Exposing Social Gaming's Hidden Lever

This was originally posted on Betable's Game Monetization blog.

In our last post, Gambling Makes Billions Without Innovation, we showed how each gambling game has spent decades or longer without a single gamplay innovation. We are following this up with a series where we outline each major type of gambling game and how their mechanics can be applied to the modern gaming world. One of the most striking things that we found in our research was that social gaming, a burgeoning $7.2 billion industry that’s beloved by over 800 million players worldwide, is merely a modern adaptation of an invention created in 1887: the slot machine.
 

Slot machines

That’s a slot machine, right? Wrong. It’s the basic action loop of FarmVille.

Here is the description again, but this time, with specific details:

That sounds more like FarmVille now, doesn’t it?

People have often argued that Zynga’s games lack gameplay depth, but make up for it in addictive, accessible mechanics. Jeff Tseng, the co-founder and CEO of Kontagent, even said that Zynga “appeals to the same psychology as gambling” in a recent Forbes article. So what exactly is the psychology of gambling? How did Zynga leverage gambling mechanics to build a massive gaming empire?

Schedule of reinforcement

The small lines jutting out of the trend lines indicate the time & amount of reward. VR = Variable Ratio, FR = Fixed Ratio, VI = Variable Interval, and FI = Fixed Interval.

Zynga’s success has much to do with their skillfully executed manipulation of the human brain. One such method is known as the Random Reward Schedule, based on the results of a study conducted by psychologist B.F. Skinner. In this study, he found that giving pigeons a consistent food reward lead to the least engagement. They would eventually get bored and only come back when hungry. Skinner then found that randomizing whether the reward was given made the pigeons come back more often, as did randomizing the amount of the reward. Lastly, he found that combining these experiments to randomize both whether the reward would occur and how much the award was for lead to a striking increase in engagement. Zynga and other social games companies have implemented the Random Reward Schedule to great effect in their games to keep players coming back.

Furthermore, just the act of engaging in gambling actions for fake money can be exciting for players. Dr. Clark from the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in Cambridge used fMRI brain scanning to measure patterns of brain activity when playing a game that involved gambling. He found a reliable pattern of brain activity when humans receive money as a reward for winning. It should be no surprise that the region of the brain (the striatum) that responds most to gambling also responds to natural reinforcing stimuli like food and sex.

Sex and money have been leveraged by advertising for years

Zynga has a distinct, approachable style

US Virtual Goods Market

Zynga is a well-disguised gambling company