The thinking is that they want your time, a LOT of your time (Destiny)

by scarab , Thursday, December 04, 2014, 04:32 (3454 days ago) @ Cody Miller

They are all the same problem: how do I get resource x?

X is:

• ascendant blah
  
• spin metal
  
• glimmer
  
• whatever

Each of those things is a resource or you could call them currencies. Point is that there are so many to hide the fact that all you are doing is exchanging time played for a resource/currency.

It looks like you are trying to achieve lots of things but the underlying truth is that you buy resource with time.

And yes, to answer your question, you aren't doing it because solving the problem is interesting, you are doing it for two reasons:

• the resource let's you do things that do interest you (the fun)
  
• our brains are wired to engage in grind - once we start it is hard to disengage

Not all scientists agree on how this works, the literature is not settled but...

Dopamine used to be seen as a reward hormone. The idea was that you get a hit once you achive the goal as a rewarded for doing the grind.

But when people looked at when the dopamine was being released it wasn't after the goal was achieved, it was during the grind.

The old idea was that an organism would work out that the grind would achieve a good end and the organism would grind in anticipation of reward.

The thing is that not all organisms are bright. You would need all organisms to be bright enough to make the connection and plan ahead before a dopamine reward mechanism could evolve. If dopamine worked as a reward hormone.

Dopamine and dopamine like transmitters go way back in evolutionary terms and pretty much every organism needs to do some form of grind to get enough resources.

A mechanism that makes the grind its own reward is more likely to arise than a mechanism that depends on foresight before it could work.

So we are probably hardwired to just get on with shit without too much complaint. It is our higher cognitive faculties that lead us to question why we are doing this.

But once we have bought into the need for the grind, if even for a while, then we get into the habit and carry on even though it isn't, making us happy. We are trapped in our biology. And people who make investment systems know this.

In addition, once we achieve a certain level of success we do not want to slip back. We are invested. So if changes are made to return us to a less successful state then we will redouble our efforts to get back to our former level. This works as long as we can feel that it will only take a bit more work, if it's just a bit more of what we have already been doing.

Our intellects are an enemy to the investment system, if we start saying to ourselves, "wait a minute...".

Although we understand all this we are still slaves to our biology and the main fun of Destiny is in the weapons. We want to try them all out. An exotic doesn't deliver its signature ability until quite late in its tech tree. That is no accident; by the time you unlock it you have become invested in the weapon.

There is nothing haphazard or accidental about the decisions that bungie has made. They didn't hire investment systems experts for nothing.