seconds, and after killing ten rats, the character has already become a level 2 character. This initial shaping helps new players learn about combat, monsters, leveling, and equipment. Gradually, the game offers rewards less frequently. Monsters take longer to kill, and it takes twenty-five monster kills to reach level 3, and then a hundred kills to reach level 4. Very soon, it takes hours of
repetitive play to reach the next level, and only rarely is a useful piece of equipment found on a monster.

To facilitate the study of operant conditioning in pigeons and lab rats, B. F. Skinner, the father of radical behaviorism, developed a self-contained testing apparatus, an operant conditioning chamber, better known as a Skinner box. These boxes of wood and glass give the researcher a clear view of the interior. Inside the box are levers that a pigeon or a lab rat can press on, as well as a food-dispensing mechanism. The researcher can release a food pellet on a predetermined schedule after the animal presses a lever.

Although online games clearly rely on much more than operant conditioning, the overlapping elements are undeniable. Online games shape a new player's behavior toward complex button presses using a schedule of rewards that is tightly coupled to specific actions. The game rewards correct behaviors rapidly until the behavior is learned, at which point the behavior can be sustained with less frequent rewards. Many rare items, whether magical equipment or quest items, are dropped by monsters using a variable schedule. You may know that killing the glowing monkey will make it drop a glowing shard, but you don't know how many glowing monkeys you will have to kill before that shard appears.

Skinner is well known for his theory of operant conditioning, but in a quirkier study, he induced superstition in pigeons. His goal was to show that complex human phenomena could be entirely explained by observable and measurable behaviors without recourse to internal cognitive variables such as desires, thoughts, or feelings. As you can imagine, Skinner was no fan of Freud, whose psyche (that is, id, ego, and superego) and defense mechanisms Skinner regarded as impossible to observe and requiring further explanation.

In Skinner's study, he placed pigeons into Skinner boxes and gave
them food pellets using a reward schedule. The pigeons received a food pellet every fifteen seconds, no matter what they did. When the food was released, the pigeon was rewarded for whatever random behavior it was performing. As the bird repeated this behavior because of the reward, the food dropped again, and the behavior was further reinforced. In six of the eight pigeons tested, a clear superstitious behavior resulted. In Skinner's words,

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a “tossing” response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body. . . . Another bird was conditioned to make incomplete pecking or brushing movements directed toward but not touching the floor.

These pigeons behaved as if their ritualized actions caused the food to appear, even though this was not the case. The birds repeated the behaviors five to six times every fifteen seconds. Thus, even though only about 20 percent of the superstitious behavior directly led to food, the intermittent appearance of food was sufficient to sustain the behavior. One of the birds performed ten thousand ritual movements without any food reward before the behavior subsided.
²

High school students do not perform much better than pigeons; a fixed-interval reward led high schoolers to perform elaborate compositions on a piano keyboard. Similar superstitions appear quite often in online games. This makes sense because online games are a kind of Skinner box, and often the cause of rare but highly desirable game outcomes is not immediately obvious. When a superstitious behavior emerges, it is often inadvertently reinforced by the game. The abundance of levers and food pellet flavors in an online game
makes it easy to confuse the underlying causal relations between actions and rewards.
³

When a player kills a monster, it reappears after some time so that it can be killed again. Otherwise, monsters would quickly become extinct. This reappearance is known as
spawning
or
respawning
. Some monsters have fixed and rapid spawn rates (for example, ten seconds after death), while other have random and highly variable spawn rates (anywhere between one and a thousand minutes after death). In the original
EverQuest,
some monsters had spawn times of an hour or even up to six hours or more. Some rare monsters had
placeholder
spawns that further complicated things. A placeholder is a common monster that holds the place of the rare mob and thus prevents the rare mob from spawning until the placeholder is killed. To make things worse, many monsters did not have fixed spawn locations but could spawn in one of several locations on the map. This made it incredibly difficult for one player to know whether the rare monster he or she was waiting for had spawned or whether another player had killed it already. This slow, chaotic pacing was not a unique feature of rare monsters; it was a fact of life in
EverQuest
. A standard monster that took thirty seconds to kill had a respawn time of several minutes—time during which players often had nothing to do. In these many moments of mixed tedium and anticipation, spawn rituals were born. One prevalent superstition was the existence of an “anti-spawn” radius.

In EverQuest, many players were under the impression that the re-spawn mechanic for monsters/NPCs [non-player characters] took into account players' positions. So when people were fighting things in
dungeons, they'd often leave whatever room they were in for a bit because they felt that the room wouldn't respawn while they were there. [
EverQuest,
male, 24]

It was widely believed that the game designers had implemented an “anti-camp radius” around major spawns, such that the mobs would not spawn if people were within the radius. Of course, no one knew exactly what the extent of this radius was, so more risk-averse people would camp further and further from the spawn point in order to avoid the radius. The developers at Verant found this so funny (there was no anti-camp radius) that they added a comment during some loading screens, “Checking anti-camp radius,” just to mess with these players. [
EVE Online,
male, 31]

Another superstition was that the corpses of monsters were placeholders and needed to be looted quickly to speed up respawns.

In Everquest it was a belief that you needed to loot all the corpses of everything in order for more mobs to spawn. This of course is untrue. The mobs spawn on a fairly precise timer and have nothing to do with crowding around the spawn area. [
City of Heroes,
female, 37]

Finally, many players developed ritual “dances” for spawning:

My favorite rituals would probably be the various “spawn dances” in EverQuest. . . . They varied wildly—some people had special gear sets they used, others had sets and sequences of movements and animations (via animated emotes, spellcasting, terrain), ways to move or not move (must stay sitting, still, as much as possible; or must move continually/every X seconds), etc. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 23]

Some players would sit and stand rapidly while strafing back and forth. Others would crouch and run in circles or figure-eight patterns. Jumping seemed also to be a common theme. Seeing a full group of six characters dancing in this manner shortly before a mob was to spawn was very funny. I think that it sometimes was done as a joke, but I knew some players who swore by its success. [
EverQuest,
male, 28]

In the same way that pigeons dance for food in boxes, people dance for monsters in online games.

In
World of Warcraft,
there is a chance that bosses will drop highly valuable pieces of equipment in difficult dungeons. Dungeons in
World of Warcraft
are known as
instances
because player teams each enter their own version of the dungeon. So if fifty different teams are running the Molten Core dungeon, the game creates fifty parallel, independent versions of the dungeon, one for each team. Bosses in the game have set loot tables—that is, different probabilities for a predetermined set of loot, of which several may drop if the boss is killed. Because different classes use different types of equipment (for example, rogues can use daggers, druids can use staves) in the game, many players often leave a dungeon run empty-handed. Boss drops are thus low-probability events with highly desirable outcomes that elicit superstitious behavior.

There is a widely held belief that instances are “seeded” despite lack of evidence and even a direct denial from Blizzard. Seeded refers to the person who starts the group or raid, and it is believed that the class of that person directly impacts what class specific loot will drop. I.E. if a warrior starts the Molten Core raid invites, more druid and warlock gear will drop. If a priest starts the invites, more warrior and mage loot will drop, etc. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 33]

Blizzard consistently states that loot drops are completely random. Yet a lot of people don't believe this because some items drop over and over when under one Master Looter and different items would drop over and over when under a different Master Looter. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 34]

A variant of this belief is that certain characters are luckier or have better loot tables if they are allowed to seed the instance.

We have a particular guildmate who insists that when he enters the dungeon instance first, better loot will tend to drop. Granted, when he has entered first, we've received some very nice, even legendary items in World of Warcraft, but to think he's somehow affecting the loot table by being the first to enter is a bit much. [
World of Warcraft,
male, 30]

[There is] the belief that certain classes seed certain loot in PvE instances within World of Warcraft and that certain players are “lucky” seeders in terms of an increased high-level loot drop rate. Sometimes, raids have been held up until these lucky seeders or a member of a certain class arrives at the instance entrance. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 33]

Silliest is that a particular person provides some sort of luck to getting loot—that one person is responsible for the “seed” being good or bad. [
World of Warcraft,
female, 49]

In short, some characters in online games come to be viewed as being inherently lucky.