🎁🐔 Chickens and loot boxes

I was watching a chicken stalking around doing its thing, and realised an answer to something that had been bothering me about making games like Minecraft or Valheim…

Designers of social media and additive games know that intermittent variable rewards hook people in a way that’s different from predictable rewards. We associate loot boxes and similar shenanigans with unscrupulous game companies trying to exploit gambling compulsions without being burdened by gambling laws or age restrictions, but the same intermittent variable reward mechanic also permeates good games, for example mining for ores in Minecraft, or fishing etc. Perhaps activities like mining and fishing could be a little grindy and addictive but people seem to enjoy doing it in those games, it encourages exploration, and it only costs time.

The thought that came to me while watching the chicken was: it’s probably not luck that we’re like this, this is an adaption for foraging (and perhaps hunting). Chickens and humans are both happy when they’re doing something which at any moment might return dividends.

Gambling might even be a failure mode of our foraging inclinations.

People relax into “simple life”/survival games that have intermittent rewards for the same reason those game genres appeal and resonate with our psychology in the first place! Gambling may highjack that reason, rather than these games leveraging gambling compulsions.

I’d put the cart before the horse.