Skinner's gone rogue

FTL: Faster Than Light recently released a free expansion. So I booted up my copy to jump through the stars on a mission to deliver a message critical to a civil war. Many hours later, I was surprised to find myself still playing. This had me thinking about why FTL has such addictive game play. FTL is a Roguelike, a genre started by the text game Rogue. There are three key features of a Roguelike. First, everything is random. The levels, enemies, and items you get are all randomly generated. Other than you starting gear, there is no guarantee of finding any particular item or location in a play through. In FTL, there are a fixed number of stages and the power of the enemies ramps up through them, but within those minor constraints it is all random. Second, Roguelikes have perma-death. If you die, you have to start over from the beginning with a completely new random world. There is no way to revert to a saved state. Finally, Roguelikes are hard and tend to boarder on punishingly so. If you are winning more than 50% of the time, the game is too easy. Sounds like a fun game, no?

Despite how awful Roguelikes sound, they are a popular genre. Some of the popularity has to do with the creativity and adaptability these games require. But that is not what I wanted to talk about. Instead, I want to talk about the psychology of conditioning and how it relates to games, in particular operant conditioning. Loosely defined, this is providing positive or negative feedback to encourage or discourage certain behaviors. An example is Sheldon giving Penny a chocolate every time she does something he approves of when she and Lennard start dating the first time.

On the surface, this clearly relates to games. Every time you defeat an enemy or finish a quest, you are rewarded. Though often the rewards are random in games. This is where things get a bit weird. It turns out that only sometimes rewarding for a behavior reinforces the behavior better than always rewarding for it. Random rewards are one reason that gambling is so addictive.

Putting this together, we see that the difficulty and randomness of Roguelikes utilizes this random reinforcement mechanism. Instead of knowing where a certain enemy is that gives a great item, players sometimes stumble upon interesting enemies that might give a nice item. And this could happen in the next location you visit! Instead of always having the sweet taste of victory, you have to fight for it. But this makes the cases when it happens that much sweeter. Granted it is possible to have the good outcomes happen to infrequently, see the first release of Diablo III. But FTL and other successful Roguelikes condition you to want to come back for more, even though they repeatedly beat you to a pulp.