Games People Play

Most of us have become obsessed with a game at some point, either mashing on it over and over again in a single session that lasts hours, or returning to it for weeks or months.

It doesn’t always look like fun, to be honest, but something keeps drawing us back in. As a studio that create apps, this dynamic interests Small Planet. What makes people want to return to a game over and over again, and how can we apply some of those principles to increase engagement in our own products?

If you think about it, games are the purest distillation of engagement. A game has no other purpose than to be played. It can’t order a car or a burrito for you, it can’t track your period or check your bank balance. You have to want to go back purely for the experience.

Up until recently I played FIFA 13 all the time. (I got it years ago.) I liked it, I got used to it, and I don’t want to change. I love the dynamic fluidity, the complexity, and the almost medieval pageantry.

Monument Valley and its recent sequel are totally different. Quiet, dark, and mysterious. It’s the satisfaction of solving the puzzle that brings us back.

The only thing these games have in common is their ability to burrow deep into my brain. So what’s the connecting thread here?

The Compulsion Loop

The Compulsion Loop has been defined as a habitual, designed chain of activities that will be repeated to gain a neurochemical reward. That reward is either a feeling of pleasure, and/or a relief from pain.

In other words, it’s a system that’s designed to keep someone performing an action over and over again through reinforcement and reward. The idea of applying compulsion loops to video games has been around at least since 2001, but really became popular around 2010.

The three components of a compulsion loop are: Anticipation, Action, and Reward.

And the idea is to build these loops into your game experience. If that’s a little abstract, maybe this will help:

That can be a powerful little cycle as long as the reward is compelling enough to make you want more. And for that to be the case, it has to affect your user on the neurochemical level — like with the release of dopamine.

What’s in the Box?

The notion of compulsion loops is based on the work of B.F. Skinner, a Harvard psychologist who thought that behavior could be programmed through positive and negative reinforcement.

He would put a rat in a box and train it to press a lever by rewarding it with food. And then he would make the exercise more complex by adding lights and tones. The rat would have to press the lever under specific conditions, like when a light was on, to receive the food.

He saw this process as a loop — stimulus, response, reinforcement — and this is the basis of what we call the compulsion loop.

What’s particularly relevant for UX designers is that Skinner spent a lot of time exploring how reinforcements should be doled out over time for maximum effect. He called these Reinforcement Schedulesand they come in a few different models.

Continuous Reinforcement is a one-to-one relationship between response and reinforcement. So every time the lever is pulled, the rat kibble comes out.

Fixed Interval Schedule Reinforcement means the treats are given out at fixed time periods, as long as the proper response is made. Then Variable Interval Schedule Reinforcement means the reinforcement comes after a random number of responses, like slot machines.

So, Which One Works the Best?

Skinner discovered that randomizing how long it takes to be rewarded — the interval — and randomizing how many actions it takes to receive a reward — the ratio — leads to the highest levels of activity. It increases desire.

Wait a minute … why?

Well, our brains crave predictability, and we’re willing to spend the time to achieve it. In fact, we’re more than willing, we’re compelled to find the patterns. It’s a very powerful human impulse to hang in and try to outlast the randomness and crack the pattern.

That’s because of Dopamine. Dopamine doesn’t reward us for finding patterns, it keeps us searching for patterns. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers.

Among many other things, it signals predicted rewards. So, we crave actions that release dopamine. And when you block dopamine, activity drops dramatically. And remember those reinforcement schedules we talked about a little while ago? They influence dopamine release.

In Part Two we’ll talk more about that and explore reinforcing action in a non-game context.