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Advancement Addiction

The Psychology of Character Advancement & Overjustification.

by Dan Bayn

It would seem that role-players just plain enjoy character advancement. It plays a central role in most role-playing games, second only to the core action resolution mechanics in importance. Entire encyclopedias of skills, spells, powers, maneuvers, and other rules candy have seen publication in the endless pursuit of more character advancement options. Its absence from a game is instantly noted and most often lamented. Behavioral psychology can tell us why... and shed some light on the dark side of character advancement.

Aside from the sheer joy of shopping, why is character advancement so habit-forming? Few things are inherently rewarding: primarily food, sex, and the avoidance of pain. Everything else becomes rewarding by association. This is Classical Conditioning, the cornerstone of Behaviorist psychology, but perhaps that's following our rabbit a little too far down its hole. For our purposes, it's enough to know that we like the feeling of control because it allows us to obtain rewards and avoid punishments. It's as simple as that.

In a role-playing game, control comes principally from your character's stats. The process of character advancement allows players to improve those stats, thus increasing one's control over the game. We like advancement because it gives us more control, but if that's the case, why start a character off so ineffective in the first place? Why defer the most rewarding gameplay for weeks or months? The answer to that question lies with Classical Conditioning's little brother, Operant Conditioning.

When you give out rewards at different rates, you get vastly different patterns of behavior. Rewarding a behavior each and every time it occurs is a great way to produce a lot of that behavior very quickly, but that behavior will drop off just as quickly if the rewards ever stop coming. If you want high rates of behavior that persist over time, you have to space out the rewards and make people work for them, patiently and diligently. This is called a Variable Ratio Reinforcement Schedule and it's the magic behind a lot of addictive activities (like pretty much every form of gambling ever invented!).

The classic character advancement scheme (Experience) exploits this trick by taking a game's primary reward (character effectiveness) and doling it out to players over time. This produces a lot of highly persistent behavior, usually involving the bloody termination of various monsters. When we look back upon all that time spent saving up experience points, we usually conclude that there was something inherently enjoyable about all that effort and self-denial. We remember the joy of getting new powers, not the pain of saving up for them, and we attribute it all to the shopping instead of its real source: control. It's a sick and twisted cycle, especially considering that the only thing preventing us from creating the effective characters we really want on day one are a bunch of rules in a book, some ink on a page.

"So what?" you might ask. "Maybe we like our artificially-induced joy of advancement!" Fair enough, but there's another wrinkle we should all be aware of. It's known as the Overjustification Effect. When you tack a token reward system onto a behavior that was already rewarding, you risk replacing the "intrinsic" reward with the token one. Then, if the token is ever removed or loses its effect, the behavior drops off... almost as if it had never been rewarding in and of itself!

This becomes a problem for role-playing games when you give out experience points for the things that initially drew you to a game, whether that's slaying dragons, fighting Nazis, or investigating UFOs. Once a player's character reaches their desired level of effectiveness, and character advancement no longer has anything to offer them, they may grow disinterested in the game... even though that level of effectiveness was what they've spent the rest of the game trying to achieve! They find it difficult to enjoy the game for itself, for the dragon slaying or the Nazi fighting. Now, the game is just about advancement.

(I expect some of you would object at this point. "But Dan," you might say, "if they don't enjoy the game once their characters are effective, how do you know that character effectiveness was the initial source of enjoyment?" "Good question," I would reply. It's a dilemma, to be sure, but I honestly cannot think of any other place the initial reward could be coming from. If I don't want to throw fireballs and hit by enemies more often than not, why would I care which spells I know and what level my Longsword skill is at? If the initial reward isn't your ability to affect the game world in desirable ways, I don't know why this hobby exists in the first place!)

The only way to prevent Overjustification Effects is to create effective characters right up front and rely on your love of the game to fuel your fun. You have to keep the focus on the game world and your characters' place in it (see below). Incidentally, this should also make the game more fun for newbies: people who haven't been trained to tough it out with a low-level character until they have enough XP to build the character they want. Instead, they'll have the immediately rewarding experience of in-game success, the joy of taking an effective character through an exciting story. As long as you can keep that story fresh, they'll keep playing.

In other words: if emulating a beloved genre is your goal, skip character advancement. You can do without it, even in long-running, open-ended, campaign-style games. All you have to do is keep the story from getting stale. That, my friends, is an issue of Character Development...

Rather than string your players along with offers of improved stats and new powers, let them decide how their characters grow and change in the context of the game. A dragon slayer's reputation will spread far and wide, rewarding them with the admiration of townsfolk and job offers from the rich and powerful. A pulp hero will collect allies and contacts like there's no tomorrow, and never underestimate the intrinsic reward power of thwarting a hated foe! UFO investigators value nothing more than uncovering the Truth, even if each new revelation raised three new questions. A good story can be its own reward.

Now, I'm not saying that character advancement is inherently worthless or that people who enjoy (ie. just about every gamer living or dead) is a bad person. I just want us all to realize where that enjoyment is coming from and what other kinds of enjoyment it may be replacing. If that's not a concern for you, keep doing what you love.

Otherwise, create the characters you want to play, right away, and develop them in the game world. (Also take a look at the approach described in Fudge on the Fly. It's all the customization with none of the token economy.) To borrow a phrase, XP can't buy me love.

Loath Your Fellow Man
www.Bayn.org