Addictive Behaviour
Feb. 16th, 2015 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davywavyBack when World of Warcraft was new - about 2004-5 - I spent an afternoon playing it on someone else's account to find out what all the fuss was about. I ran about waving a sword, killing goblins and nicking their stuff, and running errands for random bystanders. After a few hours of this I came to the conclusion that WoW was specifically designed to be addictive and I wasn't going anywhere near it again.
The human brain is an exquisitely well-designed reward-seeking machine, and as psychology as a discipline improves we're getting ever-better as ticking those reward boxes in the name of entertainment. Take Pringles, for example. There's a specific set of proportions of sugar, fat and salt in a food which if present makes the brain light up like a christmas tree in a scanner, and Pringles have that combination to perfection. "Holy Crap!", your subconscious says when you eat one. "These things are effin' boss! More!"
And that's why before you know it the entire tube is gone.
WoW, I reckoned, was designed the same way. If you play it in a goal-directed way, you got a little tick or a pat every twenty minutes or so. You go and find the ring of Zognar for the villagers, get some treasure and get a message saying "Well done, Kragnor the mighty! You have saved the village!" and the brain, reward-seeking little machine that it is, goes ping! and gives you some success chemicals which make you happy. Just that little kick, every twenty minutes, but it's enough to get people spending hours, days, even years of their lives pursuing just one more step before logging off and doing something else.
Like I say - knowing myself like I do I went nowhere near it ever again.
It's also this reason I've always reckoned the internet isn't a particularly psychologically healthy place to be - it's a mechanism whereby you can receive instant rewards for pretty much any behaviour you choose. Feeling down? Get hugs. Feeling funny? Get likes. Want to troll? There's bound to be someone who will rise to the bait. And the thing is psychological study after study demonstrates that getting rewards for little or no effort isn't really all that good for you. Despite that, however, it's still great fun.
I've written a few things over the years on here which have gone viral. Possibly the best known is the "British terror alert levels" chain email which still goes round every so often, which I've seen attributed to John Cleese and which I had to have an argument with Snopes.com before they gave me credit for it. It's an odd expereince, seeing others passing on your own work, often without credit, but I've got to admit it is nice. Addictive, possibly.
Anyway, I have in the past written a few pieces for the satirical news site Newsthump. North Korea Internet blackout blamed on TalkTalk account and England world cop pitch treated by the same people who did Rooney's hair, for example. It was an occasional thing. I'd think of a halfway decent joke, submit it to them and they'd run it if they liked it. A few hundred or a thousand or two people would like it, I'd get that little reward kick, and then I'd get on with my day. That was until a few weeks ago when I submitted Warning that scrapping Page 3 could leave footballers unable to find girlfriends. They accepted it, posted it, and I thought little enough more of it. Briefly. As what followed was one of the strangest afternoons I've had in a while. Like I say; I'd had stuff go round the internet, but I've never seen it happen in real time.
Within an hour, thousands of people had liked and shared the piece. At one point I was clicking refresh and finding I was getting an average of one 'like' every 2-3 seconds. Then Myleene Klass and Lauren Laverne stuck it out on twitter and it really went a bit nuts. I sat and watched as it racked up over 50,000 likes and shares over the course of a day and the reward centre in my brain went Awoogah Awoogah. It was an insight into the power of mass communication in a social media age and the attention and reaction was, clearly, addictive. I say clearly because I've submitted more to them since then - considerably more in than in the past, trying to catch the buzz again. I've had a few successes - my piece Russia's credit rating is just fine, says last surviving Standard & poor's analyst didn't set the world on fire in terms of reach, but it made it into the political and economic sphere and was retweeted by Toomas Ilves, the President of Estonia*.
I've written a lot for them over the last few weeks. By my calculations I've been responsible for more than 50% of their site traffic in the last month, which is good as I get paid by traffic, but on the other hand I'm clearly chasing the dragon of internet approval.
The only question is, it's harmless so should I stop? Writing jokes is fun and I'd be doing it anyway. And what should I write instead?
*I can only assume relations between Estonia and Russia are at a bit of a low ebb at the moment.
The human brain is an exquisitely well-designed reward-seeking machine, and as psychology as a discipline improves we're getting ever-better as ticking those reward boxes in the name of entertainment. Take Pringles, for example. There's a specific set of proportions of sugar, fat and salt in a food which if present makes the brain light up like a christmas tree in a scanner, and Pringles have that combination to perfection. "Holy Crap!", your subconscious says when you eat one. "These things are effin' boss! More!"
And that's why before you know it the entire tube is gone.
WoW, I reckoned, was designed the same way. If you play it in a goal-directed way, you got a little tick or a pat every twenty minutes or so. You go and find the ring of Zognar for the villagers, get some treasure and get a message saying "Well done, Kragnor the mighty! You have saved the village!" and the brain, reward-seeking little machine that it is, goes ping! and gives you some success chemicals which make you happy. Just that little kick, every twenty minutes, but it's enough to get people spending hours, days, even years of their lives pursuing just one more step before logging off and doing something else.
Like I say - knowing myself like I do I went nowhere near it ever again.
It's also this reason I've always reckoned the internet isn't a particularly psychologically healthy place to be - it's a mechanism whereby you can receive instant rewards for pretty much any behaviour you choose. Feeling down? Get hugs. Feeling funny? Get likes. Want to troll? There's bound to be someone who will rise to the bait. And the thing is psychological study after study demonstrates that getting rewards for little or no effort isn't really all that good for you. Despite that, however, it's still great fun.
I've written a few things over the years on here which have gone viral. Possibly the best known is the "British terror alert levels" chain email which still goes round every so often, which I've seen attributed to John Cleese and which I had to have an argument with Snopes.com before they gave me credit for it. It's an odd expereince, seeing others passing on your own work, often without credit, but I've got to admit it is nice. Addictive, possibly.
Anyway, I have in the past written a few pieces for the satirical news site Newsthump. North Korea Internet blackout blamed on TalkTalk account and England world cop pitch treated by the same people who did Rooney's hair, for example. It was an occasional thing. I'd think of a halfway decent joke, submit it to them and they'd run it if they liked it. A few hundred or a thousand or two people would like it, I'd get that little reward kick, and then I'd get on with my day. That was until a few weeks ago when I submitted Warning that scrapping Page 3 could leave footballers unable to find girlfriends. They accepted it, posted it, and I thought little enough more of it. Briefly. As what followed was one of the strangest afternoons I've had in a while. Like I say; I'd had stuff go round the internet, but I've never seen it happen in real time.
Within an hour, thousands of people had liked and shared the piece. At one point I was clicking refresh and finding I was getting an average of one 'like' every 2-3 seconds. Then Myleene Klass and Lauren Laverne stuck it out on twitter and it really went a bit nuts. I sat and watched as it racked up over 50,000 likes and shares over the course of a day and the reward centre in my brain went Awoogah Awoogah. It was an insight into the power of mass communication in a social media age and the attention and reaction was, clearly, addictive. I say clearly because I've submitted more to them since then - considerably more in than in the past, trying to catch the buzz again. I've had a few successes - my piece Russia's credit rating is just fine, says last surviving Standard & poor's analyst didn't set the world on fire in terms of reach, but it made it into the political and economic sphere and was retweeted by Toomas Ilves, the President of Estonia*.
I've written a lot for them over the last few weeks. By my calculations I've been responsible for more than 50% of their site traffic in the last month, which is good as I get paid by traffic, but on the other hand I'm clearly chasing the dragon of internet approval.
The only question is, it's harmless so should I stop? Writing jokes is fun and I'd be doing it anyway. And what should I write instead?
*I can only assume relations between Estonia and Russia are at a bit of a low ebb at the moment.
