this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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No they are not and I will fight you. If you mean multiplayer online games, well maybe, you might have a point, but I don't play those games and so I will make no claims about them.
However. If you call Outer Wilds or Pathologic/Pathologic 2 or Disco Elysium or A Short Hike or Journey skinner boxes, well, you're just wrong. Games are experiences, they're stories that can be more immersive than a movie or a book and if they're done well, holy shit are they good!
Games are (can be) amazing, and I'm sick of pretending they're not.
They're still feedback loops of input and reward. That the reward is "compelling narrative" rather than "loud ding with big number go up" changes the quality of the treat dispensed but not the nature of the box.
Skinner Boxes are tools to gauge the behaviors of their subjects.
The form can still be artistic and the reward for interaction can be sublime and the thing itself can still be what it is.
do you think a novel is a skinner box
No. There's no human input that determines the response.
Goosebumps choose your own adventure novels.
But to take you a tiny bit more seriously, ok? So what? Why does "I have some agency in this story" make a story bad? What actually are you getting at here?
Primitive, but closer to the mark.
I don't think it does. The box is just a mechanism. In the same way that a book or a painting can be good or bad, a gameplay loop can, too.
You can have a Beautiful Skinner Box in the same way you can have a Van Gogh or a Tolstoy novel.
So you're using some weird definition of "skinner box" where you simply mean "human inputs lead to various outputs". Why use this definition? By this definition a fucking mathematical function is a skinner box.
I simply do not understand, in general, what you're trying to say.
More specifically, its to refer to an experimental device to gauge psychological responses through IO. Well made games attempt to collect and convey more complex information through the mechanic of IO.
The original Skinner Box existed to devise mathematical functions through experimentation. The goal was to quantify behavior in a controlled setting.
Video games repurpose the tool for entertainment. But they are ultimately intended to be revelatory. Games exist to measure and eventually train behavior. A "good" game provides useful insights and beneficial behavior patterns. A "bad" one exists to extract vulnerabilities and exploit them to nefarious ends.