3. Making you press the button
Imagine that a mouse is its own box. Because we are gamers too, we don’t like to think of ourselves as mice.
What can you do to make the mouse press the button immediately? If you feed him for every time he pushes the button, he will quickly become relaxed, because he will know that he can feed easily. It is much better to make a machine that feeds it, but not always, automatically. Once it realizes this the mouse will press the button as quickly as it can so that it can have more food. Experiments prove this fact.
This behavior is known as the Odds Shifting Award and this is the reason why so many people try to hoard things they don’t need in World of Warcraft. This works exactly the same way on slot machines. You can surrender right now and let the next player win, or the next one after him!
In our opinion, for example, ZT Online,an MMO game developed in China, uses this system in a less trivial way. The game is full of chests that may or may not contain random items, but you need to find the keys in order to open them. Where do you find the keys? You have to buy them with real money. The same goes for the chips to play the slot machines. But wait, this is still not the best part. ZT Online goes much further than the casinos: the player who opens the most chests per day gets a special item.
Thousands of players compete daily to find out who can open the most chests. One woman was known to have opened thousands of chests all night long, but she still couldn’t win the prize. Simply, there was someone crazier than she was.
What is the problem, you ask?
Can you imagine her character standing in front of a chest pressing the same answers in dialog boxes and watching the same animation for hours? If you hadn’t known this story, you would think she had some kind of disease.
Skinner knew how to achieve this result. He called this “training.” Small step-by-step awards working like the links in a chain. It is up to you to decide whether or not to build a Tier 10 Armor in World of Warcraft knowing that you need 5 parts to get the full Tier. The 5 parts can be obtained by gathering 400 Frost Emblems that you get when you defeat certain enemies multiple times. After this, you will need to upgrade each of these parts with the Marks of Sanctification and then again with Heroic Marks of Sanctification. So you will have to redo the same missions over and over again sitting in front of the computer and clicking endlessly for days on end.
Can this still be called gambling? Unfortunately it is more like a rash that you keep scratching…. And it keeps getting worse.
