I know what a Skinner Box is, but where Reddit and Gamasutra and the video are failing is the following: absent testing, you can vaguely describe anything in these terms. The earliest instance of this discussion I can find as a Reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2itlvw/destiny_addictive_formula_detailed_by_bungie/
This guy's "research" consisted of grabbing the Wikipedia article on stuff like Operant Conditioning (
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning) and basically tying elements of the game to the structure of these concepts.
I could argue that moderators on GAF use name tags as bait to condition us into posting and have calculated the optimal amount of tag awards as a reinforcement schedule. That the community and the expected quotes of "I found that funny" are confirmation feedback loops to stay tied to the thread. And that this is all manipulative.
But the thing is, tying two ideas together and saying there's some parallels doesn't make an argument. The correlation between arcade revenue and deaths from people falling off their beds in the United States (200-2009) matches to r=0.91. I can't just observe two things happening and draw a conclusion without further testing.
Operant conditioning is an important concept but too many people have read about a Skinner Box on Wiki or Kotaku and assume that these things are foolproof manipulation devices. Research into the field allows you to determine what consumers want - creating appetitive incentives towards a given behavior (in terms of business this would mean consumption).
This is at the heart of advertising and indirectly the whole point of every business meeting at every company ever. How do I keep my clients coming back.
I'm calling the article pseudo science because it's taking concepts from fields and arbitrarily awarding get them powers they don't have and using them in a context foreign to their actual scope.
You run focus groups. Players like random rewards. They're satisfying. Let's play around with the rate so it's not overwhelming but not too slow that they feel it isn't worth it. Find a balance of where customers are feeling most satisfied. There you go, you've managed to create a virtual system people enjoy and have fun with. That's as far as the Skinner Box concept can be taken here.
The key difference being: in creating a reinforcement schedule designed to keep people here because it's where they've revealed to draw satisfaction, as opposed to the (this is insane) rate which causes addiction.
And if you're successfully satisfying your clients, you've got a product that sells. If you don't, you have a product people quit on. You adapt so your retention rate improves - by listening to what they want and implementing the attending changes.
Do you see the difference between trying to keep your clients by designing systems that suit their responses - and the macabre suggestion that they're engineering addiction?
