There is no Skinner Box, says Bungie user research leadThere is no Skinner Box, says Bungie user research lead

In Gamasutra's latest feature, Bungie's John Hopson revisits his popular and influential 2001 article, Behavioral Game Design, to set the record straight on what it really means to marry psychology and games. When the original article was published, writes Hopson, "It was a radical idea to say that games contained rewards and that the way those rewards were allotted could affect how people played. Now it's simply a given." However, his ideas and those of like-minded authors and designers have come under increasing scrutiny and even ridicule in the time since he first put them forward. One common criticism is the idea of putting players in a Skinner Box -- named for the psychologist B.F. Skinner. However, Hopson writes in his new feature, "When critics of this approach describe games as Skinner Boxes, they completely miss the point of the Skinner Box. The goal of the early behaviorists was not to create an artificial environment where some new form of mind control could happen; it was to create a simplified model of the real world." In essence, he writes, it's a misunderstanding of the term. The Skinner box "was an attempt to understand learning at a fundamental level by creating the simplest possible operant learning task: 'Press lever, get food.' Like all scientific experiments, it was an attempt to isolate a phenomenon, to remove distractions and alternative explanations that could confuse the issue being studied." "A Skinner Box is completely unnecessary to create operant conditioning. It is an experimental tool for studying conditioning, nothing more. There wouldn't be any point to 'putting players in a Skinner Box'!", Hopson concludes. He writes, "In my personal view, contingencies in games are ethical if the designer believes the player will have more fun by fulfilling the contingency than they would otherwise." In other words, rewarding players for behavior only makes sense to Hopson if the rewards make a more enjoyable game -- not if they trick players into changing their behavior. The full feature, in which he explores criticisms of his original article and further clarifies his position, is live now on Gamasutra.