Skinner Box Game

Skinner Box or the operant chamber is a box that contains a bar or key that an animal can manipulate to obtain reinforcement, and it will be attached to a recorder. The game I played is called "Dungeon and Fighter." The similarity between this game and a skinner box is that it gives reinforcement to keep players oneline (its an online game). The keyboard (especially the X key) is the bar in the Skinner box. The "Level Up," "Weapons," and "New Move." The differences are that if I want improve the ability of my character then I must invest real money to buy the "armours and suits," which Skinner box does not require investment; to be an advance player I will also need to calculate how to spend the "Skill Points" (these points are needed to learn new moves), the Skinner box does not require much thinking.

I believe the reward style is the fixed-ratio schedules. The fixed-ratio schedule is the reinforcement scedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses. "Dungeon and Fighter" gives out three "revive coin" that brings the character back to life on every log on. The leveling up is also based on how many experiences a character has and that is mostly "calculatable" therefore I can expect to level up my character after I slaughter a certain amount of monsters.

Secondary reinforcer is naturally not a reinforcer, but after conditioning, people or an organism associate this object with our natural reinforcers, and thus gives the similar stimuli to our brain as if it is the primary reinforcer. The secondary reinforcer in this game are the game money, weapon, and the skills. The primary reinforcer is to win the game, or to beat other players, but in order to beat other players, I must have all of the things I listed to strengthen my character. To obtain all of the secondary reinforcers will require a large amount of time investment. (that is why I am not an advanced player)

A possitive reinforcement is to add or give a desirable behavior or object. The possive reinforcements in the "Dungeon and Fighter" are the "level up," "new fancy moves" and the social connection (other well behaved players." These reinforcements are probably the only reasons that I was playing this game, especially those very fancy moves and they can be used to implement other moves. A game with no reinforcement is not worth of playing in my opinion.

Negative reinforcement is to take away something aversive. "Dungeon and Fighter" doesn't take away anything in the game that is aversive. If I have to use negative reinforcement to analyze DNF (the abbreviation) then I guess it took away my boring time (usually the time that I should spend on doing the homework)

Achievemnet motivation is the desire for significant accomplishment, mastery of things, people, or ideas, and higher standard. DNF keeps a record of won battles and lost battles, thus people who cares about this report, would try hard to maintain a higher score. I also like to be better at this game (this game is a action game, so it does require some fast finger work), so I can beat others, the sense of winning is very desirable. However to be better at this game would require players to stay longer online to increase the level and other stuffs.