CQPR - Questing for Dopamine

Better Grinding through Neurochemistry

One theory on the addictiveness of gambling come from studies on the neurotransmitter dopamine. If you do something, expect a result and get it, your dopamine levels remain pretty much level. However, if you introduce random chance into the equation, your dopamine levels will fluctuate: down when you don't get the reward, then a spike up when you do.

Dopamine feels good. It's how our primitive monkey brain regulates risk-taking. Try something too long without success and the drop in the neurotransmitter makes us frustrated enough to move on to another task. Occasional victories will give us a spike of happy that convinces us to keep going.

This is one explanation why people sit for hours in front of poker machine, despite the fact the games themselves are dull and repetitive (mostly hitting the same button over and over), and at some level the players understand they are losing money. They're not there to play the game, they're there for the neurochemical response they get to the steady but random trickle of winning moments. Which in turn sounds very much like World of Warcraft.

It's all grinding

There are a lot of random rewards in World of Warcraft. Some of it is game mechanics: occasional rare world drops liven up the game and economy, and random loot tables for bosses give every class incentive to enter an instance without having to reward them all every time. Much of it, though, is pandering directly to our little monkey brains.

Collection quests are the most obvious culprit:

[Former World of Warcraft Director Jeffrey] Kaplan used an example of a quest where a captain asks you to kill eight gnolls.

"What the eff, the guy down at the hill asked me to kill bandits and I didn't need to bring anything back to him," mocked Kaplan. "So 'A' I'm asking why I need to bring the paws back. But then I get into this philosophical thing where I say, 'Shouldn't the gnoll have a paw every time I kill him?' Or am I so brutally massacring the gnoll every time that..?"

"And then I'm like, 'Shouldn't he have two paws?'" (source)

Quests are rarely challenging in themselves, and if they are players are more likely to avoid them rather than waste unproductive downtime on failure and death. Killing mobs around your own level is generally an exercise in pressing the same sequence of buttons for each enemy, being careful not to pull too many at once. Adding the random element to collection quests, no matter how illogical it might be, turns an otherwise flat "Kill 'x' creatures" quest into a dopamine roller-coaster of failures and successes. You feel satisfaction when that quest item drops. You also feel frustration when it doesn't drop, but at least you feel something more than counting kills.

Standardly Deviant

Because the whole aim of this dopamine reaction is to regulate risk-taking, you don't want to leave people too long without a reward. Too much frustration means an unhappy game-player and an unpopular quest. This is why picking your odds carefully is important.

Take two quests:

• Collect 50 dwarf helms (drop rate 50%)
• Collect the Banesword being carried by one of the dwarves (drop rate 1%)

Both quests on average will require you kill 100 dwarves, but the distribution of probability on the second quest will be much wider. The happiness spike for finding the sword would be much higher than the much more grind-y feeling of gathering helms, but the trade-off is the potential for a short "was that it?" quest as the sword drops in the first few encounters, or a lot more and longer frustration as the number of kills stretches towards 200 with no reward whatsoever.

(Worse, the player might run out of mobs entirely and have to stand around waiting for a respawn)