“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.

wikipedia received better notes than brockhaus in a german study comparing the two online encyclopedias, that was commissioned by stern magazine. the information found on wikipedia appears to be much more up-to-date, and who is surprised really. but still, this is great news, that attests quality to user-generated online content.

the original stern article
on wikinews

a study done by wemf ag für werbemedienforschung has found that 90,9% of the swiss read newspapers on a more or less frequent basis. how many of these are made up by the free papers like 20min and heute does not seem to matter. apparently it’s just important that it envolves dead trees. naturally the study did not ask how many of the swiss read blogs. [via kleinreport]

Die Schweiz bleibt ein Volk von Zeitungslesern

90,9% der Schweizer Bevölkerung lesen mehr oder weniger regelmässig eine Zeitung. 93,1% der Personen ab 14 Jahren lesen mindestens eine Zeitschrift. Diese Werte seien seit 2000 stabil. Dies hat die Wemf AG für Werbemedienforschung in der neuesten Studie 2006-2 festgestellt. Die Tagespresse erreicht heute 77,5% der Schweizer Wohnbevölkerung, 2000 waren es 75,1%. Auch die regionale Wochen- und Sonntagspresse konnte sich von 42,1 auf 49,2 respektive von 40,3 auf 43,5% steigern. Stabil blieben die Programmzeitschriften (sie erreichen 50% der Bevölkerung) sowie die News- und Themen-Zeitschriften (37%). Einen leichten Rückgang muss die Finanz- und Wirtschaftspresse hinnehmen – sie erreicht noch 14,1% der Bevölkerung, 2000 waren es 17,7%.