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Games Aren't Good Because They're "Addictive" (The Jimquisition)
(www.youtube.com)
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules
They're still feedback loops of input and reward. That the reward is "compelling narrative" rather than "loud ding with big number go up" changes the quality of the treat dispensed but not the nature of the box.
Skinner Boxes are tools to gauge the behaviors of their subjects.
The form can still be artistic and the reward for interaction can be sublime and the thing itself can still be what it is.
do you think a novel is a skinner box
No. There's no human input that determines the response.
Goosebumps choose your own adventure novels.
But to take you a tiny bit more seriously, ok? So what? Why does "I have some agency in this story" make a story bad? What actually are you getting at here?
Primitive, but closer to the mark.
I don't think it does. The box is just a mechanism. In the same way that a book or a painting can be good or bad, a gameplay loop can, too.
You can have a Beautiful Skinner Box in the same way you can have a Van Gogh or a Tolstoy novel.
So you're using some weird definition of "skinner box" where you simply mean "human inputs lead to various outputs". Why use this definition? By this definition a fucking mathematical function is a skinner box.
I simply do not understand, in general, what you're trying to say.