Psychologists and neuroscients in gaming development?

Basic psychology is applied in video game design, yes. It's not always centered on "tricking" the player into dopamine response loops but also in order to create an experience that flows properly. Levels can be designed around teaching a player a skill or guiding a player into a certain direction through subtle (or sometimes not so) key points or markers.

One thing that I like is the way From Software seems to design their enemies. It seems like they look at players typical responses to enemy patterns, then design punishment based on that response. For example if a boss does a big lunging attack that leaves them open, From will add a chance of them doing an unlockable move or a grab afterwards to keep the player on their toes. It isn't completely random either. It's often based on your inputs and positioning relative to the boss. This is cool because you aren't fighting against a completely random maneuver but rather something you can actually bait out, avoid, and punish yourself. The enemy won't do this every time and they'll mix it up in a way where you'll still have to be on your toes to respond correctly. In the end it makes learning patterns feel much more rewarding.

The same reason why kids back in the day loved CoD multiplayer. It throws you into killing people. No cutscene, no obnoxious intro before the game starts, you're out there, killing shit asap. The psychology here isn't that deep man. If it's boring to you, then it just is. Also people like winning.

spbp

Doesn't take a psychologist or neuroscientist to figure out too much vidya is bad for you. We all know that eating burgers will makes us fat and eating salad will make us lose weight, with caloric intake considered, it's nothing new to know but we still eat the fucking burger. I never liked this narrative that until an actual study comes out there's this giant shocker like "Woah this is not good for my health?????" as if you don't fucking know that as you're not moving an inch in your chair covered in your own semen and playing games for multiple hours and days with little sleep and shit nutrition on a constant basis.

>The psychology here isn't that deep man.
Its not as simple as that, people like you don't comprehend that there are many subtle things that help. There were numerous other games who failed miserably, its why when you look at most expensive to develop games they spend 2x more on marketing and who knows what than on the game itself.

Well, people have this naive trust, if its legal then it can't harm me. But they can't even comprehend why burgers are made so addicted.

>neuroscients
>neurosciencetists
Fuck OP is a retard. Fucking dumb idiot.

Thanks for bumping my thread, faggot. Some small mistake helps me get further, sad for you.

Even when I was young I used to drink a shit ton of sodas and I knew full well what I was doing and that it wasn't a good thing. That's what happens when your life sucks, you take any good and easy thing you can get. That's why it always pisses me off when a study comes out suddenly you can just play the victim card and pretend like it wasn't your fault. Owning up to a problem is the first good thing you can do to move away from it.

You're a complete idiot, just think about what you said for a moment.
>people design games (or any media for that matter) to be as compelling as possible to humans
>this is supposed to be bad

I don't claim escapism doesn't help a ton but some games turning bad can, even rarely turn you off from it. Just them having that feeling of relief and safeness is not as simple as it may look.

how about this instead:
psychologists are all hacks.

>addicted to paying money/wastfor low art
>compelling
Yep, I hope you overdose on jenkem its the most compelling experience you deserve.

You dont need to be a psychologist or a neuroscientist to understand how to make an addictive video game
Things which make a video game addictive are reward systems like leveling up and achievements, and gambling systems that give you rewards at random

Sound like a faggot that just finished his freshman in psych
Insufferable maggot, get a real job

Like flipping burgers in the day
Shitposting in the night? Great life you got there.

>no no you're not enjoying the right things
Being physically addicted to a drug rather than mentally addicted to a game is completely different you stupid mutt.

>games being engineered by psychologists and neurosciencetists in such ways so you can be addicted to them
Behaviouralism with long-term reinforcement. No scientist would do that - its against ethical principles. However, nothing stops suits to use published research to implement that stuff.
>how they trick us
Long-term reinforcement, misleading (deception, manipulation)
>why such a practice is enabled
Law did not catch up to them yet. Also, the whole uproar over government trying to control entertainment (even if it is for the good of the nation).

Tell that to WoW players who lost everything.
>but muh drug is de chemicals
A lot of people can go cold turkey, though a lot of people who plays games don't have friends even if they do stop them they still feel the same pain and loneliness. Its the same reason for an addiction though the means are different.

But the 'science' here isn't the kind that requires MRI scans or years of experimentation and surveys. There's popularity, mechanics, artstyle, word of mouth, etc etc... Again, psychologists aren't wizards. Maybe the devs just know the intricacies of what gives you a good dopamine rush. Like the sound of hitboxes in MW2, it's simple as fuck but the sound is satisfying.

hitmarkers*

It's different.
Try quitting alcoholism. Or worse, hard drugs.
Most wow players combine addictions and create multiple hooks but in the end it's the physical brain change that is harder to quit.

>Maybe
>spend hundreds of millions
Maybe you're just a drooling retard, maybe even worse.

You guys probably don't even realize that browsing Yea Forums is a dopamine trap. All it takes is for you to have any emotion from a thread or post, laughter, anger etc. Do that for weeks and you're hooked for years.

Thanks Captain Obvious.
Im here a decade already.

Well the point was that it's not a physical addiction. You can leave anytime, feel like a shit for a day at the most and go back to baseline.

Do your really think they spend all this cash on formulating some kind of alien technology in their games that makes you mindlessly addicted to their games? Shit like battle royals are addictive because the stakes are higher, if you die you die permanently. If you win, you just made came out on top of 100 people. Since the reason behind that genre's popularity confuses you, let me go back to MW2. Back in my zoomer days, every fucking nigger loved Search and Destroy, most ignored the objective of planting the bomb and instead adored the mechanics of never coming back until round is done. Again, we like winning, and the feeling of winning feels real good when the stakes are that high and risky. You're the retard for overestimating psychology this hard. What, so Marvel's popular big budget capeshit movies are the works of some supreme mastermind, and not the people working on it knowing what they're doing?

>he still doesn't understand
What can I say, some people are simply too stupid to see further than their nose.

Is this the part where you remain enternally vague with extremely short posts to bait me throughout this whole thread now because you have no argument?

OP just need attention since the loser is from some 3rd world shit hole
just pretend u really care and hope the faggot grow up

That's not where the "trap" lies though
It's because thanks to anonymity, Yea Forums is risk-free socialization. Basically you get (some of) the benefits of socialization but without the risks or efforts of live socialization, which may lead you to stop seeking it.
It's similar to drug addiction in this, since drugs give you enjoyment without the need to actually do anything.

That is also true.
Although it's not a physical substance and doesn't nearly create the same heavily damaging and irreversible effects as meth for example. The way our neurochemistry works is unless you fill your bloodstream with any foreign substance you can regain baseline function within a relatively short time.

Well when will they make some fucking good video games then?

The most of brainfucking research has gone into advertisement.
It's why I refuse to consume ads in any form and will consciously focus on blocking them wherever they are.
Games that do the trick of manipulating you into turning them into a habit date back to farmvile or even further back maybe.
Games doing gambling predates computers and they've only gotten more efficient.

Keep your brains clean kids. Being aware of the manipulation does not make you immune to it, just resistant.

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They're trying. It's not some catch-all though, they're just casting nets and seeing if they get statistically significant results. Like anecdotally, I'm more addicted to Yea Forums than I am any game, and I don't even post for (you)'s. There's a lot that goes into it, you're not just trying to release dopamine, you're playing with the whole hormonal and neurotransmitter spectrum. You want people to get stressed out, you want them to delay satisfaction, then you give them that win while they have plenty of epinephrine, and norepinephrine along with some cortisol and they CHIMP THE FUCK OUT. It's nowhere near clicking dots on the screen and counting for each hit. There are stakes, there is pressure.

Of course not everybody enjoys a game like that, not everyone likes CSGO, lots of people think it's too slow. Those people aren't getting the same level of immersion and they aren't hitting the same peaks. Just like some people don't like CoD because all you need to do to be successful is run in circles with a P90. Some hate CSGO and CoD and they play quake because it's fast and strategically oriented.

Basically these (predominately psychologists) are just taking in a paycheck and giving their opinions based on research done in house that is at best nebulous, or just giving it to them how it is. "Just delay rewards, increase pressure, stress them out, and then give them the win"

What I mean to say is basically you all have a bigger chance to make it than anyone who's in a similar position. Imagine a methhead or an alcoholic, they'll never recover in their entire lifetime, even if they quit. In a weird turn of irony you got blessed with an addiction that isn't even an addiction in it's fullest form. Don't you guys think it's hilarious how you've might've spent your formative years shitposting and jerking off to weird shit and you can literally become a productive member of society in a matter of months? Isn't that fucking crazy?

I don't understand your fear.
Even a mild form of critical thinking is enough to mentally block out advertisement. Also, subliminal messages are a meme.

Being consciously aware that an advertisement is associating a product with hot women and other cool shit doesn't mean that your subconscious isn't also fed this information and isn't processing it and remembering it.
Even if you ignore that aspect there is also straight up persuasion, which is why those long form infomercials work where they spend half an hour selling you on a vacuum cleaner. Which is why they do ad floods when they advertise the same thing everywhere at the same time.
It's also junk data, ads are not designed to inform they're meant to cause an impulsive click or to embed product recognition. There is no reason to see them unless you want your though process meddled with for some reason.

in basic ways that try to exploit human tendency to obsessive-compulsive behavior like collecting worthless shit in-game or achievements by completionists and the likes
also the constant "sense of progress", unlock/upgrades, rewards, daily incentives for logging in, all that is in place for the people who don't really get hooked on the gameplay alone and need to be constantly given a carrot
cue all the "fuck this game and it's grind to unlock this shit"
the grind is actually called playing the game, if you don't enjoy it and only want to unlock some useless crap, don't play it
admittedly this is scummy and badly designed 99% of the time
also all the MMOs, especially subscription based, focus on making you work rather than play the game
they compound stacks of shitty mundane tasks, collecting, farming, long term and short term goals that never end and have no real purpose but burning time

I'd say anonymity does little in the way of risk/reward releases/. Look at Fecesbook, it's addictive and people have identifying credentials posted all over it. Conversely forums aren't particularly popular these days, despite being in some middle ground. So it's either the extremes, or what I find more likely, the rate of information fed out.

It's certainly the reason Yea Forums was such a monolithic force in its heyday, threads could go from page 1 post 1 to dead in a matter of minutes. There was a constant influx of new material that no other board could parallel. And in comparison Faceberg, every time you refresh you get some new shit.

Both of them can create adversarial relationships as well. Arguments made on one or the other both offer to devalue a person's ego. Fecesbook goes further in allowing you to do it publicly and be shamed for it. I suppose another addicting quality is lurking and giving witness to such an event. Yea Forums allows this, the only difference is that your 3rd cousin won't know.

And then there's programming, Yea Forums allows you to select a large number of topics, a lot of which are fairly popular on the site so you can have a continual feed of information and interactions that are highly unprofessional to interactions you might expect in a board meeting of a fortune 500. Diversity of exchange I suppose is what you could call it. You get to program Yea Forums yourself by visiting different boards. Faceberg automates a lot of this, sliding you ads or groups or people in your feed.

Forums do none of this, they're usually slow moving and are themselves really only about one topic. They don't program themselves, and while you can have adversarial relationships because they're so heavily moderated you're liable to get banned for successfully gunning someone down in the public view. This means most interactions are very professional.

Name 8 From bosses that have this.

>Keep your brains clean kids. Being aware of the manipulation does not make you immune to it, just resistant.
Ads aren't very effective on people who have even minor awareness of their spending habits.
They're targeted towards the normal people and normal people get scammed into dumbest shit, like loans or becoming religious.

>Games that do the trick of manipulating you into turning them into a habit date back to farmvile or even further back maybe.
I have it easy here because as soon as I stop having fun, the feeling of wasting time creeps on me and I can't shake it off, but I think that normies have some of that too, just less.
I had normie friends in schools and they quickly dropped the timesink "games" with daily rewards and shit.

I'd say that it mostly hits people who don't have good time sinks in their life. People who watch TV all day.
What's the harm in stay at home mom switching from woman-empowering slut garbage on TV to mindless clicking on virtual vegetables?

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I believe that even a little light reading or meditation of some kind develops your willpower and ability to have a good grasp on your subconscious mind.
I've never bought anything that was advertised to me, through coercion, indirect or otherwise. I spent my childhood glued to the tv and I remember those half hour long ads with the vacuum cleaners. I had the money and the ability to get whatever I wanted and it never worked on me. In fact even in later years I've never spent a single dollar on anything virtual either.
I attribute this to exposing yourself to your fear as the best way to desensitize it. Like I've said all it takes is even a mild form of critical thought. When you treat it like a boogeyman it has an emotional grasp over you instead and I think it's a bad thing to actively tell people to stay away from it. When you understand how something works - it doesn't have any power over you.

As long as you think consciously before doing something stupid, none of your actions will ever solely be determined by an unconscious impuls, Well said.

>I have it easy here because as soon as I stop having fun, the feeling of wasting time creeps on me and I can't shake it off
It's a blessing and a curse. One of the pros is that you can become insanely focused and disciplined in anything you put your mind to because you value your time. Some of the cons include not being able to mentally shut off to relate to other people. I work with 30+ year olds who are still manchildren and spend their time, money and attention on random inane and meaningless things and most of them don't really care. But it's also a good thing to have the ability to stop taking yourself too seriously because the most pleasurable things in life are the most simple and when you're in that reactive mode all the time you can't have a good time for prolonged periods at all.

this, i bought a high end pc and the only thing i feel like playing is bloodlines and other old games

>the most pleasurable things in life are the most simple
It really depends on person.
I genuinely do not enjoy the simple - food, exercise, socialization, repetitive vidya, TV. I bet sex would also be on the list, but I don't care enough to check.
I can only have fun from shit that appeals to human part of a person, not to the animal stuff. Complex design, figuring out a system, autistic philosophical discourses where everyone uses correct logic to determine which belief is the least likely to be wrong.

>they don't know the unconscious mind drives the conscious mind
Classical thinking boys, we're learning more and more that executive processes are very high level processes that are driven by the unconscious. Think about all the memory maths you do, 2x2=4, do you visualize the table? Do you multiply directly? You likely don't, instead the unconscious cogs turn and rapidfire select the congruent memory and send it forward to the executive department where you use metacognition to determine if it's correct. The PFC is just a big debugger, you are just a debugger for the unconscious mind.

Another set of examples, you don't painstakingly search for every word in your individual lexicon to find the appropriate word each time you need one in a sentence, just like you don't watch every footfall and determine where the next should go. You can do either, but usually do neither.

These modalities for advertising and retention appeal to specific sets of people, not a universal whole. And lest we forget some 50% of all psychology literature is unsound in that it can't be reproduced or is otherwise flawed. Going back to our premise, the unconscious mind does most of the coloring of our world, and even the body does a hefty bit of that through cascades of neurotransmitters, hormones, ligands, histamine and so on. The unconscious mind accumulates sensory data from these and creates a baseline from information given by the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems along with itself in series of feedback loops.

This is all then fed as emotional states or apathy depending on x or y to the conscious mind. If you're allostatic then you're apathetic or perhaps happy or maybe just complacent. The conscious can then modulate these things, you can manually manipulate your emotions with practice (though there are exceptions being things like chronic inflammation or endocrine disorders and the like) or have them deliberately manipulated.

>And lest we forget some 50% of all psychology literature is unsound in that it can't be reproduced or is otherwise flawed.
Neural networks will fix it
Age of automated jewry is at hand

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>I can only have fun from shit that appeals to human part of a person, not to the animal stuff.
I used to think the same way. Neckbeard roguelikes and hard sci-fi would be the only thing that I could genuinely enjoy, I turned down a lot of "simple pleasures" for the dumbest reasons. But I'd always feel this subtle void that something is missing in my life, even when I'd have large success in my interests. I realized that everything in life has to be in balance and so I lowered my inhibitions and exposed myself to a lot of fears out of my comfort zone, I did that because it was the fastest way to grow mentally and physically. I've learned to discern between real fear that would potentially end my life and psychological fear, which is an illusion. Now for the first time in my life I'm "happy", and it doesn't matter if it's from sex, vidya or whatever. Most of all I feel congruent and at peace and what I've noticed was that the most pleasurable things are the most simple.

That's why you exercise meditation and learn how to block out external stimuli. Added with the benefit of deep reading and development of critical thought the most likely event in occurence is that you shift from a consumer to a content producer. PUA and Self-Help have made billion dollar businesses off of these two simple principles.

So there's a break in which system you have to appeal to. Do you want to appeal to the basal reptile by presenting food and pussy? Or do you want to appeal to the intellectual gentlefolk with rational dialogues? Well the answer is both. You need to provoke the lizard, incite interest, a red car and an attractive potential mate. But then you need to drive the point home by implying social prowess in owning that car, make the justification a step away.

The balancing act therein is the difficult part. Some people really do prefer modesty, or at least having it in their theory of mind that they're perceived as such, so a red Ferrari isn't going to appeal to their conscious mind, and thus they will rationalize away from it, and gravitate towards the beige Tercel. They might even react unpredictably towards the Ferrari at the lizard level, finding it threatening, or maybe it incites anger by holding his prospective mate captive. Now you've got a mad modest man that wants the beige Tercel seething about the Ferrari with his next girlfriend hanging off of it and a missed opportunity.

How would you win in that situation? Perhaps by offering a Ferrari in forest green with a less aggressive bumper and an eco badge with a turbocharged 4 cylinder, you should still furnish the girl though. Men and women both love attractive girls. But now you've got people seething about pretty girls running a smear campaign against Ferrari for objectifying women and the theory of mind behind buying that car shifts. Was it effective? Yeah, in this hypothetical instance. Did it compromise sales? Maybe.

>meditation
This is such a meme, there are dozens of kinds of meditation, which one are you preaching nigger? And if you're so high and mighty off of it why are you shitposting on 4channel/v/?

>production
How about conservation? Production is all we've done for a millennia, look where we are

>PUA
>self-help
Sounds like you're getting marketed to just like everybody else.

>I realized that everything in life has to be in balance and so I lowered my inhibitions and exposed myself to a lot of fears out of my comfort zone, I did that because it was the fastest way to grow mentally and physically.
I'm doing this shit, but it's not changing who I am because doing this is a part of what I am.
I didn't choose to only enjoy the "human fun", it's just that I don't have most of the animal part.

As soon as I actually enjoy anything leaning towards the physical pleasure or herd instinct, I get hit by hedonist treadmill.
First it gets addictive, then I stop having fun, then I slowly wean off it because it's no longer fun but still an effort.
That's how I lost all my friends when schizoid and anhedonia kicked in.

In short
>do something
>game rewards you for it
>your brain wants to do it again because it wants to feel rewarded for it
>the more you repeat the cycle the harder it is to get that dopamine fix meaning you need to play for longer to get it
>congratulations now you are trapped

It's how Runescape works at least

With all that said there is one resounding example where this shit works. It's the media, all those VOX articles with nebulous outrage headlines that get posted here on the daily. That's precisely their intention, it's pure lizard brain shit, contagious mob mentality that spreads like wildfire from both sides. Of course all they have to do is get someone to click a link to the article and its as good as gold. They're not pushing a $60 fee, nor a 30 year mortgage, they won't charge you anything, and they'll let idiots on Yea Forums spread their seed for them. Of course this isn't specific to VOX, all the national news outlets do it. Local institutions have to be slightly more conservative in their outrage bait, but it's certainly just as intent on creating polarizing content to galvanize the mobs.

Stop falling for it.

I'm not preaching anything, there's no need to become so hostile. We're simply having a discussion about what can help "prevent brainwashing" by advertisement.
Simple meditation. Absence of all thought completely. Try it out for at least 5 minutes. It should be incredibly easy for someone of your intelligence.
I'm not being marketed by anyone. I simply gave you an example of simple concepts that have worked for me and that successful people use in response to your claim that you have no control over your subconscious.
I never claimed to be high and mighty, I am in here because this place is a part of me as anything else and I only post to give value if asked for. If you're not interested I can just leave.

By in large you can't even claim that you are who you are because of you and you alone. Your every thought is a reaction to something, either experience or influence by something that has nothing to do with you. The choices you think you made are not even yours to begin with, figuring out what or who instilled that into you is the thing you should concern yourself with. For example, and I'm not saying this is you, but those who have been exposed to religion most of their lives think similarly about hedonism as you do. That's not to say that hedonism is any inherent evil in it, it depends on the context and the gradation levels of hedonism that matters. For example a religious person would be against casual sex with a beautiful woman due to conditioning whereas in reality that's a value that he didn't even come up with himself. He thinks it's his choice when it's not. it works the same way with a lot of things that you consider as freedom of choice or will. True willpower is the one you train yourself, through experience, you train it like a muscle as the bigger it gets the more choices you have.

>For example, and I'm not saying this is you, but those who have been exposed to religion most of their lives think similarly about hedonism as you do.
I'm not all that much against hedonism, it's just something that does not work for me.
Normies often split hedonism into "not-hedonism", such as eating cheap food they like or having sex with person they're married to, and "hedonism", such as heroin and orgies.
For them, this split is natural, since the "fun" doesn't seem to wear off for "non-hedonism". Although old couples almost universally show that it does wear off much more than society thinks it does.

For me, there is no such split.
Anything that gives me fun is at first addicting, then routine, then boring, sometimes repulsive after that, at least until I can get away from it for a while.

>True willpower is the one you train yourself, through experience, you train it like a muscle as the bigger it gets the more choices you have.
I do that. I do physical exercises that would be pointless in my situation, except for the fact that they take willpower to continue.
The only way it makes me happier is indirect feeling of having been through something hard, reminding me I can force myself to do hard things if needed.

in Battlefield 3 you get the same cash register "katshing" wether you kill or get killed.

>Anything that gives me fun is at first addicting, then routine, then boring, sometimes repulsive after that, at least until I can get away from it for a while.
This is relatively normal. You can trace it physically through hormonal spikes. Boredom of a pleasurable activity is a natural response of the "reptilian" brain to promote growth and variety of activity. It's a natural evolutionary aspect of human behavior. However the repulsive aspect is not normal, it could be a self-inhibiting pattern you've convinced yourself of. I don't know you personally, so I'm assuming your brain is baseline average. In my case, the subsequent feeling of guilt following some form of hedonism would usually be a result of conditioning of some kind, that I had no control over. I'm not a guru so I don't know any other way of regaining control and re-establishing what your inner values truly are, only through out of comfort zone and fear based experiences in my case.
>The only way it makes me happier is indirect feeling of having been through something hard, reminding me I can force myself to do hard things if needed.
Exactly this. Mental fortitude and willpower nurtures that sense of accomplishment that gives you the freedom to be at peace with yourself, to be congruent and content in any situation. It's the most true and genuine sense of identity you can ever have and believe in.

>However the repulsive aspect is not normal
I associate things with their context. If I'm playing a game that is no longer fun while feeling like shit, I remember feeling like shit while playing the game.
I know that I'm doing this so I don't blame the game/people/food, but it does make me avoid them.

>I know that I'm doing this so I don't blame the game/people/food, but it does make me avoid them.
I haven't thought of it like that. This could be a good idea to get rid of some bad habits since emotional attachment of any kind is a powerful catalyst.

There's one bad aspect I think you shouldn't do though. Whenever I would fail an activity, especially something creative driven, I would talk about myself and it in a negative way. I used to think that this way you would create a negative feedback loop to condition yourself to avoid the mistake, and it works to some degree but it has a huge downside. You associate feelings of guilt, shame, failure and a lot of fatalist nuances to your activity, which often lead to feeling like extreme shit after a mistake and subsequently apathy and disinterest. Right now if I get bored of an activity, I search for new challenges to put on myself, and when mistakes happen I simply accept them as part of the process and never associate anything as negative as that with an activity that's supposed to make me grow.
A good example would be your deload workout week. I used to let ego get in the way and blame myself for not putting the weight I needed but then I let it go, accept it as part of the process and let my ego take a break. I've had better progress since then. I think associating negative aspects could be good with a negative activity rather than a positive one or you can get caught up in things you could probably never get out of that way.

>Whenever I would fail an activity, especially something creative driven, I would talk about myself and it in a negative way.
Oh I've been through this, though it was just about myself.
I realized I had to stop when self-bantz turned to self-insults and then I started associating those with self. It was like having a second personality made just to destroy the first one.
My morality is a great part of what I am, without it I'd need a whole new "me", so a "voice" trying to convince me I am actually strongly incompatible with my moral system is pretty much mental suicide.

By the way, are you schizoid? I'm pretty sure I am and you sound like you match a great deal of symptoms too.

>Other than the really few articles on dopamine and gaming, are there any in-dept sources on that topic?
Look up Skinner's box. In a nutshell, experiments were made about how stimulus can influence the frequency of specific behaviors. In games, you can create a similar environment where the player is constantly bombarded with positive stimulus that pushes them into playing more and (sometimes) spend more money.

>They don't just automatically know whatever aspects of a game's design will be the most appealing to / rewarding for the player
Obviously you won't know what is appealing to everyone but there was research put into propaganda to figure out what catches people's attention. Stuff like the usage of specific colors, contrast, memorable logos and music, it all helps with passing the message more effectively.

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This helped me drop all that shit back in the day when mmos were still a thing:
cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted_p1.html

Gacha games literally use the same tried&true psychological tricks casinos do to rope people in.

Morality is flexible. The things you are for now you might be against in a few years. You should read In search of lost time by Proust and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
I used to think I might have BPD coming out of terrible relationships left and right in my teens, which was mostly my fault.
I've taken several tests and I'm completely healthy. There's various neuroticisms in every person out there so don't sweat it too much even if you're diagnosed, take the meds you're prescribed, if any, and do the best you can.

>Morality is flexible.
Not when it's the only reason not to commit suicide right now.

There's a million reasons to live other than that, take it at face value from an ex nihilist.

>food analogy
That food analogy doesnt even work. You can eat a salad, but if its smothered with big mac sauce, itll have the same number of calories as a burger :^)

That being said, you're not even talking about the point OP is trying to make

There's literally nothing wrong with a common denominator analogy if it's valid.
>with caloric intake considered
At least finish reading the sentence next time.

Suicide is the result of not knowing how to handle your emotions at the time. As intense as the pain is, it is always temporary like any emotion. Even a suicidal person will not want to die unless they are pushed to their edge when they see dying as the only way to escape from the pain.

So the skinner box is a famous example, but an arguably more complex setup (but more relevant) is the pigeon task suppression studies.

The tl;dr is that pigeons were trained to press a button when a green light was shown. Pressing the red button when the light was on gave them food, and after a second or two it'd turn off, then a short time later it'd come back on. For most animal models, the animal is starved to around 85% normal body weight so food is VERY reinforcing; they are very hungry. BUT there was ANOTHER button, a blue button. When you pressed the blue button, it led to a larger time interval between the green lights.

So why do that? What was found was that the pigeons would press the blue button often. Why? Because they wanted a break from the light. But again, the pigeons could just NOT press the button--remember, it had to be trained in the first place to use it.

It literally had to give itself a break from a food reward task that it really wanted because it couldnt help responding to the stimulus.

I think its pretty applicable to the era of "if you buy a booster for $0.99 you can skip all the annoying steps of building xyz etc". But instead of a blue light, you have gems and credit card number forms

"Im a slave to my brain chemistry so everything i do is something else fault except my will" thread.

That's pretty neat, I never heard about that experiment.

We aren't slaves to our chemicals. Sure emotions and instincts will have a strong impact on us, but being aware of them and formulating strategies allows us to override or at least deal with them better. Some as easier like not randomly raping people on the streets because you are horny, others are more tricky like not letting your anger push you into hurting others or yourself.

Its a complicated setup, usually you'll find it in animal methodology and research design college courses. I'd look it up but i dont have my database pw with me at the moment. it may be on NIH or pubmed if you dig around--tons of old behavior studies used pigeons back then (rats have ass vision, whereas pigeons learn visual cues real fast)

>Look at Fecesbook, it's addictive and people have identifying credentials posted all over it.
It comes down to the person and whether or not they're ok with it. I mean, I had a myspace account with actual irl friends and family, but I still didn't put my real name or picture on it.

Yeah, rats are more useful for physiological tests since their system is relatively similar to ours while being easily affordable.

You can count on microtransactionshit being engineered by psychologists to be more addictive.

There could be billions, but none are mine.
And vast majority of them only work if you don't want to die.
I don't "need" a reason to not die, it's just that without it, I will do it because that is what I want.

For me, "at the time" means "second half of my life so far".
I have it planned for a specific year. It's symbolic in a way, but also practical for me. I need those plans to actually motivate myself to either find a different way out or follow this one.

It's not about escaping overwhelming pain, it's about universal feeling of not wanting this anymore, a below 0 satisfaction rate.
It's like:
>I am not having fun with this game, I will turn it off
>I don't enjoy this food and I am not hungry
>this TV show is boring and teaches me nothing, I will turn it off
>I am falling asleep but I still need to finish the job, I wish I could just stop working right now
>those people talk about things that do not interest me and their voices annoy me, I wish I could excuse myself from this conversation
All of those sound reasonable to me.
I just apply the same reasoning to life.

You'd probably have better luck with this thread if it was during GG because there were conspiracy theorists scared that DARPA and DiGRA were going to control gaming.

I get where you are coming from. When I said "at the time" I meant the emotion itself at its peak, not the thoughts that make you feel sad. It's easy to feel like offing yourself when your mind goes through that one sequence of thoughts you would rather avoid. I hope you are already consulting a therapist user.

You don't really have to worry unless you play mobile/browser games. Those are the real money cash cows that make billions of dollars and where the high level scientists are hired to figure out ways to make people addicted, down to UI changes.

EA also hires them, but that shouldn't surprise anyone

>I hope you are already consulting a therapist user.
Planned it for second-to-last year.
I don't really trust it will help, but I need to do it to carry out The Plan™.

Psychologist here. Don't fall for this bullshit, it's just basic gambling mechanisms

Oh it definitively does. I had a similar issue you had and went there for like a year, it did wonders to me. It's amazing how much your life improves when you become aware of how your head ticks.

>Psychologist
What area my nig?

>(((Psychologist)))
Are you a jew or a woman?

Gaming companies got caught hiring psychologists with focus on addiction. Interestingly enough it's hard to find now. Might have been scrubbed.

The people saying gambling mechanics are on point. It's important however to realize the scope of what gambling constitutes. Social media falls also under it despite most never associating browsing facebook with gambling. All you need is a element of chance coupled with a reward. What happens next is optimizing the chance&reward ratios to maximize addiction and facebook does that as well as games.

And if you pour Wendy's dressing with 1000 calories into your salad, you might as well be eating a burger. with caloric intake considered, it's still subjective. Hence why the food analogy is bad. Within certain context, it makes sense, in others it doesnt.

Europe
I wanna become both very soon

the feeling of reward and experience releases dopeamine, its just that simple

applied psychology student reporting

Destiny 2 did it too for example. Activision also patented rigged matchmaking to increase cashshop sales.

But what causes those feelings?

t. neural network programmer

The hidden layer

The expectation of a reward causes a higher spike than the actual reward. This is why gambling is so addiction -getting the reward doesn't actually give you the biggest spike. It's the gambling itself that gives the biggest high. And that's why deterministic 100% reward systems are never as addicting as gambling.

also true, wanted to type this myself

Sounds reasonable, it adds up to the dog saliva experiment.

It's not higher you just anticipate the reward and shift it more towards early stages of the action. For instance while nicotine can be a positive reinforcer the feeling if reward can shift to an earlier action. Just opening a pack can also feel rewarding reinforcing smoking eventually

So, did any of you actually get caught in the skinner box trap?
As in, genuinely didn't have fun but kept going.

For me, it was Fallout Shelter
Fuck this "game"

Attached: 1487827168840.jpg (448x501, 51K)

>You act like psychologists are trained in magic
To be fair, they act like that too, since everything they do is pure pseudoscience

idk, i guess its just basic human nature to feel good by (the thought of) gaining something

we have dopeamine receptors in our brain to receive it for whatever reason

Also most people never get true satisfaction because if you get used to something that felt good, in the end its not gona give you the same feeling

moderation is key in life

Avocado kadabra

>Europe
confirmed psychologist

it's actually higher. There's a study with graphed curve for blood concentration. Right when pressing the button has the biggest spike. The reward itself was roughly only half. This is why it's so big. It's freely available on pubmed if you want to read it.

I think I have an addiction to edamame and salt.

How so?

skinner boxes are generally for stupid people, why the fuck would you be playing something that isn't fun?

Jetpack Joyride for me a few years ago.

Because I kept thinking that there will be some fun just around the corner until I could say with confidence that there won't be any.

Don't need a psychologist to exploit people with gambling weaknesses, but yes, we use teachings from Addiction Psychology on our games.
You are not the main target for them. Mobile game is where all the money is, because frankly, US/Europe is such a nonfactor in gaming revenue. China is all it matters, and in China you are capped at how much you can spend per month on a PC game, but for mobile there is no limit so we make mobile games to be as addictive as possible.

Autism is the only way to have control over your unconscious mind. The ultimate man brain

It depends on the game. There is little point in getting you heavily addicted to single player games. Their entire business plan is to churn you from game to game so they can keep selling things.
The games that try to addict people are mostly the phone games and free to play games. Their end goal is getting you on the microtransaction wheel.

Here are some tricks they use:

Loot boxes - Give you the loot box and make you buy a key to use it. You feel like you have these resources. Loot boxes also tap into gambling.

Gambling - Pay for a random chance to get something extremely good. The backbone of gatcha games.

Loss Aversion - Humans are adverse to loss. Losing $100 makes you far more unhappy than gaining $100 makes you happy. So you do something like Puzzles and Dragons where get your rewards in the middle of the level and they present all they stuff you lose if you don't spend a coin to continue. The sunk cost fallacy comes from this. You don't want your time and effort to be wasted.

Leveling up/Progress - The driving force behind MMOs. The equivalent of giving kids gold stars. You have a reward schedule and are basically making a Skinner box.

Disassociating in game currency with real currency - Pretty much all the games make you buy currency. If you were presented with spending $1 every time you continues there would be more resistance. Instead they convert everything into a fake, game only currency to reduce resistance.

Social comparisons - The gaming version of keeping up with the Jones. You don't want to feel your social status dropping, so the game compares you with other players. Lets you see the stuff someone slightly higher than you has.

Reciprocity - When you get a gift or someone does a favor for you, you feel obligated to do something in return. Most of the games abuse this, when a friend buys something big for themselves, you get a little something too. Shouldn't you buy something for them.

Studies about microorganisms and radiation were made before people even had the tools to directly observe them. While the "mind" on itself cannot be observed at the moment, a lot can and has been done with what is affected by it. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if someone built a machine that visualized thoughts by the end of the century.

I do like my traps on dopamine. Without it they're just boring.

Some build a algorithm that can visualize what you see already from training a neural net on brainwaves + images presented. It was low res but first major step of extracting information directly from the brain.

This, it's kind of scary when you think about that fact that game devs have no choice but to go mobile because of the sheer money they make from jewing chinks.

I find it absurd CANDY CRUSH makes the same amount of money as EVERY BLIZZARD GAME COMBINED.

But there is probably some sort of tolerance level that is above average at the same time. Possible that the dopamine reaction is stronger due to this

cont.

Annoyances/Grind to wear down willpower - Willpower is a finite resource. Many of these games will intentionally annoy you and then offer a little cash as a way to get around the annoyance. Each time it takes a little willpower to resist.

Commitment - Once you have made progress and committed to something you feel more obligation to see it through. So a game will give you a goal and show you the progress you made. A little more and you made it.

Psychological triggers - You are trained when you hear your phone play the message sound to pick it up and check. Your mom might be messaging or calling you. Games abuse this and use the same sort of triggers to get you paying attention to them.

Straight up addiction - Humans have patterns of behavior, related heavily to skinner's theory. If every time you shake a tree you get food, you'll shake that tree. Even if the reward stops coming you'll keep trying to shake it. This is because with your ancestors sometimes there were only a few coconuts left, but the guy who kept trying got the meal. So the games will push hard to get you to log on regularly. This is why you get cravings to go back to something. You have to fight these cravings. The whole process is called psychological extinction.

The decoy effect - One of the purchases is clearly a much worse deal than the other. You can get 100 coins for $1 or 1,000 coils for $5. People will buy the 1,000 coins. Not only that they will be more inclined to make the purchase because they are getting a good deal.

Why it isn't purely focused on behavior psychology in games, I would strong recommend reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. It is a really good base for everything.

The strongest tool to beat them is recognizing their tricks and then reminding yourself "These people are motherfuckers, I owe them nothing, they are the scum of the earth."

there is this fucking creepy weirdo who posts "Warm memo" all the time

boards.fireden.net/v/thread/456072309/#456072309

Attached: warmemo.jpg (1817x466, 131K)

This all sounds so unappealing to me.
I don't get normals. I mean, I get that those are things they do, but it's things that someone else does, not something "doable", it's like they're using NPC-only abilities.

It's unthinkable to me to consider gambling without at least approximating the expected value of the result and comparing it to cost.

>Social comparisons - The gaming version of keeping up with the Jones. You don't want to feel your social status dropping, so the game compares you with other players. Lets you see the stuff someone slightly higher than you has.
I haven't seen this one.
Any examples?

While we don't know 100% of the mind, we know certain behavior patterns that can be abused. I know if I price something at $9.99 you will be more likely to buy it than if I make it $10. That is because it feels like it costs a lot less.
I know if I give you a free gift or a free sample, you feel a bit of obligation to me. So if I give you 50 free coins before asking you to buy 1,000 you are far more likely to buy the 1,000.
I also know that if you reject the 1,000 and I then follow up with a 500 coin offer, you are more likely to buy it than if I offer both the 500 and 1,000 simultaneously. It feels like I am bartering with you and giving you a better deal.

>you are just a debugger for the unconscious mind
>no stack trace
>no peek/poke memory
>no breakpoints
>no halt/restart
>no memory allocation charts and stats
what did he mean by this bros

It's because the dev is a fucking retard who tried to hack a debugger into a product feature while only providing release builds.

I think it's plain to see that some games are designed to addict and to keep the player there to spend money. This is of course most obvious with microtransaction-driven games, especially things like gacha or lootbox-based titles where getting what you want isn't even a problem of deterministic progression, but is based on luck and very low drop chances in order to keep the player spending money constantly and peppered with special events where you get a freebie or the terrible odds turn slightly less terrible as a way to keep the rewards coming and to make you think it's overall not so bad.

I feel like this is most prevalent in F2P and not really the case in what would be a traditional, full-featured SP game, though some of the most cancerous companies out there are now sneaking in microtransactions even in SP.

It is unappealing. I would probably take being punched in the dick over most of these games. They are insufferable cancer.

Social comparisons are most popular in phone games. At a simple level a high score board is this. Farmville would compare you to your friends back in the day. I think Clash of the Clans does this too. MMOs are big on this. A major reason the hub cities exist is so you can see other players running around in their cool gear with their high levels and have social goals. Heck, it is all over Yea Forums with shit like PS4 vs Xbox vs Switch or Apex Legends vs Fortnite. People have a lot invested in their social status.
Also note this one hits women a hell of a lot harder than it hits men. They have very rigid pecking orders and social games to determine who ranks where. You'll catch them playing constant games where they compare each other and say stuff like "her nails look cheap." They are big on sending out social cues to indicate they are better. A poor guy can become a self made millionaire and raise is social status. A woman typically raises her social status by who she associates with and the messages they send off, so she marries up the social ladder or gets into more exclusive social groups. So their rank in the social pecking order is far more important to them as it is a lot harder to change.

any game with a ranking board. think back to Arcades, getting 2nd only motivates you to try for 1st.
or ranking in battle royale. you see this fancy hat your friend got for jnvesting 10 hours? better do that top to get that and stay cool!

Generally, I leave when I realize I'm not having fun any more.

The perfect dopamine trap usually have a good Randomizer, or allow for many scenarios to take place. The more choice you have, the better. Space Station 13 is a perfect example of dopamine, but it is also the perfect game on social behavior in a work environment with the usual enemy scenario. Psychologists could use this game for a good research, but there is no other servers that allows you to fuck around as much as /vg/ now thanks to all the whiny babies that screeches and rages over the simplest things.

Also achievements helps for other games

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But skinner box design is also about expecting more fun later, not just now.

>any game with a ranking board
That's not really it because it compares you to like top 10.
If you aren't anywhere near top 10, it's like seeing a saudi oil baron, not like seeing your friend who makes 30% more than you do.

>Also note this one hits women a hell of a lot harder than it hits men.
Women are like double normies - applying empathy and logic to them is instant failure, but trying to predict their behavior as if they were robots or animals gives consistent results.
So alien

>A major reason the hub cities exist is so you can see other players running around in their cool gear with their high levels and have social goals.
I played Runescape and WoW a bit back in the days, but never felt like the maxlevel grinders passing by were anything but different species.
I'll put it into "normie NPC shit that you shouldn't try to reason with, just accept as something they do" bin.

>Heck, it is all over Yea Forums with shit like PS4 vs Xbox vs Switch or Apex Legends vs Fortnite.
That's somewhat different because they are fighting each other in a zero sum game.
It's hard for me to imagine a Farmville "player" gloating that other "player" didn't get some drop, but exclusives are the most important "feature" of consoles even though they literally are just about others not having the same.

limited willpower is literally make believe. There's been publications that showcased people only follow that rule when they get told it's limited.

>enjoy games
>become game developer
>make games you enjoyed
>find out you were just an addict this whole time and are now an enabler

>Try quitting alcoholism. Or worse, hard drugs.
Alcohol is a hard drug.

And publications that show the opposite

And one with some of the worst withdrawal symptoms at that.
Death from opiate withdrawal is rare, untreated severe alcohol withdrawal is considered life-threatening.

>stack trace
Metacognition
>POKE, PEEK
Recall, short and long term. Muscle Memory. All immediately accessible and rewriteable to and by the conscious.
>Breakpoints
Can't find an analogue for these, naps or meditation. I guess you could chalk it up to metacognition, but self reflection on a given activity while removed from it.
>Halt/restart
Certainly this is sleep, of course the program is an I, so restarting it from initial parameters only sets back the data accumulated, and so the feature is removed from biology. EST and amnesia are fairly common though, as is pruning.
>memory allocation
You certainly don't get stats, but you know when you don't know something. You know when you've forgotten something. Shit, one of the common memory techniques is the memory palace, where you use imaginary physical spaces to house memories. Recollection of past event both near and distant can also be enhanced by visualizing the data.

I'm not a programmer though, so correct me if I've misinterpreted these things. I used debugger loosely, perhaps I should've used a different term.

Here's some xkcd to corroborate:
explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1163:_Debugger

Overwatch is one such game. They used psychological tricks to get people to buy more loot boxes.

Psychologist here. Well, at least I have a diploma. IT is much better as a career. I even wrote a thesis about corelarion between vidya and psychological factors.
Current understanding of vidya in professional psychology is very low. Nobody touches the subject nor cares. There's much more on neuroscientists side.
But you should keep in mind that single research means jack shit in vacuum. Actual science happens when you have the same thing questioned over and over again.
You may look up ludology. It's considered as a parascience related to vidya.

Well yeah, first limited willpower was published then some called it out as bs and pointed at methodical flaws which lead to their own studies on make believe. It's not on equal standing.

I don't think constant exposure is a willpower thing. It's just a matter of lowering the hurdle and placing it in front of you. Just like hungry at the restaurant you will more likely buy something then when you sit at home and have to drive over first.

game theory is prolly the closest science to vidya. Literally about minmaxing decision making.

Alcohol consumption is normalized since youth in most of Europe. It takes great lengths, volume and time to actually become enough of an alcoholic to suffer severe irreversible withdrawal effects.

>memory palace
there's been some publications about the same section used for orientation in space also being used for sorting things like people etc by attributes and assigning distance. Fits beautifully in when if you consider reusing a space construct for memory management to work better than other approaches.