4303 – Ed/Serious Feedback and Reinforcement
Feedback and Reinforcement • Both of them are the most important concepts in learning. • Any differences?
Feedback • Feedback involves providing learners with information about their responses • Positive • Negative • Neutral (attendancy) • External
Feedback • Feedback helps learners to maximize their potential at different stages of training, raise their awareness of strengths and areas for improvement, and identify actions to be taken to improve performance .
Reinforcement • Something that happens after a behavior that makes the behavior more likely to occur again . • Reinforcement is defined by its effect on behavior. Only environmental events that actually increase behavior are reinforcers. • Positive (Increase the response ) • Negative (Decrease the response ) • External • Instrinsic (Generated by the individual)
Reinforcement • Positive reinforcement occurs when desired behavior is strengthened by the presentation of a contingent stimulus. The attractive, behavior- increasing, contingent stimulus used during positive reinforcement is referred to as a positive reinforcer. A positive reinforcer is defined as any environmental event that, when given in response to the behavior, increases the strength and frequency of that behavior. Some commonly used positive reinforcers in the classroom are praise, attention, tokens, and stickers.
Reinforcement • Negative reinforcement occurs when desired behavior is strengthened by the removal of a contingent stimulus. The aversive, behavior-increasing, contingent stimulus that is removed during negative reinforcement is referred to as a negative reinforcer. A negative rein-forcer is defined as any environmental event that, when taken away in response to the behavior, increases the strength and frequency of that behavior. Some commonly used negative reinforcers in the classroom are taking away an aversive assignment (e.g., homework), withdrawing an intrusive stare, or canceling a chore.
Reinforcement
Reinforcement
Information Processing • Information processing theories tend to emphasize the importance of feedback to learning since knowledge of results is necessary to correct mistakes and develop new plans.
Behavioral • Behavioral theories focus on the role of reinforcement in motivating the individual to behave in certain ways.
Timing • Timing is important for both the feedback and reinforcement. – The length of time between the response and the feedback or reinforcement. • In general, the more immediate the feedback or reinforcement, the more learning is facilitated.
Feedback/Reinforcement in Games • Positive feedback loops in games are mechanics that reinforce the success or failure of the player and make future successes more probable. • The cliche often used to explain positive feedback loops is “ the rich get richer ”. Having money is often a prerequisite to gaining more money: you need capital to start a business, so the ones making money are the ones already rich. • Examples?
Examples • Quake II faces positive feedback loops. The relevant mechanic is that when you die, you restart with guns that are not as good as the ones that can be picked up on the battlefield. The player with the first kill then has an inherent advantage – he will have better weapons than the newly respawned player and will be more likely to kill him again, given equal skill.
Examples • Professional baseball in America has a somewhat muted positive feedback loop. There are no salary caps in baseball, so teams can spend as much money as they have to procure the best players. The best players (one would think) lead to the best success on the field. Success on the field leads to more money as people bid up tickets and buy merchandise. That money can then be fed into buying even better players.
Feedback/Reinforcement in Games • Negative feedback loops in games are mechanics that cause to hinder succeeding players from further success or failing players from further failures. • Negative feedback is dangerous because it sends mixed signals. We direct our players to succeed – win the race, kill the bad guys etc., but at the same time our negative feedback mechanics do not agree with our stated intent. • Examples?
Examples Mario Kart is a racing game where players have weapons that • they can use to speed themselves up or hinder the progress of their opponents. In a later installment, Nintendo added the Blue Shell weapon. The Blue Shell is the ultimate negative feedback loop. It homes in and destroys the player in first place no matter where they are on the map. There is nothing the first place player can do to avoid this. The blue shell is almost inevitable – there is almost one in every race. It is always on the mind of the player in first. Succeeding players are punished – no one wants to be too far ahead of the pack because the blue shell will knock them back. Instead, it encourages a dynamic where players want to be in second place until the final parts of the race – safe from blue shells but also close enough to take the lead by the finish.
Examples • Since most racing games are more interesting when you are jockeying for position with other cars, if you do too well and leave the pack behind, the AI will cheat and make the opponents go supernaturally fast to catch up with player to encourage more nail-biting racing. This punishes the player for succeeding, which goes against all the other mechanics in many of these games which are tailored to encourage the player to race well. • Players are almost unanimously against this technique – do a search in racing game reviews for “rubber-band AI” and you will see what I mean. Designers here are faced with a conundrum – have no “rubber banding” and let good players race off into the distance, effectively racing time trails, or have the AI cheat to make the race more exciting.
Why both Positive and Negative? • Positive feedback loops are naturally occurring for a simple reason: players direct themselves towards actions that make them stronger. • Negative feedback loops are much harder to come by because they can be simply contradictory and non- intuitive. We guide players to help them succeed and then behind the scenes sabotage them with negative feedback so that succeeding is bad. • We spend more time figuring out solutions to positive feedback situations than negative because positive loops cause more problems:
Positive Feedback Problems • Positive Feedback Loops • Interest curves . What if the player spends all his time trying to level up instead of exploring all the great content we have for him? What if the drops he gets from such leveling up make the rest of the game too easy? How can we reward the player with one hand and take it away with the other such that he keeps progressing through the game? Even single player games can fall victim to this.
Positive Feedback Problems • Problems of balance. Multiplayer games need to use positive feedback sparingly. If the entire game is decided by the time the first winning move enters the positive feedback loop (like the first kill in Quake II above), then why play the rest of the game? The loser will be continually beaten by the first winner, and without hope of winning himself, probably won’t be having much fun.
Positive Feedback Problems • Endgame problems . World of Warcraft has a problem. Players get stronger and stronger, but there is a finite amount of content they can offer. Eventually, you have to reach the strongest sword in the game. At that point, players cannot be directed to kill bigger bad guys for the purpose of better drops that have better stats. The designers there have to deal with the problem of “what to give the player that has everything”. Naturally, they’ve done a good job as they have a healthy base of players at the maximum level, but this problem only exists because of the positive feedback loops in the main gameplay.
Fix Positive Feedback Problems • One technique to fix positive feedback getting out of control is to decouple what the reward affects and what the tasks require. • This is a fine technique and one that I recommend, but it isn’t perfect because the player has to want a reward of something other than what will give him more power to achieve. Thus it can only be applied in some situations. • Example?
Fix Positive Feedback Problems • Pair positive feedback with negative ones • RPGs do this: When you level up, monsters also become tougher. So you get stronger, but your enemies do as well, likely at the same rate. • Your power increase is positive feedback. Your enemy’s increase is negative feedback. This would be noticeable to players if put that explicitly, so what we do is allow the player to really beat up on some lower-level thugs after powering-up to get them feeling more invincible before throwing their ass in front of newly souped-up baddies.
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