作者：Dennis Scimeca

你也许会认为《Game On: Energize Your Business With Social Games》作者会是个狂热游戏化倡导者，或者他会在非游戏产品或活动中融入类似游戏的元素。

Jon Radoff from radoff.com

从某种意义上来说，Jon Radoff并不排斥这个理论，只是不是我们所说的那样。Radoff称，“这些内容点非常肤浅。将游戏融入商业活动，制作游戏要比简单创建积分系统或奖励系统复杂得多。”

Radoff是社交媒介公司GamerDNA创始人，目前担任社交游戏发行公司Disruptor Beam的首席执行官，此前曾进行标题为“Game On: What Motivates Gamers?”的演讲。

Radoff认为社交媒介技术通过改变用户群体及其游戏期望（游戏邦注：这主要通过提供新游戏选择）重新改造整个游戏市场。遗憾的是，太多参与社交游戏和游戏化的开发者都锁定过时斯金纳箱心理学原理。

Radoff表示，“二者（社交游戏和游戏化）存在一个共性，那就是认为通过给予足够奖励便能够重新设定用户行为。我要推翻这个理论，呈现一个更有价值的研究方式，不仅适用社交游戏和游戏化领域，还适用所有游戏内容。这是有关什么元素促使游戏富有趣味的全面理论。”

B.F Skinner是行为心理学的著名人士，曾提出操作性条件作用空间理论，也就是众所周知的“斯纳金箱”，这是用于训练实验室动物行为的装置。Radoff认为这是游戏行业人士都耳熟能详的装置。

Radoff表示，“你会反复读到将游戏称作斯纳金箱的在线文章，若你能够把握奖励机制，给予玩家些许食物回馈刺激其快乐中枢，他们将沉浸其中，持续体验，”

虽然Radoff并不否定某些游戏内容存在条件作用，但这不是促使游戏富有深度和趣味的原因所在，看到游戏开发者继续采用斯纳金箱理念，Radoff感到非常惊讶，因为这早在几十年前就被主流心理学所摒弃。

Radoff更赞同哈佛心理学家Steve Pinker的观点及进化心理学理论，理论认为某些认知机制是人类逐步发展而形成的，例如体验欲望。Radoff表示，“动物通常选择实践或将成为现实生活重要内容的活动。我自己关于此的分支假设是人类游戏能力源自我们的体验能力。”

他表示，“我们希望遵照特定心理活动进行体验。我们希望以安全方式进行。我们希望能够尝试现实生活做无法进行的活动。”Radoff预测，涉及人类发展过程重要内容的游戏将成为成功作品。

Radoff表示，“我们不是斯纳金箱。我学习游戏不是因为游戏给予我奖励报酬。游戏存在的原因是它们对人类而言非常重要。”神经学论据表明由虚拟经历激活的很多大脑神经都影射同现实生活经历类似的大脑图像。

他认为“这说明我们可以假设体验是实践现实生活或将遇到情形的方式。这是强化某些同重要活动相关的大脑认知关系的方式。”

Radoff指出，成功运用此知识创建更优秀游戏的关键是找到斯纳金箱以外归类游戏玩家行为和动机的方式。Radoff认为玩家心理学的巴图测试（游戏邦注：其将玩家分为 Killer、Socializer、Achiever、和Explorer）是在此方面的一个小突破，但还算不上成功。

他称“这个理论并未提供适用所有游戏类型的模式。它主要瞄准MMO类型。我认为若能够创造适用所有游戏类型的模式，我们将受益匪浅。巴图的分类主要基于自身发现，而非源自统一动机原理。”

Radoff在撰写《Game On》过程中，借助重要进化论和人类共有心理机制理论，创造自己的模式。其模式采用4个不同类别：沉浸、合作、竞争和成就。Radoff认为这些分类更准确地反映人类思维运作方式，主要就故事叙述和利他主义倾向，遵守特定进化基本原则及享受掌握技能而言。

Radoff表示，“我觉得你有必要弄清这些元素在游戏中的意义。利用其中某些元素制作成功游戏体验。我们不妨在强化模式和奖励频率（游戏邦注：其旨在促使玩家进行正确操作）过程中，参考斯纳金理论。但这从根本上来说涉及人类重要进化特性。若你查看其中最成功的作品，你就会发现这些特性同最具生命力的作品密切相关。”（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Radoff: Games Are Not Skinner Boxes

by Dennis Scimeca

One might expect that the author of a book titled “Game On: Energize Your Business With Social Games” would be an enthusiastic proponent of gamification, or injecting game-like elements into products or activities that are not games, in order to make them more appealing.

Jon Radoff may subscribe to the theory in a general sense, but not in the way it’s typically discussed. “There’s a lot of superficiality out there,” Radoff said. “Bringing games into a business, building any kind of game, is a lot harder than simply building a points system, or a rewards system.”

Radoff, the founder of the social media company GamerDNA, and current CEO of social game publisher Disruptor Beam, was the guest of the Gamasutra-attended August edition of local dev gathering Boston Post Mortem, and delivered a presentation called “Game On: What Motivates Gamers?”

Radoff believes that social media technology has reshaped the game market by changing both who the consumer is and what they expect to get out of games by providing a new landscape of opportunity for products. Unfortunately, too many developers involved in social gaming and gamification are locked into the outmoded psychological principle of the Skinner Box.

“Those two categories [social gaming and gamification] share one thing in common… this idea that you can reprogram peoples’ behaviors if you just give them enough rewards,” Radoff said. “I want to demolish that theory and present you a more meaningful way to look at not just social games and gamification, but all games in general, something that’s a more all-encompassing theory of what makes games fun.”

B.F Skinner is the best-known figure of the behaviorist school of psychology for his invention of the operant conditioning chamber, more popularly known as the “Skinner Box”, an apparatus used to train the behavior of lab animals. It’s a device Radoff believes most people in the games industry have heard of.

“Over and over again you read articles online that tell you that games are Skinner Boxes, and that if you can just figure out the reward system, and the way to give the food pellets back to the player to press their pleasure center, they will become addicted and they will play forever and ever,” said Radoff.

While Radoff doesn’t dispute the idea that there’s some amount of conditioning that occurs for certain aspects of games, that’s not what provides depth to gameplay or makes things interesting, and Radoff finds it surprising that game developers continue to take the concept of the Skinner Box so seriously when mainstream psychology left the associated theories by the wayside decades ago.

Radoff would rather look to Harvard psychologist Steve Pinker and the concept of evolutionary psychology, which argues for the existence of certain cognitive mechanisms we have evolved into, such as our desire to play. “Animals play to practice the things that are going to be important in their life,” said Radoff. “My own branch hypothesis off of this is the idea that the human capacity for games stems from our capacity for play.”

“We want to play with psychologically-engaging activities,” he said. “We want to do it in a safe place. We want to be able to try out things that we couldn’t do in real life.” Radoff predicts that games which account for the things that have been important to human beings in evolutionary time scales are going to be successful games.

“We’re not Skinner Boxes. We don’t just learn games because the game gives us a reward payoff. Games are there because they’re important to what it is to be human,” said Radoff. Neurological evidence suggests that many parts of the brain that are activated during a virtual experience mirror the same brain images during a real-life occurrence of the same experience.

“It suggests the hypothesis that play is a way to practice the real things that you might encounter in your life,” Radoff said. “It’s a way to strengthen some of those cognitive connections in the brain that are relevant to important activities.”

The key to using this knowledge successfully in the pursuit of building better games is finding ways to categorize the behavior and motivations of game players outside the Skinner Box metaphor, Radoff said. The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, which scores players in the categories of Killer, Socializer, Achiever, and Explorer, was a step in that direction but didn’t quite hit the mark, according to Radoff.

“It doesn’t provide a model that applies to all types of games,” Radoff said. “It’s very specifically MMO-centric. I think it would be helpful to have a model that we could use in thinking about virtually any game experience. The categories [Bartle] came up with are [also] based on his own observations but they’re not based on any unifying theory of why things would be that way.”

While writing Game On, Radoff developed his own model, drawing upon knowledge of what’s important in evolution and the psychological mechanisms that all human beings share. His model uses four different categories: Immersion, Cooperation, Competition, and Achievement. Radoff feels these categories more closely reflect the workings of the human mind in regard to our propensities for storytelling and altruism, our being subject to the fundamental basis for evolution, and our enjoyment of skill mastery for its own sake.

“I think that you have to figure out which of these elements really makes sense for a game, and draw upon several of them to make a successful game experience,” Radoff said. “Think about the Skinnerian stuff in the process of maybe reinforcing the pattern and frequency of rewards that tell [players they're] doing things correctly. But it’s fundamentally about these evolved traits that are important to people. I think if you take a survey of the most successful games out there, you’ll find that it’s these attributes that are what’s associated with the most enduring game franchises that exist.”（Source： gamasutra）