Panken said:
4)They are glorified Skinner Boxes(look it up), except instead of getting food, you get armor or some other shit.
-Which is kind of scary when you think of it. The developers programmed the game to make it addicting and to keep you playing and paying.
Please don't be insulted by the following, for it is my intention to debate rather than attack.
I don't know if you've studied psychology, but it seems to me that to call MMOs operant conditioning chambers (Skinner boxes (herein acronymed OCC)) is just facetiously reductionist. You're not the first to make that comparison, indeed, Wikipedia cites a book which makes such a comparison, but this not only misunderstands the purpose and nature of OCCs, but also ignores the function of drives and fails as a derogation. OCCs test operant conditioning in animals, namely, the associative function in which an animal comes to associate a particular simple mechanism with an unrelated phenomenon e.g. a rat presses a button and an electric shock occurs, this positive punishment (AKA nocuous stimulus i.e. the presence of something unpleasant) becomes associated with the button pressing and the rat no longer presses the button. This applies to humans too; if your mother grounds you for spitting at her then the act of spitting at your mother will become associated with the negative punishment (i.e. the absence of something pleasant) and you will be less likely to spit at her in future as a result.
However, to reduce MMOs to the level of an OCC is a gross oversimplification of MMOs. The analogy to the OCC, as far as I understand it, works thus: positive reinforcer (armour piece, for instance) is achieved through playing the game and this reinforces the behaviour 'playing the game'. However, this reduces 'playing the game' to a single behaviour which is reinforced by something inextricably dependent upon the game itself (the armour piece cannot exist without the game and has no relevance outside it). This would be like reducing 'doing your job' to a single behaviour, whereas in fact there are many little behaviours that add up to that larger behaviour; you probably do many things at your job, each of which you had to learn individually e.g. you may have learnt to type quickly because it was positively reinforced and you may have learnt to be polite because it was negatively reinforced, yet both these behaviours are merged into one single behaviour under the heading 'doing your job'. Similarly, in the MMO, I may have learnt to heal my team correctly because it was negatively reinforced (thrown off the team when I did it badly) and I may have learnt to use route A to get to city B because it was positively reinforced (it was quicker), however, by merging these behaviours into a single 'playing the game' my argument becomes circular:
If we presume that the 'armour piece' is the positive reinforcer (i.e. the thing which makes me want to play the game) and ignore drives then my argument for playing the game on the first go around is: The armour piece reinforces my desire to play the game, my desire to play the game is necessary for the armour piece to be a reinforcer. This is both because 'play the game' has been needlessly reduced in order to become a single behaviour (necessary for the OCC analogy) and the lack of inherent drive satisfaction in the 'armour piece' has been ignored (necessary for the OCC analogy). Saying 'doing your job' is reinforced by 'money' bears no such problem, since money is vestigial for food, which is inherently satisfying, but this is still reductionist.
If I do not merge these separate behaviours into one single behaviour ('playing the game') my argument is no longer circular, for instance, if I say that "I heal my team correctly and my team succeeds which earns me an armour piece, the armour piece positively reinforces my healing of the team" this no longer requires a circular causality, namely, I do not heal to get the armour piece and get the armour piece to heal. Yet if I say I 'play the game' to get the armour piece, yet the armour piece is only a justification for playing the game if I am already playing the game then we create a circular dependency i.e. neither step of the causality can occur first since both require the other to have already occurred. This occurs because the worth of the armour piece is inextricably tied to me already finding worth in the game, which the OCC analogy ignores.
Sorry if this was confusing.
