Life Lessons From Video Games
In 1938 B.F. Skinner published The Behavior of Organisms and let the world in on operant conditioning. What Skinner discovered is that behavior would either be reinforced or avoided depending on if subjects were rewarded or punished. I know this might seem like an obvious mechanic of cause and effect, but the field of behaviorism was just developing at the time.
Skinner performed his experiments in operant conditioning chambers (or Skinner boxes), in which an animal is placed in a box with a reward mechanism such as a lever that will dispense food. If say we had a rat in the box, and it pushed the lever and got a food pellet, it would quickly learn to push the lever whenever it wanted to eat - pushing the lever was reinforced by getting fed. Skinner boxes also could punish the animals with electric shocks, which I know sounds pretty terrible, and honestly, with what I've read about some tests, it really was. For our purposes today, we're going to be focusing a lot more on the reward side of things, but I thought I should at least mention it.
This had some significant implications on how we learn new skills - but it was discovered that how the reward is delivered is even more critical. Behaviorists found that the pattern (or schedule) of reinforcement is incredibly crucial for how quickly we learn a new skill and also how long it takes that behavior to die off. If every time the lever is pushed, the rat gets a pellet that is called continuous reinforcement - the rat learns to do the task quickly but will also stop the behavior shortly after it no longer receives the reward.
If instead of a continuous reward, the rat gets the pellet every 5 minutes after the lever is pushed, that would be a fixed interval schedule. Or we could have the rat get rewarded every time it pushes the level 3 times in a row, that's a fixed-ratio schedule. In both of these scenarios, the rat has to work harder to learn what it has to do. But once it figures it out (or at least thinks it figures it out - partial reinforcement schedule can easily create false positives), it will take a lot longer for that behavior to extinguish.
Then there come the variable schedules, in which being rewarded is essentially random. The rat might have the push the level once the first time, then 3 pushes the second time, and twice for the third time. It knows that sometimes it will get the food pellet, but not every time. This is the most potent form of conditioning. Once the rat learns to push the lever, it will take a long time for that rat to stop pushing the lever (if it ever does).
Now, when I hear about a rat pushing a lever forever to get a reward that may or may not be coming, it reminds me game mechanics I've seen where players will grind for loot drops that may or may not happen. Operant condition is a fundamental feature of a lot of game design. It's how the feedback loop we talked about in the last episode works.
And it comes in all flavors of games - in Stardew Valley it definitely hits me when I'm fishing. I don't know what kind of fish I'm going to get and so I can get hooked on fishing for a while because of that variable reward schedule. Maybe this time I'll get that fish I'm after this time - nope, just another Red Herring. Since this isn't the main loop of the game, it isn't so insidious, but some game developers have started turning to these variable reward schedules to really hook players. Think about some of the mobile games you play and how often you get what's a seemingly random reward. It turns out that it isn't usually all that random. Instead, those rewards are based on an algorithm saying how often you need that dopamine hit to keep you playing. It's the same way that slot machines are programmed.
Operant conditioning doesn't just take place in a lab or in video games - we experience and can use operant conditioning in everyday life. I think the clearest example of this comes from our cellphones. We have been conditioned to check them frequently because we might have just gotten an important notification - <cell phone ding> nope, only text that my cellphone auto-payment went through. The fact that we get so many trivial notifications just reinforces that variable reward schedule. This is one of the reasons that I recommend turning off virtually all notifications on your phone.
Of course, operant conditioning isn't evil - it's just one of the ways our brain works, and we can use it to our advantage. We already know that ADHD brains are incredibly reward motivated, so we can use our knowledge about how operant conditioning works to help us craft better ways for us to stick with our routines and learn things.
What is vital for us to keep in mind is how our schedule of rewards and punishments are doled out. Let's say you are trying to work on your morning routine and decide to reward yourself every time you complete your routine - and let's go with something small here, like a small piece of chocolate (man, what a way to start the day). This might be incredibly effective for you in the beginning, but what we're doing here is continuous reinforcement. If someday you run out of chocolate and stop rewarding yourself, your habit is going to die out quickly. What we can do instead is try working on a variable ratio reward, we're maybe every other day you get the reward for planning your day. I mean, really having that random reward system would be best but a lot harder to implement. Maybe you could roll some dice after you finish planning, and if you get a six, you get your treat.
And your reward doesn't have to be something big - what matters most is what works for you. Maybe you just need your friend to send you a smiley face after you tell them you did your routine. Or maybe adding a sticker to your sticker chart.
Operant conditioning isn't a perfect tool, however. The problem is that sometimes is it isn't as always clear how the mechanism is working. It's easy for operant conditioning to go sideways when the reward or punishment isn't done immediately after the action.
People often get this wrong while trying to train their dog where they'll come home, and maybe the dog has peed on the floor and want to punish the dog. We don't know when the dog peed, so if the dog is punished, it isn't going to know what it is being punished for. Since the dog doesn't want to be punished again, it is going to try and avoid whatever behavior it was doing right before you punished it - maybe it'll associate looking at the window with punishment.
You can also see this when bad behavior is rewarded. The child who is given candy after throwing a tantrum is going to learn that throwing a tantrum is going to get them candy.
Of course, people are a little more complicated and resilient here in that we can communicate about what punishments and rewards are for - when I pee on the floor and get yelled at, I'm going to know what I did wrong.
None the less, we want to give that reward or punishment as close to the activity as we can so we can strongly link them in our minds. And it is worth mentioning that operant conditioning isn't the only mechanism at play in reward behavior. People are complicated, and we're still learning a lot about psychology.
One of the biggest lessons we can take away so far is that how a game is designed is really important. If the main feedback loops of a game don't feel rewarding, we aren't going to keep playing that game. I've played plenty of games that were fun to play but never got me engaged in the game, and I eventually put them down and forgot about them. We often think that the reason that we keep playing a video game is because it's fun, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. Sure, I might pick up a game because it looks fun to play, but that usually isn't the only reason that I'm going to keep on playing it.
This is important to touch on because one of the most frustrating parts about ADHD for me is that it can be hard for me to activate on the things I want to do. I feel like a crazy person sometimes because I find myself not doing something even though it would be fun for me to do - this is especially true for things that take some effort for me to get started on. One example off the top of my head is drawing - making art is fun and rewarding. But unless I've got my art supplies ready to go, it's also going to take some time to set up and get started.
Right off the bat, their video games have a considerable advantage in that they are usually incredibly simple to start up - if I want to play a game on my phone, I can almost immediately load it up. One of the only games I have on my phone right now is a puzzle game called Picture Cross, which is kind of like a math crossword puzzle where you fill in squares to make a picture. I've also got a physical version of the game in a book that I usually keep in my backpack. But because it is so much easier to just whip out my phone and play on there, I've finished all 2378 (two thousand, three hundred seventy-eight) puzzles in the app. Meanwhile, I've only done about 10 of the puzzles in my book - although, admittedly, the ones in the book are also a lot harder and take more time to do.
What we can gather from this is that if we want to do something more often, we need to lower the difficulty of getting to the fun part of what we want to do. If I want to do more puzzles from my book, what I need to do is make it easier to do. This would probably mean leaving it out on my desk so that I can just flip it open and get started - of course, I can't actually do this because my children would steal my colored pencils. But this could also be applied to my art example from earlier. If I wanted to get into the habit of drawing more, I need to make it so that there aren't so many steps to get started. Since I can't just leave things out with my children around, maybe I just need to have a bag with everything in it that I need.
The idea here is to just make the tasks feel as seamless as possible. Those little steps between you doing the thing seem like they aren't that much effort, but our brain always wants to take the path of least resistance. It's why a lot of people end up watching the same TV shows over and over again, it's just easier to choose something you already know you like than doing the research to find something new.
Good game design also helps make the game feel fair (and actually most games are heavily biased towards the player even if it doesn't feel like it). In the last episode, I talked a little bit about one of my favorite platformer games call Celeste. In that game, the game developers made it so that mistakes aren't going to take you out of the immersion of the game. For example, when you are running to jump off the edge of a platform the game gives you a little cheat where you can still jump within 5 frames of going off the side of the platform - this is called coyote time, it gets its name from Wile E. Coyote in the old Roadrunner cartoons. This mechanic makes it so that the game isn't quite as punishing if you make a slight mistake.
I imagine you're telling yourself it would be nice if we had a similar mechanic in real life - unfortunately, we aren't going to be able to do any jumps before we go over a cliff. However, there are areas that we can still apply this idea of reducing our punishment on things. Many people I know with ADHD deal a lot with perfectionism - and really perfectionism is all about being scared of making a mistake. While I'm all about always producing good work, there are also areas in my life where I don't need the specter of perfectionism hanging over me. There are times when good enough needs to be okay.
Last year I was having a lot of trouble getting enough sleep, and so one of my goals was to get two nights in a row where I had 8 hours of sleep on my sleep tracker. It might sound like a low bar, but I struggled with this goal. The closest I got was when on the second night I got 7 hours and 56 minutes - that's pretty darn close. Does that count as hitting my goal? The perfectionist in me says it doesn't, but it really should - I mean for one, sleep trackers are only like 70% accurate because they only measure sleep indirectly. But also because I got close enough where I deserve to have that win - I deserve to feel good about my progress. This doesn't mean that I'll hit the goal and abandon it. I can celebrate that I hit that first step of getting better sleep while also taking what I learned from that and applying to further my next sleep goal.
While games are less punishing than real life, they also let us start over pretty easily. In Celeste, when you do mess up and die, you are immediately whisked to the beginning of the level where you get to try again. This gives you a chance to quickly learn from your mistakes. Okay, I can't jump across that chasm like that, what's another way to approach this.
I think a big part of my resilience in a lot of projects has come from video games and learning that my mistakes are just steps in me learning how to do something the right way. In real life, we may not get to restart the level after we screw up, but we can still take that lesson of trying until we get it right. I'm pretty good with computers, and that mostly comes from me playing with all the features and figuring out the right way to do things. I'm okay with fiddling because I can usually put it back the way it was. When I write the scripts for this show, I know that I'm not going to come up with the right words the first time and knowing that means I feel a lot freer to just slap things into the first draft. Making mistakes there is okay, and it makes the entire process more comfortable because it helps me come up with more and more ideas.
Today’s Top Tips
Operant conditioning is a learning process in which the strength of a behavior is modified by reinforcement or punishment.
We can use what we know about operant conditioning to help us modify our behavior by figuring out the right rewards and punishments we need to complete tasks.
Video games make it incredibly easy for us to pick them up and play - for anything else in our life that we want to do more of we should reduce the steps it takes to start.
Video games don't punish us harshly for messing up - in fact many video games make it easy to restart after we fail making it easier for us to learn from our mistakes. If we want to fail well in real life we've got to accept that we are going to screw up sometimes and figure out easy ways to dust ourselves off and try again.
