Have you ever played a game way past the point where it was fun? Have you ever finished a game, and then looked back and thought what the hell was I doing with my life?
Some games are built around reward schedules. Their design makes you repeat dulling, tedious tasks that have long lost their novelty, creating the illusion of engagement. Even some poorly designed action games use this to convince players to smash the same buttons for 12 hours straight.
You can spot the techniques in random loot drops, grinding, leveling up, farming, loot boxes. Persuading you to stay for just one more prize, even though you’ve been bored and sleepy for hours. Almost anything with a points system is using some version of this. And it goes beyond points — it applies to anything with a clear, manifest reward.
In the early 1930s, B.F. Skinner began studying psychology in a groundbreaking new way: Radical Behaviorism.
Before him, we already knew how to condition immediate reactions — how to induce fear, hunger, sadness. Imagine getting someone terrified of pencils, or inducing extreme sadness over pumpkins.
But this power was limited to immediate, reflexive reactions. Not rational decisions. Skinner’s breakthrough was showing that logical decisions can be conditioned too. He went so far as stating that there is no real free will — that every decision is the outcome of consequences of previous decisions, and how they affected us.
The Skinner Box
Skinner built a simple closed box with a button inside that automatically dispensed food. He put a pigeon in the box and recorded what happened.
He proved he could condition the pigeon’s decision-making. Pecking the button wasn’t an immediate reaction to a stimulus — it was learned behaviour. This distinction makes all the difference. This is operant conditioning. And it works on humans too.
Further research revealed something even more impressive: the best way to keep someone repeating an action isn’t to reward them every time. It’s to reward them at random intervals — scattered enough to create the sense of randomness. This turns out to be far more effective.
You can see this in gambling. We all know the odds aren’t in the gambler’s favour, and the gamblers know it too. So why do they keep playing? Ask yourself: would you rather spend 8 hours in a casino playing blackjack and ending with €100, or pushing a button in a factory for the same time and the same pay? Which would people say is more fun?
Conditioning
When talking about conditioned learning, we need to understand what a reinforcement is. It’s the rewarding support of someone’s action, achieved by exploiting conditioners. There are two kinds:
Primary conditioners. Biological needs: food, water, sleep, sexual desire. The reward can be huge, but it diminishes once you reach satiation.
Secondary conditioners. Needs outside the biological realm: social approval, sense of power, money. These don’t hit a satiation point. Reinforcement through secondary conditioners can be extremely powerful. Some argue that trying to fulfil these unappeasable needs is what fuels human progress and creativity. Some say they’re the root of all unhappiness.
The truth is, secondary needs are just proxy achievements to eventually get the primary ones.
Too many games use Skinner techniques as a catch — a cover to delay your realisation of how boring and uninspired they are.
But there are better ways to foster engagement. Not just Skinner Box tricks, hustles, hoodwinks, gambits, flimflams, stratagems, and bamboozles.
Compelling narrative. Have you ever wanted to get lost in a world? Continue playing just because you wanted to be there? This is what great masterpieces achieve. The Wizarding World, Middle-Earth, Skyrim, the Fallout series. You don’t even need to build a complete legendarium — just interesting and sensitive stories. Unravelling mysteries can be as compelling as any cold Skinner Box reward system.
Mastery. We all like to practice, learn, and improve. Players stay engaged just by having the opportunity to master their skills and use that mastery to overcome challenges. Street Fighter, Dark Souls, Portal, Civilization. All of this gets amplified with online competition.
Behaviorism isn’t a bad thing. All honest and compelling design can be enhanced with Skinner Box techniques, making games more exciting. But we need to be aware of their existence, and push back against the increasing reliance on methods that just trick players into compulsive, non-compelling, unhealthy gaming.
We can do better than that.