Following up from last time, if you need further indication of the behavioral sink experiments' applicability to modern humanity, I invite you to visit an MMO. And really, given the genre's shameless copycatting problem, most any MMO will do. My annoyance today happens to be fueled by City of Heroes, a game I got back into last year and which will thus be supplying more than two dozen character bios to this blog in the near future. Granted, said annoyance is compounded by my chosen server launching its Halloween event recently, at which point all other activity almost instantly ground to an absolute halt as the lemmings* set to infinitely grinding that one single activity. Never mind that sitting in one spot or running back and forth from door to door endlessly killing the same respawning zombies makes you more zombie-like than the mobs themselves.
But this is far from a merely seasonal affective disorder. The "game as service" business model hinging on constantly spammed content to bait customers into the cash shop, some of that content is of the playable variety. After two decades, older MMOs have accumulated endless instances big or small. So, wouldn't you think more customers would want to experience the content they actually paid for? You can shout yourself hoarse reminding them there's no actual cake at the end of the level/gear grind, that their time is just as well spent taking two steps along the infinite leveling treadmill as twenty, that they ain't none of 'em gonna win the motherfucking internet by grabbing the latest armour set which will be obsolete in three months anyway, that they could spend at least every fifth instance run in a different instance. Even if those're still repetitive "kill ten rats" nonsense, you could at least be doing the same thing in a different decor.
Nuh-uh.
Just like your mommy told you, never try anything new. Doesn't matter the game, the season, the year, the decade, the generation, doesn't matter which particular game you're talking about. 90+% of a game's content goes unplayed. Half a billion knucledraggers have played Dust2 nonstop in Counterstrike for a quarter century now, from the myriad custom maps which had sprung up around 2001. The deltas and epsilons keep chasing the same exact reinforcement, herded or rather herding themselves into narrower and narrower paths.
But here's where the mindless chasing of reward stimuli takes a more rodential twist, because before they perma-banned me for raging at a griefer, I had also tried Warframe, and I stand by my observation of its more proactive playerbase. I'd guess that has a lot to do with its overwhelming auto-queuing instead of forming teams via chat. When the mindless rats aren't actually watching the constant spam of THIS-THIS-THIS-IS-THE-COOL-THING-DO-IT-DO-IT because all the cool kids are doing it, you get a bit more overflow into less popular content. Not much, mind you. But, combined with the four-player team sizes, enough that you could actually take a step off the beaten path now and then, which simply does not happen in an MMO.
When the rats can't actually see all the other rats running to the same food trough, they suddenly rediscover some of their own freedom of choice.
Oh, and this has absolutely nothing to do with election season coming up here in the U.S. and each party making a show of popular support, trying to convince its rodential base it's the popular choice. I don't know why you'd even think that.
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* Yes, I know real-life lemmings don't-actually-do-the-thing, but until we get a replacement metaphor as vivid and mocking, I'll keep running those lil' rats into the ground and you can damn well add it to my list of sins.
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