The Psychology Behind Call of Duty

Jul 27, 2011

It took Infinity Ward three games to perfect their multiplayer formula and create a worldwide phenomenon.  Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a huge success both critically and financially for Activision.  Even though there has been yearly sequels to the game, with each one utilizing new weapons, perks, and killstreaks, the formula for the series’s outstanding multiplayer has always remained the same.  That’s because CoD 4 utilized a system that worked in the background of the game, and this system still keeps you addicted and playing long after the sun has come up.

The Skinner Box

The blueprint for not only CoD’s multiplayer, but indeed all purposefully addictive video games was created by a man named B.F. Skinner in 1930.  A graduate student at Harvard, Skinner’s doctorate work was learning how exactly stimuli could alter behavior in rats.  To test this, he created the Skinner box; a box with a lever and food dispenser that would dispense food every time the lever was pushed.  It didn’t take the rat long to figure out and he only pushed it when needed.  This is where the experiment takes a creepy turn.  Skinner altered the food dispenser so it would dispense food randomly when the lever was pushed.  This made the rat push the lever more and more, as it was trying to find a pattern.  Then Skinner perfected his experiment by figuring out how to alter the rat’s behavior to push the lever as many times as possible.  He would start by having the box dispense food with relatively few pushes of the lever.  Then as time wore on and the rat became conditioned, it would need more pushes of the lever to get the same amount of food dispensed.  This last pattern made the rat feverishly push the lever more and for longer.  Skinner’s findings have become the model for operant conditioning, where outside stimuli is used to change the behavior of the subject in a voluntary manner.

Just One More Round

When the Skinner Box experiment goes from interesting to scary is when the rat is replaced with a person.  In the above experiment, imagine you are the one in the box.  Now imagine that instead of being in a box you are in front of a TV with an XBOX  360 controller as a lever.  With each correct use of the controller, you see experience points accumulate instead of food.  Congratulations, you paid sixty dollars to be in your very own psychological experiment!  It is no coincidence that every action in CoD; shooting an enemy; shooting air support, defending an objective; capturing an objective; rescuing a friend; putting air support up; everything gives you experience instantly, popping up in yellow in the center of the screen for pushing the “lever” correctly.  After you get enough experience you gain a level and are rewarded with new options to play with.  Then as the game goes on these levels come less frequently, and along with it, your rewards.  You are coerced into pushing the “lever” over and over again, each time getting less satisfaction than the time before until finally, you are offered a chance to get “food” at a much easier rate again by prestiging.  Mix in random challenges to complete like playing X number of hours or falling X feet and Call of Duty can become quite the addiction.  The game is knowingly designed this way, to keep you playing and dropping money on DLC all until the cycle repeats itself with the newest game.  Don’t believe me?  Read this article by John Hopson, a researcher for Microsoft.  This also explains why achievements are such a huge success too.

Timmy

As scary as the above is we should be happy to live in a part of the world where we even have the opportunity to waste an afternoon away on the couch.  We are all old and mature enough to recognize when we just had a bad game or when real life needs more attention then our virtual one.  Timmy on the other hand, is not.  For those of you who don’t know, Timmy is the nickname we have given to all young, immature gamers who are extremely annoying.  He is susceptible to CoD’s Skinner Box just as much if not more so than we are, and it shows.  With little to no experience coping with failure, (which often coincides from a meeting with PcP) these players can have inexplicable behavior.  From purposefully being completely incompetent to filling every players headphones with their rendition of Justin Beiber’s “greatest hits,” these players go above and beyond what most considerable tolerable as a team mate.  But if you have ever thought to yourself “I never would have done that when I was their age,” you’re probably right.  Timmy growing up purely in the age of internet has led to online disorders that we see far too often.  Keep in mind what we usually see in-game is a combination of the following to varying degrees.  Don’t hate him, pity him for having:

The Cry Baby

Munchasuen’s Syndrome is when a person fakes an illness in order to get attention from others.  It can get sickening when parents in extreme cases actually cause harm to their children so others will give them sympathy.  Thankfully online Munchausen is comparatively minor, but holy god in heaven is it annoying.  These players will scream in the lobby just so people will tell them to shut up.  When we compliment Onslaught for another 212-3 game, they will immediately bring up how they went 213-2 once but it got deleted from their file share because their last account was banned when they were so good so many people reported them cheating but their mom called Xbox to get it back and… you get the point.  They are the people who run right into a friendly grenade or across your firing M60 in hardcore mode and then play the victim while they wait to respawn.  They are the reason we have a mute button.

The Jerk

Asperger Syndrome is an acute form of autism in which the sufferer has great difficulty with social interaction.  These people can flock to online gaming as they can turn a blind eye to most of the difficulties they have interacting with others in real life.  It is great that there is an outlet in modern society for them, it is terrible when that outlet is CoD.  One of the defining characteristics of Aspergers is difficulty empathizing with one’s peers.  You see where this is going.  They are the players who don’t care if you were in a spot first, it’s their spot.  They will knife you in the back for minutes to let you know how much you have displeased them or just get directly in your way because they can.  They put claymores six feet before yours so they get the kill and will try to steal your care package on a regular basis.  In hardcore, these players are the plague, using explosives with complete disregard, and will think nothing of shooting through you to get a kill.  Still they aren’t anywhere near as bad as:

Rage Incarnate

To talk about the rager, we must first talk about something we all do. It’s called the self serving bias. The self serving bias is when people think they are always the victims of outside conditions beyond their control while others act solely on internal conditions they can control.  In CoD, it makes us think our enemy will always choose a camping spot because they are “cheap” players.  On the other end of the spectrum, we will take the same camping spot the next game because it is where his team “needs” us.  Most of us have learned to live with it just fine with a quick curse word or two to vent, but not someone with Intermittent Explosive Disorder.  Intermittent Explosive Disorder is an impulse control disorder in which the victim suffers fits of uncontrollable anger from a disproportionately small cause.  When these people lose a game, they don’t respond like you or I.  They explode in rage, cursing the almighty for picking a host in the far away land of New York, and will let you know about your connection’s incompetence in the lobby.  Every kill you get against them is because of your “unfair tactics” which drives them furious.  Their rage will always get the best of them, causing them to toss life after life at your position in search of revenge.  The hilarious thing about the rager (on top of how much they must spend on controllers per year,) is that in their mind, they must be the best player in the world, playing with the worst set of disadvantages imaginable; how else could they lose?  They are the epitome Timmy.