Achievment Unlocked!

What makes games fun is an intriguing question, not least because ‘fun’ is a rather nebulous concept. Games are frequently a competitive pursuit, and thus for many gamers there is a desire, or compulsion, to achieve. Sam G asked in an earlier post: “is it more important to win or to have fun?” We’ve discussed before how players may often choose the most effective, if not necessarily the most fun path to success. The concept of ‘grind’ is something which I find difficult to understand. What is it that compels players, (myself included) to continue playing, long after a game has become repetitive or monotonous?

This episode of Extra Credits covers a psychological concept called ‘Skinner box theory’. (Side note: if you haven’t checked out Extra Credits in general, it’s a good series and I recommend it.) The basic gist of this concept is that people can be conditioned to perform an action through a system of infrequent or scheduled rewards, called operant conditioning. According to them, some games use this as a crutch to make players feel compelled to keep playing. For example, levelling systems and random loot drops can be abused in this manner.

Upgrade Complete and Achievement Unlocked are both satirical games which try to persuade players that gamers and game designers are too fixated upon arbitrary achievement instead of gameplay and story. While Achievement Unlocked presents its message in a “giving into the madness” manner (i.e. from the description, “Who needs gameplay when you have ACHIEVEMENTS?”), Upgrade Complete is decidedly cynical and bitter in its tone. They attempt to persuade players via procedural rhetoric: one by rewarding you for inane and overly simple tasks, such as standing still, the other by getting you to earn game money to buy ”upgrades” for absolutely everything, such as the graphics, or a mute button. By presenting a simple game with an overly detailed “reward” system, they both attempt to make the point that some games rely on these systems too much over actual gameplay, tactical challenge, or story.

However, it is interesting to notice the interaction between this procedural rhetoric and the operant conditioning discussed by Extra Credits. Because these games base their procedural rhetoric on the same framework as games which work via operant conditioning, they also get the same result: many players found these games fun, or at the very least engaging, despite their blatant and intentional reliance on achievements and upgrade systems. For them to truly succeed in their message, people would have to stop playing them. But they do draw attention to the overuse of these methods, such that whilst the player may not be convinced that they are not fun in and of themselves, they are successful in getting the player to question why this is, and whether their games rely on this in lieu of creating an experience which is challenging, intriguing, or engaging. As Extra Credits put it, “Engagement and compulsion are different things. Just because you can make an experience compelling, does not make it a good game.”