Memetic Hazards in Videogames

Have I ever remarked on how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so?

Support like, say, spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores? The more so considering this is a central allocation question for the entire economy?

When I get insignificant amounts of change, like a nickel, I leave it on the nearest outdoor object, thus teaching people that they can collect small amounts of money by searching random objects.

Here's one that's particularly sinister, and shows up in nearly every RPG and MMORPG:

Progress is tied to presence, not performance.

In these games, as long as you're there, in front of the screen, you're making progress. Skill is almost never involved in success - if you can't beat that boss you just need to go kill a few thousand boars and level up a little bit, and if you want that sweet equipment you just have to put in the hours to grind for gold, or faction, or honor, or whatever.

In the real world, getting better at something generally takes actual work, and only occurs under specific conditions of deliberate practice and proper feedback. But it's so easy to fall into the trap of "hey, I'm doing something tangentally related to goal x or skill z, I must be making progress at it".

It's interesting to see what happens when videogames behave more like real life. For instance, in Oblivion (and Fallout 3), you can't just take things unless you're in the middle of nowhere. If someone sees you, they cry out "stop, thief!". Equally, attacking people who didn't attack you first in civilised areas will draw the guard or vigilantes down on your head, and most of the stuff you find lying around is worthless trash that isn't worth the effort to haul away and sell.

I remember how jarring it was when I first tried to take something in Oblivion, only for a bystander to call for the guard. And then I realised that this is how NPCs should react to casual theft.

The most insidious of these misguiding heuristics have, apparently due to their transparency (like water to a fish), gone unmentioned so far in this thread.

Typical game play shares much in common with typical schooling. Children are inculcated with impressions of a world of levels that can (and should) be ascended through mastery of skills corresponding to challenges presented to them at each level, with right action leading to convergence on right answers, within an effectively fixed and ultimately knowable context.

Contrast this with the "real world", where challenges are not presented but encountered, where it's generally better to do the right thing than to do things right, within a diverging context of increasing uncertainty.

One thing this essay does not address is whether humans actually are likely to learn heuristics from playing videogames or whether a large enough fraction of the population plays videogames for this to be a real concern.

Let's briefly address that: There's a fair bit of evidence that much of "play" behavior over a wide variety of species is specifically to learn behavior and rules for actual life events. Thus for example, wolf cubs engage in mock fights which prepare them for more serious events. Some species of corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.) will actively play with the large predators in their area (pecking at their tails for example or dropping objects on their faces) which is an apparent attempt to learn about the general behavior of the predators which is primarily important because these species of corvids get much of their food from scavenging. It is likely that humans engage in play behavior in part for similar reasons. If so, there's a real danger of people learning bad heuristics from videogames.

What percentage of the population plays videogames? A quick Google search turns up various numbers which disagree but it seems that they vary from around a third to slightly over half. See for example here. Given that, this seems like a common enough issue to be worth discussing.

As I was reading this, I realized that many of the points here apply heartily to single-player games, but the reverse is often true of MMOs.

A while back I spent a few years playing World of Warcraft, and ended up doing mid to high level raids.

When leveling, or completing a raid, you do know your purpose, and it is handed down from on high. This is unrealistic, but possibly one of the most relaxing aspects of escapism.

You DO NOT delay or take forever! While leveling or raiding, it is important to do things efficiently to meet your goals quickly. You want to hit max level ASAP, not see the whole low-level world; you want to see the whole high-level world.

When leveling or raiding, there is usually a specific build that is more powerful than the others. You have choices between various builds, but never more than 3 per character class, and usually the 3 are vastly different and you must choose one of them. For example, every rogue ever would take a talent that gives them +5 attack speed, but taking a bonus to speed while in stealth would get you kicked out of a hardcore guild.

In raiding, the difficulty isn't (strictly) progressive. Some fights are easier, some are harder. Some are more gear-dependent (i.e. harder until later in the game) but some of the fights in the highest-level raids were easier than some in the lowest level raids. It's also true that the difficulty mostly comes in learning how to do things the first time; after that it's easy to breeze through the content and most of the difficulty is in managing the guild.

Guides and patch notes are REQUIRED reading in most multiplayer games, because you have an obligation to support your team and defeat your opponents.

In terms of modeling the real world, MMOs are much better. On the other hand, they can be less fun. I've also experienced the multiplayer attitude leaking into other games (specifically D&D) and ruining the setup. I guess the lesson here may be that people are bad at changing heuristics when they change settings, in total agreement with the OP.

This thread wouldn't be complete without a link to this Ctrl+Alt+Del comic

On the other hand, good videogames can be a cool tool for low-risk self-improvement.

I've historically had a lot of trouble focusing on one thing at a time - choosing a major, minimizing my areas of focus. I recently played KOTOR, and realized that I play videogames the exact same way. I can never commit to one class/alignment/weapon specialization at a time, and I suffer for it.

Recognizing the similarities, I decided to play KOTOR as a specialist in one alignment, one class, and one weapon type, ignoring tantalizing opportunities to generalize whenever possible. I ended up enjoying the game a lot more than I usually do.

Three weeks later I chose my major, and I honestly believe KOTOR helped.

I would like to commend you for taking the time to include the penultimate paragraph. I think it extremely worth pointing out that not everything that happens in games is likely to manifest in seemingly-analogous real world decisions.

The good news about most of these biases is that they are quite testable. I would love to see some research about the decision making processes of video game enthusiasts (particularly those who started at an early age) and a control group.

Thanks to Ralith, Lark, neptunepink and nshepperd for their feedback on the first draft of this article in the #lesswrong IRC channel. The IRC channel is a good way to get early feedback on posts, and discussing it there revealed several important flaws in the writing that have been fixed.

Hello, player character, and welcome to the Mazes of Menace!

I'm surprised that you didn't mention NetHack, and that nobody else has either, given that it contains the Mazes of Menace and provides counterexamples to many of your points.

Because your goal is not to reach the end quickly

In NetHack, the goal of beginners is to ascend, i.e. win, and it is very difficult. (I have not yet ascended; the furthest I've gotten is level 27, with 422434 points.) The goal of intermediate players is to ascend quickly. And the goal of advanced players is to ascend under the most ridiculously severe restrictions possible, called conducts. For example, not engaging in genocide is a conduct, and it makes the game harder (because now you can't genocide those nasty electric eels or master mind flayers).

Beginners may go slowly in order to methodically clean out the higher dungeon levels before heading into the lower ones (higher = nearer to your starting point at the surface = easier), but that's because they're trying to not die, and in NetHack character death is permanent.

For most games, there's a guide that explains exactly how to complete your objective perfectly, but to read it would be cheating.

In NetHack, reading spoilers is almost mandatory - in fact, unspoiled ascension is the rarest possible kind. NetHack's universe contains many systems that can be taken advantage of, but only if you know how - using pets to steal from shops being one example. (Shopkeepers hate direct theft and are ridiculously powerful, but pets can pick up and drop items, and shopkeepers don't mind that. By feeding your pets, you can induce them to drop items near you. This leads to the ability to convert tripe rations - which pets eat - into shop theft, giving you access to lots of items for free.)

This is because in games, the classes, skills, races and alignments are meant to be balanced, so they're all close to equally good.

NetHack's roles, races, and alignments have unbalanced advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Valkyrie is much, much easier to play than the Tourist. Only gender is balanced, as it has very few effects on the game.

Reality is the opposite; most of the difficulty comes up front, and it gets easier as you learn.

NetHack appears to follow reality here. Learning how to avoid death is front-loaded - see Yet Another Stupid Death, e.g. "genociding oneself", and Lessons Learned The Hard Way, e.g. "Don't stand on ice when there are foes with fire attack around."

Similarly, if you're on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible

I've explicitly made note this fact, that one should do quests in exactly reverse order of importance, in every cRPG I've ever played. Because often making progress on major quests will change the game (lock you out of an area, say, or kill an NPC) such that you can no longer complete some minor quests if you haven't done them already .

I guess I might as well post about my own experiences, even though I'm probably not a typical game player:

I noticed myself developing the habit of seeking the dead ends first in video games, but I thought that it was just a bad habit that I developed, and that most other people don't play like that. My brother doesn't play like that. But I continue using this strategy even in games where there isn't a reward at the dead ends. I deliberately choose the path that's more likely to be a dead end first, just for my own peace of mind, to know that it's a dead end, and I don't have to mentally keep track of another decision branch that I might have to come back and try later. And I also apply this strategy in real life, in any situation that involves a branching set of decisions, where if I take the wrong branch, I'll need to go back to a previous branch, and there is some cost involved in backtracking, even if the cost is just a trivial amount of time or mental bookkeeping. And I've found that this is actually a good and helpful strategy. Or maybe it just feels helpful, despite often being counterproductive. If, for example, you're trying to track down a bug in your source code, and... actually, rather than trying to explain in words, I'll just link to this XKCD comic, which illustrates what happens you follow the opposite of this strategy.

I'm not afraid of spoilers. And I have the bad (or maybe not so bad?) habit of always playing to win, as opposed to playing for fun. If there is a guide for the game, I'll read it. Unless reading the guide would actually be more work than figuring things out for myself, or if reading the guide would prevent me from learning or practicing a skill that's actually important. Guides can save you from having to do lots of pointless searching, or experimenting, and can prevent you from making wrong choices early in a game that have big harmful consequences later in a game. And they can contain other important information that you wouldn't have had much chance of figuring out on your own. Also, I often find reading the guide to be more fun than actually playing the game.

I apply the same paranoia to games that I apply to real life. I err on the side of spending too much effort researching which choice to make, rather than risking making the wrong choice by deciding arbitrarily on a whim. And this is often necessary even in video games, due to imbalanced classes, or classes that just don't fit my playing style.

Another example of this paranoia: I'm constantly expecting that at any moment, the game might contain a challenge that's impossible, or that is only possible if I haven't made any other mistakes or wasted any rare items until I reached that challenge. And this is sometimes necessary even in video games.

I also apply the same frugality in video games that I apply in real life, even if I know that the game's currency inflates dramatically as the game continues, making this strategy counterproductive. I just can't bring myself to act in any other way. I avoid buying any items I probably don't need. I avoid using up nonrenewable items, often to the point where it's useless to keep them in my inventory because I never use them. And yet I still try to collect as many of these nonrenewable items as possible, even though I know I'm probably never going to use them. The problem with this strategy was illustrated in this 8-bit-theater comic. Specifically, the quote "I merely realized that my reluctance to sacrifice spell slots or use items for the express purpose of maintaining my peak level of versatility was a vicious cycle of stagnation."

Actually, this strategy sometimes causes problems in real life. Usually with food going bad because I was reluctant to use it up... just because of some irrational inhibition about using up any resource that can't be easily replaced.

I really hate playing "deathmatch mode" in FPS games, because the usual rules about trying to survive at all costs no longer apply, because you're competing for the highest number of kills, not trying to be the last person standing. After years of trying, I still can't get used to playing like that. And so I've mostly stopped trying.

I suspect that video games have made me more risk averse than I would have been otherwise, by constantly providing me with examples of ways that things can go terribly wrong. I'm still undecided about whether this has an overall positive effect. For example, when I'm driving, it makes me constantly be on the lookout for objects that could potentially move into my path or otherwise collide with my car. But sometimes it makes me panic, with dangerous results.

I guess I had better stop writing now, this comment has already grown too long.

Good post. One other thing that should be said has to do with the /why/. Why do we design many games like this? There are some obvious reasons: it's easier, it's fun, it plays on our natural reward mechanisms, etc. A perhaps less obvious one: it reflects the world as many /wish it could be/. Straightforward; full of definite, predefined goals; having well known, well understood challenges; having predictable rewards that are trivial to compare to others; having a very linear path for "progression" (via leveling up, attribute increases, etc.) A world with a WHOLE lot less variables.

Back around 1990, there was a school of game design that said that a game should be immersive, and to be immersive, it should stop reminding you that it's a game by making you throw away all real-life conventions. So this school of game design said things like:

• You should not have to examine everything in the game. You should do just fine in the game by examining only objects that a reasonable person would examine.

• You should not have to die in order to learn something needed for the game.

• You should usually be punished for theft, breaking and entering, and other crimes.

• You should not need to pick up lots of junk and carry it around because it's going to be needed in the endgame for reasons no one could have foreseen.

Unfortunately, this school of game design died. It was only ever really popular with non-commercial text-adventure designers.

In the real world, getting rid of junk costs money in effort and disposal fees instead.

In the real world, you can sell your old stuff. People just don't. Perhaps games can teach them that it is a good idea, even if it's for a fraction of the price you bought it for.

I'd say the worst habit of thought promoted by computer games is that if you do something disastrously foolish or clumsy, you can conveniently restart from a recently saved position. Clearly, that doesn't help one develop a good attitude towards the possibility of blunders in real life. (Though I should add that I haven't played any computer games in almost a decade, and I don't know if the basic concepts have changed since then.)

I'm rather amused to be reading this for the first time while wearing my 'Things You Learn From Video Games' shirt...

I bet video games make you a better driver by forcing you to develop situational awareness.

Hmm, I've never really confused my life with in-game life before, but I wonder if I maybe do it on the subconscious level. An interesting note: when I tried playing Morrowind (for those who don't know, that game has a huge open world with many huge areas that are there for no reason other than to add realism), I had a sort of paralysis, because I had to explore every room and open every door, but that's simply impossible in that game.

It should be noted that some of these seem specific to games with a levelling/upgrade system, and in particular ones that you don't know in advance / are not really intended for replay.

For most games, there's a guide that explains exactly how to complete your objective perfectly, but to read it would be cheating. Your goal is not to master the game, but to experience the process of mastering the game as laid out by the game's designers, without outside interference. In the real world, if there's a guide for a skill you want to learn, you read it.

This doesn't sound like how people actually use them?

If it's a puzzle, then sure, figuring it out yourself can be fun. But if you get stuck and want to move on...then don't you pull out a guide?

(That's not to say that this is optimal for learning skills or knowledge or other things.)

if there's a guide for a skill you want to learn, you read it.

You open up a calculus textbook, read the questions, read the answers. How much do you think you'll get out of it?

Applying this reasoning to the real world would mean choosing a career without bothering to find out what sort of salary and lifestyle it supports; but things in the real world are almost never balanced in this sense. (Many people, in fact, do not do this research, which is why colleges turn out so many English majors.)

It would have been worth noting that there are valid criteria for choice of university courses other than these. As it is, this section looks rather philistine.

If you think people believe that RPG classes are balanced, you obviously haven't spent much time reading game forums! "Imba"ness, real or perceived, is probably the #1 topic of discussion for most multiplayer games.