The art of satisfaction is highly volatile. It changes with the audience, their motivation, the situation and even their experience level playing your game. Satisfaction is the result of many little things done right, built on a backbone of one major thing: Positive Reinforcement.
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
Crista C. – Behavioral Therapist |
Players are Human
Many Faces of Positive Reinforcement
Mechanics & Numbers
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.
Hydra says
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.
John Smith says
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!
FF3 LockeZ says
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.