Thinking Outside The (Skinner) Box
How B. F. Skinner influences the world of interactive media
Press a button, receive food, repeat.
Seems pretty easy right? You’re probably thinking to yourself “But that’s boring,” and to be fair, being stuck in a cycle like that would leave you feeling pretty boxed in. That might be because you are literally in a box, a Skinner Box to be exact.
This contraption is the brainchild of renowned American psychologist Burrhus Frederick Skinner, and this humble box started a revolution in behavioral thinking. Unbeknownst to many, Skinner’s ideas turn up in interactive multimedia to this day, and they can help turn a game, toy, or piece of software from dust to magic.
B. F. Skinner — The Executive Chef of Interactive Media
B. F. Skinner was born on March 20th, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. He originally attended the Hamilton College in New York with the intention to make a career as a writer, but he became frustrated with it after coming to the realization that he did not have an enriching enough life at the age of 24. He instead became interested in psychology and gained his PhD in the field from Harvard University in 1931, staying as a researcher until 1936. He returned to the university as a professor in 1948 and taught there until he retired in 1974.
During his tenure at Harvard, Skinner developed the prototype for the Skinner Box. Skinner had been researching rats’ behavior, and he created boxes that would automatically reward rats for completing a certain behavior, such as pushing a lever or button. Eventually, pigeons came to be used instead, after Skinner observed them roosting outside his office window at the University of Minnesota. They could be trained to tap a red dot for food, as shown in this video:
The Skinner Box’s formal name was the “operant conditioning chamber,” and as the video shows and the name suggest, operant conditioning was the main principle behind this famous invention.
Operant Conditioning — Skinner’s First Ingredient
One of the most well-known concepts in modern psychology is classical conditioning, famously researched by Russian behaviorist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate on command by first combining the delivery of food with the ringing of a bell, then gradually removing the food until the simple act of ringing the bell was enough to trigger salivation. Pavlov discovered that when you repeatedly combine a neutral stimulus (e.g. the bell) with a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. the food), the subject’s brain begins to associate the two.
In the 20th century, classical conditioning was one of the prevailing theories in behavioral psychology, but B. F. Skinner believed that this was not the only way humans and animals learned behaviors, and he set out to prove it. Through much experimentation using his Skinner Boxes, Skinner discovered that animals can be trained to perform certain actions through a process known as operant conditioning. Operant conditioning can be divided into two types: reinforcement and punishment. In reinforcement, a desired behavior is increased, and in punishment, an undesired behavior is decreased. Both reinforcement and punishment can be classified further into positive and negative. In positive reinforcement, a positive stimulus is added to encourage a desired behavior, while in positive punishment, an unwanted stimulus is taken away. In negative reinforcement and punishment, the opposite occurs: a negative stimulus is added to decrease undesired behavior, or a positive one is taken away.
When the stimulus is given or taken away every time the action is completed, it is called continuous reinforcement, but Skinner observed that a technique that is especially potent in creating learned behaviors is intermittent reinforcement. The subject receives a reinforcing stimulus as a reward for completing an action, but on a certain type of schedules. Schedules can be divided into three types: ratio, where rewards are given after the subject completes a certain number of actions; interval, where the reward is given after a certain amount of time of completing the action; and time, where the reward is given after a certain period, regardless of whether the action has been completed or not. Schedules can also be fixed, where a reward is given every time, or variable, where the reward is given at certain intervals on average, but not every time.
The principles of reinforcement have been applied to interactive media, especially video games, for decades. They can be used to train players to perform certain actions and encourage the player to keep playing, but if executed wrong, reinforcement can make the player feel as if they are wasting their time.
Monster Hunter: World — How Core Loops Create Magic
Monster Hunter: World, released in 2018 for the Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows, is Japanese video game developer Capcom’s best selling game of all time, with over 14 million units sold as of October 2019. While Monster Hunter has been one of Capcom’s flagship series since 2004, what makes World unlike any other game in the series is that the game is more tailored towards newer players, with improvements to its user interface, a bigger focus on cooperative multiplayer gameplay, and improved monster AI that allows players to use environmental elements to their advantage.
Monster Hunter: World, like its predecessors, is centered around the player encountering and battling monsters of many different types in order to gain rewards. These rewards often come in the form of new weapons and armor. These determine which abilities the player can use and may allow them to defeat monsters they were not able to before, creating a core loop where the player battles weaker monsters in order to gain the weapons required to battle stronger monsters. This is a great example of continuous reinforcement, because the player gets rewarded and becomes stronger in game every time they defeat a monster. Because of the difficulty of the game (some monsters can take a half hour or longer to take down), the player is encouraged to keep “grinding” in order to beat the enemy that they are struggling against. This core loop is what makes Monster Hunter: World so addictive, and we can only expect it to entice players further now that its Iceborne expansion has been released.
Shiny Pokémon — How a Lack of Intervals Creates Dust
In the massively successful creature-collecting Pokémon games, there are two main ways to encounter wild Pokémon: a random encounter in tall grass (or an overworld encounter in the most recent games, Sword and Shield), and breeding two Pokémon at a day care center to create offspring. When encountering or breeding a new Pokémon, there is a 1 in 4,096 chance of finding a differently-colored Pokémon, referred to officially as a “Shiny” Pokémon due to the sparkles that appear during the creature’s entrance animation, and these have become some of the most sought after commodities in the Pokémon community.
Game Freak, the development team behind Pokémon, have recognized that hardcore fans are willing to spend hours on end hunting for or breeding for “Shinies,” and they have made this easier in the more recent games. Pokémon Black and White introduced the Shiny Charm, an item given to the player after completing the game’s National Pokédex. This item adds an additional 2 in 4,096 chance to the base probability of finding a Shiny. This is often coupled by Shiny hunters with the “Masuda method,” a method that has existed since Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, which increases the chance of finding a Shiny to 6 in 4,096. This can stack with the effect of the Shiny Charm, bringing the final chance of Shininess to 8 in 4,096, or 1 in 512.
While Shiny hunting and breeding still remain popular, the very low probability of finding Shinies can be a turnoff for more casual players, as it is effectively gambling. There is no interval for Shiny encounters, only a fixed probability, meaning that the amount of eggs required to hatch a Shiny Pokémon can range from the tens, to the hundreds, to the thousands. After a certain amount of time spent on this, players may become frustrated and think that they are wasting their time, just to own a Pokémon with a different color scheme.
Though B. F. Skinner passed away in 1990, his findings still remain engrained in the collective consciousness of interactive media, and examples of operant conditioning, both good and bad, spring up on a daily basis.
Skinner’s ingredients, when applied correctly, can help improve your digital recipe.
