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Behaviourism, In-game Economies and the Steam Community Market
A look into how In-game item systems can increase player motivations by providing rewards, of both internal and external value; from virtual weapons, skins and keys.
This was initially drafted in January 2016 and used for coursework.
Behaviourism, In-game Economies and the Steam Community Market
A product being used continuously in a set manner is subject to routine, a user of the product can be influenced into this manner by how the product sells itself. The establishment of routine is focused upon in the book ‘Hooked: A Guide to Building Habit-Forming Products’ by Nir Eyal.
It theorises a 4 stage framework in the process of how users become ‘hooked’ to the product they own.
The first stage is the trigger, this can be considered as the factor which sparks the interest to people and will actuate their behaviour. Triggers come in 2 types, external and internal; “When a product becomes tightly coupled with a thought, an emotion, or a pre-existing routine, it leverages an internal trigger. Unlike external triggers, which use sensory stimuli like a morning alarm clock or giant “login now ” button, you can’t see, touch, or hear an internal trigger” (Eyal, 2013, P.41).
Team Fortress 2 (Valve, 2007) is an FPS multiplayer game released by Valve for the PC platform consisting of 9 different character classes to play matches in a team orientated style. Technically, wanting to play a game can be a trigger, but that’s quite broad to say, how can games further entice players?
TF2 had a set of achievements per each class to attract players to try each of them and learn through these milestones to understand how the class should be utilised. This can be considered learning through habits or attribution, for this instance an act of remembering being rewarded for doing the correct thing – positive reinforcement. Learning through reinforcement is known as Operant Conditioning, a form Behaviourism , where players can be encouraged or discouraged with their actions by being given positive or negative reinforcements and learning from it.
But when the achievements are completed, what would keep people wanting to continue?
One of the first developments was to reward players specific weapons when a certain amount of achievements were completed per class, but once players had done so they again had no other enticing features to keep them coming back.
Valve decided to introduce a ‘Skinner box’ format to induce people to keep coming back to the game, the notable change came to TF2 and has greatly affected the player base ever since; an item drop system. People who would play the game for a certain amount of time would receive items at random intervals, consisting of either a weapon or cosmetics, this design choice would prove to give players a reason to play at least a few hours a week (the cap to how many drops resets weekly) because they were being rewarded for playing the game.
A skinner box is basically; rewards being given to subjects who perform a certain action (the reinforcer) to ensure specific responses are learned from a stimulus response association, this was discovered by B.F. Skinner after experimenting with rats and pigeons.
“Experimenting with different regimens of reward, he found that they produced markedly different patterns of response. From this was born a new area of psychology and one that has some strong implications for game design” (Hopson, 2001).
Players were not just being reinforced with rewards or punishments for their actions in-game like any game, but given actual items/equipment through reward schedules which could be traded with other players. This developed into an in-game economy where weapons found could be converted into metal and be used to craft cosmetic apparel or traded for Mann.co keys with other players. The keys represented real world value as they cannot be found, only bought and are supposed to be used opening crates, another item which could be found with cosmetics of different qualities when opened. This relates to the hook systems second phase, “Following the trigger comes the action: the behaviour done in anticipation of a reward” (Eyal, 2013, P.7).
The item drop system can be seen as a secondary reinforcer and the way the system is laid out creates a reinforcement loop: Cue>Behaviour>Reward, which is comparative to Nir Eyal’s hooked system. Players know that by playing the game they will be rewarded with items at random intervals of time until the limit is met per week. The conditioning to keep it random suggests it would be more effective for player engagement, most likely to prevent oversaturation of the reward. Desire and motivation drives people to continue playing, “What distinguishes the hook model from a plain vanilla feedback loop is the Hook’s ability to create a craving. Feedback loops are all around us, but predictable ones don’t create desire” (Eyal, 2013, P.8).
Money is the external factor that fuels TF2’s economy, a secondary reinforcer that started with Valve introducing the ‘Mann-conomy Update’. Released in September 2010, it brought in many new weapons, cosmetics, crate drops and the ‘Mann co. Store’ for micro transactions.
Players enjoy investing time into games to improve their ability in playing them, to either win more or simply enjoy the game further with competitiveness. But for others they prefer to customize their characters and ‘show off’ or simply want to profit from the financial side of investment with the in-game economy.
The extrinsic factors further progressed when on December 2012 Valve launched the Steam Community Market. After the success of Steam trading, Valve included the virtual market to allow users to buy and sell in-game items with Steam Wallet (funds on a Steam account). Now instead of exchanging items, players could earn currency which could be used to purchase whatever was available on steam from games, game expansions and other in-game item content.
The Steam community market itself had evolved into a tool for enticement, a way to keep players to remain ‘hooked’ and keep TF2’s economies more accessible and active.
This market is the pinnacle to the extrinsic form of investment, a player could collect their items and trade for items that could be sold on the community market and with acquired steam wallet funds they could buy items from other games or actual games.
Pictured above, the market in 2012. (Extremetech, 2012) |