This is to be a basic run down on the various ways in which sharing methods as children we may have been reinforcing fixations with video games. This is neither damning or supporting anything, it is merely a piece of interest. This is derived largely from personal experience and from a really small adhoc survey of friends in how they shared growing up. So the validity holds all the water of a rubber duck in Stalingrad in 1944. This is an article written purely for fun. Don't expect citations, a particular formatting or any supporting evidence whatsoever because I am posting this to the Internet and the Internet should know better than that.
The methods of sharing that I have chosen to examine are some classics starting with Man or a Stage, relying on the whims of siblings that "owned" the system or were older/younger depenidng on familly dynamics, Timed turns being another and we will finish it off with various ways of sharing from playing together or playing different components of the game. However before we dig into that I think it is necessary to cover some very basic Psychological concepts of conditioning, I am writing this as a Psychology graduate, a gentleman, a liar, a beggar, a thief and a coward. Which is to say I am writing this as a very average Psychology graduate. I will not be assuming that you have foreknowledge of these concepts, but will also not be going into more detail than the most basic fundamentals of Classical Conditioning and much to my chagrin as something of a classicist we will also be touching on Operant Conditioning. If you want to find out more about these particular kinds of theory you would be best placed to look into the works of Pavlov for Classical conditioning and B F Skinner for Operant Conditioning.
Classical Conditioning is as its name says something of a classic. It is the most basic form of conditioning, originally put forward by a Russian Biologist in the early 1900s, I highly reccomend you check him out, like all the best classics he is sporting quite the pimping stache. He won a Nobel prize for his research and looks a little bit like Santa, he brings the gift of Science. The basics of Classical Conditioning stem from research into animal physical responses, specifically how much dogs were salivating or some such and generally checking out all that is involved in how dogs end up taking a dump. The real breakthrough though was when Pavlov and his research assistant realised that the dogs had begun salivating before they provided any food. Well before it was even going to be in the room even. They eventually hammered it down to the bell they rang prior to doing testing. The dogs would salivate whenever the bell rang whether there was food even made or not. The basics of Classical Conditioning is this, you present a stimulus alongside something causing a specifc reaction from the subject and they will associate the reaction with the stimulus. From that you can begin to get them to display the reaction just from the stimulus without actually providing the original cause for the reaction. You can see this if you have a pet of your own, they will come running to you at the sound of your voice making certain inflections (such as FOOD BITCH GET OUT THE WAY) or the sound of a door slamming or somesuch other quaint pet related nonsense. For you math types we are looking making A = C, A + B = C and B = C where A is a natural stimulus, B is an unnatural stimulus and C is a natural reaction. That is horrible math and I mostly put that in there to annoy people. The entire scenario takes a good bit longer than I am making it sound, but we will touch on that a bit more in Operant Conditioning. It has been shown to work to a degree in humans as well. It is really fun stuff and I highly reccomend you check it out because as I said earlier, he is like Santa that brings the gift of Science.
Onward to Operant conditioning, also known as The Great Enemy of Humanism. To begin with this is largely based on the works of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, don't be fooled by his name though, he is actually more of a Mad Scientist than a Grave Robber who makes women suits (that was Ed Gein, true story, real guy from the 50s), he is actually incredibly successful and very important to the field and well deserving of all the praise he gets. He has had almost as much effect on pop Psychology that most people will have bumped into as the classical Freud stuff (Which is to say Pop Psych gets them totally wrong, but he is part of the wider cultural lexicon more so than some of his incredibly deserving predecessors like the delightful Carl Jung or others of Freud's proteges). To put it into perspective, Skinner almost single handedly changed the way Psychology was practised for research across the US (Which was and still is one of the dominant regions of the science), he essentially gave us the style and flavour of the science for a good 20 or 30 years. Now keeping that in mind that he was brilliant and incredibly important, he was also the man that worked with the US Navy on the prospect of Pigeon Guided Missiles (look up Project Pigeon), a great man and more than capable of stretching his theories and his science well beyond the point that most normal people would even consider. With all that praise out of the way lets actually get into the meat of the work here though. Operant Conditioning is taking the same basic principles of Classical Conditioning that Pavlov gave us and taking it up a notch or 5 million. Operant conditioning is still all about providing a stimulus and elliciting a specific desired response, however Skinner was doing research that showed how to make it more effective, the effect frequency of providing the stimulus has and almost every variable of the lot. This is one that you are much better off looking up on your own than me going into detail. The long and the short of it was that Skinner found that you can get people and animals to perform actions by rewarding them with things, so where Pavlov was ringing bells and making dogs drool we have Skinner training rats to push levers for food. The main thing was not just that he had people performing actions to do things however it is discovering the ways to make the unnatural response last longer and to be picked up more quickly (Operant conditioning also can get people to perform actions for rewards, it is just further extrapolations of Pavlov's work). The results of his work was that by far the most effective way to train a response was to provide the stimulus randomly, Operant conditioning also covers having to perform the action multiple times to receive the stimulus or having to do it for lengths of time and so on. Push the button once and you have a chance to get the cookie pretty much the most effective one though. Sounds familiar yeah? It is your classic gambling addiction scenario. This method of Operant Conditioning not only is picked up the most easilly however, it has the longest retention and is by far the most effective after a sustained delay. That is to say when you push the lever and get the cookie at random; you learn that pushing the lever gets you the cookie more quickly than if you had to push the lever 5 times and when they take the lever away from you for 2 weeks and give it back you are far more likely to start pushing that lever for cookies again expecting cookies. The scary part of all this is that you are going to keep pushing the lever for the cookie even after it stops giving you cookies. It is pretty much the text book example for addictive behaviour and this is kind of the important thing for what we are going to be examining. Note however I am not saying that these methods of play have made us addicted to games or that elements of these in games are a cause for addiction. What we are examining here is how we went about playing games and how that behaviour of even getting to play games may have reinforced our appreciation for playing games. As for why Skinner is the Great Enemy of Humanism? That is a simple answer, in the study of the human mind he and his legacy systemically removed the concept of the human mind from it.
Man or a Stage
So keeping in mind these basic principles of Operant Conditioning and noting that it is the more effective method of reinforcing a response we come to what we will call Man or a Stage. This is normally a way of playing with a group of people, either finish a level or die and the next person plays. This is a fairly powerful feedback loop you have with this process. The worse you are at a game the more infrequently your turns will be, especially if the people you play with are better, but the lengths of play and therefore the frequency also have no real fixed cycle time. You have all the text book examples of ways in which you will have reinforced the pleasure you derive from gaming, random intervals, random degrees of positive feedback and most of all big rewards for good play. If you mix in using this play style when playing with a differing group of people and you have the near perfect recipe for long term reinforcement of a habit of playing video games.
I am the Youngest/Oldest/Jesus/Visitor/GODDAMNED BATMAN/owner of the system.
Next up we have varying time frames based on the nature of whoever you are sharing with. This is a situation where your time allocated to play games is greatly influenced by the whims of another. Whether it is because someone else owns the system, someone else is younger and you are supposed to look out for them, someone is older and can physically threaten you, someone is the son of some god so calls dibs, someone is a guest and you let them play as they will out of courteousy, whether you are dense or retarded; they are the goddamned Batman or just plain someone else owns the system here you are looking at again a set of broken up infrequent intervals that are reliant entirely on outside stimulus other than your own specific desires to play the game. Now of course this is entirely dependent on the person that you are dealing with here, but the basic assumption is that this actually matters, if you were in a similar scenario but it was never actually influenced play times then clearly this is not a case where the fact that they are the goddamned Batman actually came up. Again we are looking at diverse interspersed play times, so you are likely looking at a method of play that is going to again encourage the habit, however your play times are far more likely to be prolonged, reducing some of the random element to Man or a Stage. So that would suggest that this is likely a less reinforcing habit.
Time Share Console
So say you and your siblings/gay lover/fellow prostitutes in training have one Sega Master system between the lot of you, how do you fairly dole out the play time? Structured organised play times is fairly common, especially with adult intervention. It is a pretty good way to get kids to shut the hell up. You had your turn, now here play with the back of my hand IN YOUR FACE. Fairly simple to analyse here though, assuming it is followed relatively strictly you are looking at consistent availabilities to games. Consistent repetetive action/response cycles show the weakest reinforcement and weakest retention. So if you wanted a kid to grow up enjoying games but not being quite as obsessed this is probably a good choice. Nearly impossible to enforce incredibly strictly of course, but it is better than never letting the kid play at all.
MULTIPLATTER
Another option is to pretty much rely on playing Multiplayer games only, most likely co-op or split screen competetive nature (otherwise you have multiple systems and can go do your own thing anyway), now that makes it fairly hard to attribute, you are likely in this situation and one of the others above. However there is a few key scenarios of multiple players that I really would like to explore more than just saying that this is random all over the place and who the fuck knows. First of all if you only ever play multiplayer games you are entirely reliant on the whims of a partner which is going to add an uncontrollable external source to the whole thing. Another one that I feel is worth noting also is a method of play where players control specific components within the game. Somewhat similar to Man or a Stage, however you see cases for games with multiple levels of play. For example using my ur example of everything brilliant in gaming we go back to an old personal favourite, the best game ever made for anything ever, the first X-COM game, UFO: Enemy Unknown or X-COM: UFO Defense if you come from places where people are certifiably insane. This is a game that had both a macro level strategy game playing out with base building aerial based interception money management kind of thing going on and also small scale squad based tactics happening at the same time. I used to play this with my siblings and we used to take turns at the individual components, myself playing the macro strategy part with my elder brother playing the tactical missions because oh my god Chrysalids give you nightmares when you are 10. There are a great many games that can be played this way and you are again looking at a vairly dispersed randomised frequency of play. Other methods of multiplayer might come up but those are the ones that come to mind.
In conclusion though, yeah pretty much playing games and enjoying yourself is going to make you keep playing, that is no surprise. It is essentially the same reason people keep putting appendages in warm moist holes. However it looks like not only are games themselves little delightful Skinerian conditioning devices in and of themselves, the way that we are likely to be engaged by them growing up is also something I would argue can quite easilly contribute to developing the habit.
