“Intermittent reinforcement,” he said. “My friend Matthew, he leads our guild, he told me about it. It comes from experiments with rats. Imagine that you have a rat who gets some food every time he pushes a lever. How often do you think he pushes the lever?”

“As often as he’s hungry, I suppose. I kept mice once — they knew when it was time for food and they’d rush over to the corner of the cage that I dropped their seeds and cheese into.”

“Right. Now, what about a level that gives food every fifth time they press the lever?”

“I don’t know — less?”

“About the same, actually, After a while, the rats figure out that they need five presses for a food pellet and every time they want feeding, they wander over and hit it five times. Now, what about a lever that gives food out at random? Sometimes one press, sometimes one hundred presses?”

“They’d give up, right?”

“Wrong! They press it like crazy, All day and all night. It’s like someone who wins a little money in the lottery one week and then plays every week afterward, forever. The uncertainty drives them crazy, it’s the most addictive system of all. Matthew says it’s the most important part of game design — one day you manage to kill a really hard NPC with a lucky swing, and it drops some incredibly epic item, and you make more money in ten seconds than you made all week, and you have to keep going back to that spot, looking for a monster like it, thinking it’ll happen again.”

“But it’s random, right?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Matthew says it is. I sometimes think that the game company deliberately messes up the odds so that when you’re just about to quit, you get another jackpot.” He shrugged. “That’s what I’d do, anyway.”

“If it’s random, it shouldn’t make any difference what you do and where you play. If you flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads ten times in a row, you’ve got exactly the same chance of it coming up heads an eleventh time than if had come up all tails, or half and half.”

from cory doctorow: for the win, another great read that for reason i am taking ages to finish reading on my iPad.

[teh glorious interweb what got stuck in my :flash: camino tabs this past week]

wikipedia and the germans

:flash: Wikipedia Sued For Nazi Sympathies – “A German politician has filed charges against Wikipedia alleging that the worlds most famous UGC site promotes Nazism.”

:flash: Stern-Studie: Brockhaus kontra Wikipedia – “In einer von der Zeitschrift Stern in Auftrag gegebene Vergleichsstudie hat die freie Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia besser abgeschnitten als die kommerzielle Online-Ausgabe des Brockhaus.”

b3tan corner

:flash: Undertaker Regrets Granting Dying Wish – a daredevil never rests.

:flash: we vishnu a happy christmas – oh, and i vishnu the same.

:flash: Did somebody mention voting irregularities? – this about sums up the russian elections.

WoWness

:flash: Feign death really works – “After playing World of Warcraft, the 12 year old boy knew how to cope when he was attacked by a moose in the forest.” [via BB]

:flash: Dell XPS Laptops for World of Warcraft Fans – “one of the world’s largest PC companies, Dell, is readying laptop systems just for World of Warcraft fans.” this makes me sad somehow.

:flash: Activision Blizzard – “Activision (Call of Duty, Tony Hawks) and Vivendi (Blizzard, Crash, Spyro) have merged to form a new company called Activision Blizzard [...] the newly formed company will overtake Electronic Arts to become the biggest games publisher.”

schmooze and abuse

:flash: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer, Is Dead at 79 – “Karlheinz Stockhausen, one of the most important and controversial postwar composers who helped shape a new understanding of sound through electronic compositions, died at his home in western Germany. He was 79.”

:flash: GRAND THEFT AUTO IV – the new GTA IV trailer is available and it looks like an awesome game. but will it convince me to buy a PS3?

:flash: people in the middle of the road ejaculating – gosh. we hope this is a typo?

:flash: Vaio John – kinda meh: write an interactive filmscript with john malkovich.

:flash: Transparency International – “The poor, whether in developing or highly industrialised countries, bear the greatest burden when it comes to bribe demands. They are also more pessimistic about the prospects for less corruption in the future.” duh.

:flash: Dangerous Ground Project – anti-landmine activist crosses london without ever touching the ground.

:flash: Here Comes Another Bubble – “The Web 2.0 “bubble” had it coming. A Silicon Valley music video by the Richter Scales.”

:flash: Beemp3.com – MP3 Search – “BeeMP3 is a music search engine for locating an mp3-audio files over the Internet.”

:flash: A Preview of HTML 5 – “HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics.” some clever additions.

:flash: Astronauts test sex in space – “US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for separate research programmes on how human beings might survive years in orbit, according to a book published yesterday.” mile high club for real this time.

:flash: Edit your photos! On Flickr! – “If you’ve ever wanted to deal with the dreaded red eye or crop a photo just so, click on the new “edit photo” icon located above one of your photos and get started.”

:flash: songs you already know :: great – so great. and you can even pay money for it, if you want.

:flash: TransRatFashion – “CUSTOM-MADE FASHION ACCESSORIES 5 pieces of fake Chanel fashion accessories made out of taxidermised rats: a rat-bra, a rat-slip, a rat-handbag, a rat-handkerchief and a pair of high heel rat-shoes.” rats!

:flash: Santa’s Ghetto – 2007 – “in a creative bid to boost Bethlehem’s sagging economy, Banksy has brought his seasonal “Santa’s Ghetto” exhibition to this Palestinian town that has seen few tourists in recent years.” [via art-threat]

mashups

:flash: Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be – “we’d like to offer you Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, a recording of our favourite show this past year, at Bestival in the Isle Of Wight. A rather crazy affair.”

:flash: YouTube – The Kleptones @ Bestival 2007 – “The Kleptones live at Bestival”

:flash: You Don’t Know Unk < Beatmixed – “New mashup for the hip-hop heads out there. It’s definitely not my “typical” 80’s inspired mix, that’s for sure. More of a lean-back, bounce, and nod your head type track.”

swissies

:flash: Züri West – die halbe single gibts bereits zu hören … album folgt am 12.1.2008.

:flash: MiNA: living in between – neues MiNA video.

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