On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 57

Psychology
I'm far from an expert on psychology, but I know enough to know that
it has a strong relationship to the field of game design. Psychology is the
study of human behavior, and games are machines for human behavior
to attach to, so it makes sense that learning about psychology will benefit
the game designer.
One area of psychology that's helpful for understanding games is
compulsive behavior. Many popular video games, such as World of War-
craft , Pokémon , and Farmville , exploit human psychology to keep people
playing. These games take advantage of our deep desire to gather ( Poké-
mon ), show status ( World of Warcraft ), and receive rewards ( Farmville ).
Many have used the term Skinner box to refer to these types of games.
This is another name for behaviorist B. F. Skinner's operant conditioning
chamber , which was literally a box with a button inside. Pigeons or rats
would be placed in the box and receive food when they pressed the but-
ton (in some studies an electrified grid was activated). This created a
clear pattern of consequences, which in turn modified behavior (a pro-
cess behaviorists call operant conditioning ). Many of you probably al-
ready see the obvious similarities between this box and, say, Farmville ,
which is all about constantly rewarding the player.
One could counter that all games manipulate human psychology.
While this is absolutely true, the question is, what are players getting
out of a game? Good games have all kinds of great, practical benefits for
the human mind that go beyond pure enjoyment. Great games can be
enriching in the same way that fine films, albums, or paintings can be,
but so-called skinner box games tend to leave people empty, since they
are merely being exploited.
Game Theory
Game theory is not the same as game design theory, which is the sub-
ject of this topic. Game theory is a very formalized logical science that
attempts to predict behavior given certain game-like situations. There
are some great online resources for learning about game theory on the
Internet, and it's definitely worth learning a thing or two about it. Some
of the “games� of game theory may even inspire an interesting game, but
more likely, you'll find the process of working out these dilemmas paral-
lels that of working out game balance.
One of the simplest and most famous examples of game theory is
the prisoner's dilemma . It goes like this: two men have been arrested and
taken into separate rooms to be questioned, and each prisoner has the
choice of whether to betray the other. If both prisoners choose not to rat