
Jane McGonigle: Saving the World, Reality Hacking thru MMORPG - MaysonL
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/mcgonigal
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stcredzero
Sorry, but most MMORPGs are just like resort casinos. There's a glitzy surface
with great art-direction, but it's really not much deeper than a stage set.
It's just a pretty background to distract you while you're subverted using
variable schedules of reward in a Skinner box. Variable Schedules of Reward
are inherently addicting. You can get a rat in a Skinner Box to expend so much
effort pulling a lever for a food-pellet reward, that it starves to death
because the energy it takes to pull the lever exceeds the amount it gets in
food pellets. This is exactly what happens to people who play slots and other
games in casinos, and what happens to you when you start "farming" for
experience points or gold. Invariably you seek out places where you get the
rare but extremely valuable "drop."

I'm sorry, but using this power of addiction to try to solve social ills could
result in more evils. The fact thats this isn't addressed directly in this
talk concerns me.

In any case, I know how to create an online world that doesn't insult the
intelligence of smart people. I know how to create an online world that isn't
just a stage-set background for a skinner-box addiction, because it has real
depth through emergent complexity.

(In all fairness, the speaker emphasizes the motivational power of social
aspects of online gaming. But collaboration is a capability granted by the
network, not by MMO games in particular.)

