In the Olympics, you don’t just finish the race, get handed a medal and a pat on the back. No, the winners stand on a podium next to each other, decked out in their countries colors and are broadcast across the globe.
That moment of recognition and glory is the culmination of years of hard work, performance and dedication. Such a momentous investment by not only the individual but also the countries supporting them would be meaningless without this ceremony.
This is the art of positive reinforcement.
Reward Good Behaviour
I was on a first date with a girl, sipping fruit smoothies and everything seemed to be going ridiculously well – but I couldn’t put my finger on why. She mentioned she worked as a child behavioural specialist – essentially a nanny who specializes in reconditioning misbehaving or distraction-prone kids. I asked her what she felt was the most important tool for fixing bad behaviour.
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| Crista C. – Behavioral Therapist |
“It’s simple, really – reward the things they do right. Be consistent with them and they’ll grow more consistent with you.”
It was then that it dawned on me that she was doing exactly that while we were hanging out. She would laugh and chime in when she enjoyed the topic and go silent whenever she felt bored with the topic at hand.
“You’ve been doing exactly that the whole time we’ve been on this date haven’t you?”
“Huh… Most people don’t catch onto that, but yes, just because it works on kids doesn’t mean it doesn’t work on you too,” she said with a coy wink.
Players are Human
The toolkit that works to adjust human behavior changes very little from youth to adulthood. In fact, much of gaming is actually a rewiring of the explore, experiment, reward/punishment cycle that helps humans learn and grow. Put this cycle to good use and players will find your game more satisfying.
Many Faces of Positive Reinforcement
Mechanics & Numbers
Image a boss hurling an explosive boulder towards the player. If they roll away, they completely avoid the attack. Now imagine, if they roll only partway, they take half the damage. Now imagine a player with the same ability – now the precision, timing and sense of skill are increasingly reinforced by the game mechanics. These opportunities are the first line of defense in making a game a fun experience.
Audio
In Legend of Zelda, destructible walls made a different sound when you hit them. Monsters made wounded noises when you harmed them vs. the irritating tinging noise was made when the attack was ineffective. Fanfare and sound celebrated your victories in Final Fantasy. Music and Sound can conjure feeling of excitement or fear – just as easily they can make even the simplest of attacks feel satisfying.
Visuals and Animation
In classic games, monsters flashed when hit. In Dark Souls, monsters staggered when hit sufficiently hard. In World of Warcraft, monsters move more slowly when wounded and outside of multiplayer content, play wound animations when spells and melee attacks land. Even removing a plate from Deathwing’s back was reinforced with spell effects and animation.
When I was working on Pet Battles for Mists of Pandaria, a large number of pet abilities had secondary bonuses when certain conditions were met. As much as possible, I tried to reinforce the secondary conditions with enhanced visuals and sound. This made the player pulling off the combo feel good *and* alerts the victim that something special happened.
Social Bonding
A powerful item drops that grants you 5% more power. By all rights, you want it and should take it. Instead you pass it to a newer member of your guild. Another player is being ganked by a rogue alone in Eastern Plaguelands. You could easily run by on your mount, but instead you CC the attacker, buying enough time for the victim to recover and launch a counter offensive.
Social bonding and the reinforcement of your alliances are often overlooked against the spotlight of personal progression and glory, but often these small acts can be change the way two people interact for a lifetime. During Classic, I was farming for my Doomguard tome in Blasted Lands. I was barely able to fight the Doomguard Commanders who dropped the items and regularly died while doing so. On one such attempt, a gnome Warlock (I was an Orc, the opposing faction) ran up and I expected a long corpse run. Instead, he helped me slay the Doomguard and we took turns for the next three days, unable to communicate except for pointing and killing the monsters.
That Gnome and I eventually got into touch and I joined his guild, one that eventually lead to me becoming Scarab Lord on my server and forming friendships I look back on fondly to this day.
There’s a million ways to encourage players to do the right thing
I’m afraid I’m getting a little sleepy at this point. What were some unique ways to encourage players that you’ve seen in games? What do you remember that stands out strongly in your mind even years later?
Admittedly I have only half read your posts till now. Because I’m not a game designer but love the games. And sometimes you don’t need to pull back the veil. But!!!… then you made reference to being a warlock and one of the quests that I felt made warlocks interesting. I went back to reread.
Game mechanics reinforcing player behavior is something that I’m very interested in.
The first time I really noticed it was when I hosted a Vampire: the Masquerade game in college. The game lasted a (real life) year. The whole time, the players were crazy-scared. They worked together & supported each other in the face of scary odds.
But! The moment there was any relief, any chance of jumping up their character’s power level, they turned on each other, very nearly ripping each others’ characters limb from limb.
That really impressed me, because in the rule books, THAT was the sort of behavior the authors ascribed to vampires. However, many of my players were brand new to RPGs, much less V:tM in particular. They had never read the books. I didn’t force much of the lore on them, so how did they know to behave in those “vampiric” patterns?
It could only have been the game mechanics.
Looking at the rules, old World of Darkness’ combat rules were awkward to use & clearly favored the monsters over the players. I think the players, even when things went well in the game, felt that there was always a very real chance of them being wiped out.
Secondly, the only real way to “level up” in Vampire, was to consume an older vampire and “lower your generation.” The trick was that only one vampire could benefit from it. And, here we had a group of half a dozen or so all wanting to level up.
That these two, simple, game mechanics could so greatly change my friends’ behavior really impressed me. I try to watch how games’ mechanics affect their players, now, & it’s been very interesting!
Positive reinforcement rarely stands out to me when it’s done correctly, but I can think of a lot of examples of games that FAIL to do this. I think one of the most frustrating and disheartening examples in many RPGs is when you kill a boss because it drops an item, and then the item doesn’t drop. Although I understand why these games do this, especially ones with subscriptions – it pads out the game length – it also makes your victory feel like failure, even though you did everything right. When you get the drop, that feels good, that’s excellent positive reinforcement, but you didn’t do anything better or different, so what exactly is being reinforced? In this sense, I definitely do appreciate the justice point system in WoW, where you kill the boss for points and after five or so kills you can buy an item, instead of just having a 20% chance to get that item as a random drop each time you kill it.