Disagree (Destiny)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Thursday, January 12, 2017, 14:28 (2658 days ago) @ slycrel

I disagree with some of what is said in that article...

I'd never say that Skinner-box game design is inherently bad, but there are a lot of places where it's clearly abused, or used clumsily. Adding a Skinner box to a strong set of mechanics is fine.

I somewhat disagree with that statement, not super strongly mind you, but I still disagree. Goodness, I still play Destiny despite my disagreement. However, I think Destiny would be a better game with less random reward. Random reward, while it sounds fun to me, puts a bitter taste in my mouth when I experience it or give it some serious thought. My mind goes back to the early 2000's, I think of Diablo and my roommates and their friends who were obsessed with Diablo. Fortunately the game didn't appeal to me and I was able to see how completely hooked they were... They had been turned into rats in a cage trained to click a button. Now Diablo without the random reward wouldn't be nearly the same game. The gameplay and story might sustain one through a single playthrough, but I doubt you'd see more than a few people playing through the game repeatedly.

Aside: I'd seriously love to see a study of people playing Dark Souls to see if some people get most of their dopamine from the moment-to-moment successful dodges and strikes, while others get the larger rewards from major milestones like completing boss fights, acquiring weapons, or reaching new content. I don't have anything to back this up, other than the fact that it would retroactively make every Dark Souls flame war make a lot more sense. The divide between Dark Souls fans and Dark Souls haters is so intense, and people cross lines so rarely, that I suspect there might be some physiology involved.

I believe we could simply replace Dark Souls with Destiny and that paragraph would be perfect fit. I think it would be VERY interesting to do a study on people here & see if there's a correlation to their physiological response to playing Destiny and their attitudes/opinions about the game. I think he's right, there's probably an actual physiological reason why some are turned off by Destiny while others aren't.