Have you ever spent hours grinding a mobile game, eager to receive that all-so-compelling 5-star reward, without realizing you’re not actually having fun anymore? Well, it may not be entirely your fault.
Modern mobile games are founded upon psychological schemes to keep people grinding away at their designated chores, even long after the player’s initial enjoyment wore out. Recently, the mobile gaming industry’s stratagem has shifted towards glorified to-do lists, statistics, roulettes, and gambling machines – far removed from what we would consider “video games”. Don’t believe me? Let’s see how the recent mobile title, High Seas Hero, utilizes operant conditioning and reinforcement schedules to dole out dopamine at key periods, keeping players sucked in, even when there’s no “game” at all. First, we’ll understand what these pieces of psycho-lingo terminology really mean, then we’ll see how they apply to the “gameplay tropes” seen in the fabled High Seas Hero, and finally explicate the consequences for the constant utilization of these tropes within the mobile gaming industry.
Operant Conditioning and Reinforcement Schedules
In behavioral psychology, operant conditioning1 is the idea that an organism’s behavior can be affected based on their consequences. For example, a kid who has their phone taken away (what we call a negative punishment2) for swearing will likely repeat it less. Likewise, a kid who’s given candy (what we call positive reinforcement) for doing their chores will likely repeat that more. Theory, here, suggests that if an organism’s behavior tends to produce desirable consequences, it is more likely to be repeated – so is the contrapositive.
Examples of operant conditioning can be seen all throughout gaming. The whole lives system hinges on negative punishments, for one. Make a mistake? You die. What do you lose? Progress. On the contrary, skill-shots, like headshots, are a subtle form of positive reinforcement. Do you have enough precision to aim down a foe’s head? You can kill them in one click. In this way, the player learns to aim at the head more often, an example of behavior reinforcement.
Reinforcement schedules, then, refer to the mechanisms by which behavior is reinforced, such as how and, in particular, when it is reinforced. The idea of reinforcement schedules was first described by B.F. Skinner and Charles Ferster in their aptly titled Schedules of Reinforcement. In it, they discussed conducting experiments with pigeons in boxes, giving the pigeons popcorn, but only in specific conditions and intervals. For some pigeons, they got food every time they pressed a button in their box. This is to test a common kind of reinforcement schedule, the continuous schedule, which provides rewards for every response by the organism. An example would be Cookie Clicker’s cookie, which, when clicked, always gives one currency-cookie3. Because this happens with every click, it is said to be a continuous schedule.
The problem with continuous reinforcement is it’s easy to get burned out fast. The pigeons who got popcorn for every press of the button stopped almost immediately after the popcorn ran out. In technical parlance, we think of “burning out” as behavior going extinct, and the speed at which it goes extinct being the extinction rate. Extinction broadly refers to the disappearance of a behavior due to not being treated with reinforcement. In the case of Cookie Clicker, extinction from a continuous process can be seen with how players almost instantly stop clicking, once they gain automatic methods of earning currency, because not only is the act of clicking tiring, it’s also easy enough to mentally let go.
Here’s a question. What if we were to take that mechanic of giving a cookie for every click, and instead tweak it so it grants cookies for every 10 clicks? Or, what if we make it so that cookies are only granted randomly? What do you think happens to player retention? Ferster and Skinner asked similar questions for their pigeons, and, shockingly found, in their experiments, that the pigeons who got popcorn periodically were more adamant about pressing the button in comparison to those who got rewards continuously. In unflattering similarity to the pigeons, people, too, are more likely to keep clicking buttons for periodic, rather than continuous rewards, even after original satisfaction was extinguished, in favor of new forthcoming goals, or at least the pursuit of them.
Described above are examples of intermittent (or partial) reward schedules, and how they’re generally better at grabbing and keeping attention than continuous ones. Broadly, four main types of intermittent reward schedules exist, which are:
- Fixed Interval Schedule: A constant amount of time between each reinforcement. Examples – Waiting 5 minutes before the roulette can be spun in High Seas Hero, or 12 hours before a booster pack can be opened in Pokemon: TCG Pocket.
- Fixed Ratio Schedule: A constant number of responses between each reinforcement. Examples – Gaining an extra life after every 100 coins in Mario, or receiving a gift after every 3 Little Sisters rescued in Bioshock.
- Variable Interval Schedule: A random amount of time between each reinforcement. Example – Waiting until a fish bites the hook in WEBFISHING.
- Variable Ratio Schedule: A random number of responses between each reinforcement. Example – Gambling.
Among all these intermittent reinforcement schedules, variable-ratio schedules (as seen in red above) have been shown to be the most effective in terms of maximizing response rate while minimizing extinction rate. The pigeons who got popcorn randomly were the ones who didn’t stop pecking the button. They kept gambling.
Why do you think gambling is so addicting to many? We, human beings, love to win – we love positive reinforcement – so we’d willingly, impulsively, spend heaps of money until we do win, under the belief that the next pull, or the one after, is the jackpot. Most damning is that the extinction rate for systems with variable-ratio schedules is really slow, so, unlike stopping oneself from clicking cookies, stopping oneself from gambling is a lot harder to mentally let go of.
Mind you, variable-ratio schedules are not the only psychological tactic of focus here, and most importantly, it’s also not only seen in gambling. Variable-ratio schedules exist in many places. For example, have you ever heard a friend scream “One more game. We’ll definitely win the next one!” You might. Hell, you’ve probably said that sentence yourself. Winning, too, can be seen as variable-ratio. You only win once every few games. Playing more and more rounds, in the pursuit of winning, even after the enjoyment was extinguished by a long loss streak, is of similar genetics to our mindset seen in gambling4. We are impulsive. But more than that, when it comes to chance, we are stubborn.
Knowing this, we can now start to analyze, using the lens of psychology, the various reinforcement schedules utilized by, and in particular the variable-ratio schedule underlying High Seas Hero‘s core gameplay, along with other similar psychological tools that it and games like it use, to give their lacking content addicting color.
A Pigeon In The “High Seas Hero” Skinner Box
Okay, so, High Seas Hero is a mobile game released just a week ago, January 7, 2025. It was created by Century Games, the same company behind Whiteout Survival and Dragonscapes. Century Games specializes within the mobile gaming industry, and High Seas Hero is their most recent, seafaring action-packed obra maestro, suited with what seems like deep ARPG mechanics and cool, steampunk-era 2.5D visuals – at least, according to their promotional material.
This promotional material, to the shock of no one, does not accurately represent the final product. It’s misleading. Fake, one may even say. Personally, it makes me sad. The visuals of the promised game look as pristine as the waters the ships tread, and the gunplay as crunchy as the debris from each bombastic explosion. It looks enthralling and exciting, and maybe fun, even if I’m not the largest ARPG fan. I would wholeheartedly play the game promised in those promotional materials. But that’s the game promised. Not the one released.
The true video game of High Seas Hero can be seen above. High Seas Hero is what I like to call a “game salad”. If you even just glance at the screenshot above, you may see what I mean. It’s not one, deep-cut video game, but it’s like a weird mosh combination of many shallow ones, which we will cover later. However, the primary gameplay gimmick of High Seas Hero lies in that glowing orange button with the word “FORGE” engraved onto it. Energy obtained from killing military scalawags can be converted and forged into random pieces of equipment, with random statistics, random levels, and random rarity. Getting good equipment is the soul and core progression of High Seas Hero, and players acquire better equipment by strenuously clicking the FORGE button, over and over, until they randomly come across that all-too-important Epic cannon or Legendary radar for which they’ve been waiting. It’s a glorified clicker game. With randomized rewards. See anything recognizable?
Indeed, the core gameplay gimmick of High Seas Hero is a good example (I argue, almost too good of an example) of a game utilizing a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule. To reiterate, variable-ratio schedules give rewards after a random number of responses. A variable-ratio schedule has the fastest response rate (i.e., players will click FORGE often) as well as the slowest extinction rate (i.e., players will not stop clicking FORGE, or will do so very slowly). The game also extrinsically motivates players to obtain better equipment and keep clicking FORGE by introduced end-of-level bosses which test their battleships. Upon death, High Seas Hero even taunts players, telling them to “try getting better equipment.” Thanks, game. We’re trying.
So, already, there are two reinforcement schedules at play. One is a fixed-interval negative punishment schedule – i.e., the bosses – which essentially acts as a “test” to see if the player has strong enough equipment to proceed. Should players die, they are barred from proceeding until they can win. This arbitrary lock forces players to fall into the core gameplay loop by forcing them to create equipment. Meanwhile, the act of forging equipment itself is a variable-ratio positive reinforcement schedule, akin to no-stakes gambling, where the “reward” is only given every so often, at random. Therefore, one must chase it, by upping how fast they can click, and for how long they can do so. When it comes to games of chance, humans are stubborn. So we click. Click, click, click.
Although, I’m certain that when you – the reader – saw the dizzying number of buttons on High Seas Hero‘s main menu above, you may have gotten interested about the sheer breadth of elements on display. There’s so many buttons! What do they do? I tell you now that many (if not all) of those elements have within them psychological tactics that, much like its variable-ratio gameplay loop, magnetizes players to the game. Let’s examine how, and why, one-by-one.
Mind Manipulating Menus
The Wheel (or Lucky Spin) is the closest High Seas Hero gets to shamelessly showing its addiction-inducing design. Lucky Spin is literally a roulette. Additionally, it can only be spun every 5 minutes, not only giving it a fixed-interval reward schedule, but also giving players reasons to play for extended periods of time. Gotta get those free spins!
The 4000 Free Draws event is notable here because it is a fixed-ratio schedule that rewards players after every 5 levels5. It’s interesting because it does little in the way of keeping players hornswoggled – the gambling-like gameplay loop already ensures that – but what it does achieve is give the idea of progression. Our idea of progression when it comes to rarity-affected variable-ratio mechanisms is to believe that, the rarer our items, the farther we are into the game. After all, levels don’t particularly mean anything in a gacha game. So 4000 Free Draws gives at least some meaning to beating the levels, in a way.
Meanwhile, 7 Day Sign-in is, well. It’s that mechanic. The one you see in every other game today. Daily login rewards is a ubiquitous machination, created to give players reasons to keep returning every day, with Daily Tasks not being far off in purpose either. The effect here is twofold. For one, it sneaks games into people’s daily routines. Have you heard one of your friends say, “I have to do my Genshin Impact dailies!”? The same routine-effective psychology is absolutely on display. If players start opening, or even thinking about High Seas Hero on the daily, they may do it so often it becomes second nature or automatic, a process known as routinization6. Then, they’ll become loyal to the product – potentially a whale – a truly valuable consumer. On top of that, the game also increases its daily average users (DAU), artificially inflating its market value when it would otherwise… you know… have none.
Of course, there’s also a Gacha system. Who’s surprised? Gacha is yet another gambling-like, variable-ratio schedule which gives players rewards at random rates. What makes gacha so effective, though, is that response rate is not all up to the player, it’s partly up to the game. Sure, players can finish quests to receive tickets or gems, but the quantity of these tickets is up to the designers. Gacha games essentially retain the slow extinction rate of a variable-ratio schedule, but with a more controlled response rate, ensuring even slower burnout. No wonder it’s so commonplace today. Of course, a game must still be careful with its rewards, for too little reinforcements can lead to player disdain. Remember when Genshin Impact players complained that miHoyo only gave 8 or so pulls for winning in The Game Awards? The playerbase got so upset, they nearly gained sentience!
Finally, even High Seas Hero‘s visual indicators bring within them psychological nuance. See the red dots above? Classical conditioning (not to be confused with operant conditioning) suggests that when positive stimuli are paired with objects or events, those objects or events are associated with the positive stimuli. For example, imagine that you are a child who loves peanut butter sandwiches. Every time your mother comes into your room, she brings you a slice of the ‘wich. With enough of these mother-sandwich pairings, you may start to associate her with that particular positive stimuli. Soon enough, just your mother merely opening the door can produce the same kind of happiness as the sandwich itself.
Peanut butter sandwiches aside, the same classical conditioning can be seen in High Seas Hero’s red dot notifiers, too. Quite often, these pesky red circles indicate that a reward can be claimed from some menu in the game. With enough instances of this, our brain can make the association that “red dot = reward”, allowing us to feel the same stimulation from merely seeing the red dot to the actual reward itself. The red dot then becomes a sort of visual eponymy for the reward, or the idea of it. If you’ve ever felt like you spend too much time claiming rewards in the menus of Mobile Legends or Call of Duty: Mobile than actually playing the game, or, if you’ve ever felt cheated when a button with a red dot didn’t have a reward, know that there may be underlying reasons behind these feelings.
Where Is The Game?
This article thus far has all but been a dense thinking exercise. Maybe you’ve worn your brain out trying to recognize subtle mind-manipulation patterns. So let’s rest. Relax. And ask some simpler questions.
First of all, where is the rest of the content?
Those astute may recognize that the discussion so far has mostly centralized toward High Seas Hero‘s main menu. Obviously, there are more elements: resource management in the Cabin; community engagement in Guilds; competitive grinding in Arena. This article was mainly written with an analysis of the game’s operant conditioning in mind, but the reader is perhaps encouraged to try and analyze the game’s undiscussed mechanics, especially those with deceptive psychology meant to trick the player into playing.
But to some, this language may still seem rather negative. Manipulation? Tricks? After all, where is the deception?
On the surface, there really is no deception. Behavioral conditioning, by itself, is not some devil-minded invention that was spawned out of Hell by Big Video Game. Anything with mastery, or a fail state, or a damn goal, makes use of behavioral conditioning. Rewards and punishments are one of the cornerstones of the modern game.
See, games are abstract systems. It’s not that they “contain” abstract systems. Strip everything, and they are. Through all the audiovisuals and narratives, video games, at their core, are mere entangled murky mechanisms made for our monkey brains. The fun comes from discovering, learning, and mastering said abstract systems. The fun is the substance extracted from within.
So, I ask, for High Seas Hero. Where is the fun?
Despite High Seas Hero‘s ultimate reliance on a barrage of modern mobile gaming tropes and psychological pieties, it’s not a very complex game. Most of my playtime has been spent clicking one button, over and over, until something else distracts me for a bit, so I deal with it, but then I come back to the button and press, over and over. Of course, many people may enjoy a stripped back, casual app to pass the time, especially when it’s so mentally stimulating, by design. Certainly, I’m not here to assert, let alone judge. We find enjoyment in different things. Honestly, I could envision how something of this nature can be enjoyable.
However, where I do take an issue with High Seas Hero is how it completely substitutes real gameplay for cheap psycho-emotional tricks. Everything in High Seas Hero, to me, feels like a long-winding excuse to keep it open, rather than an intricate system actually worth delving into. I said earlier that its core gameplay loop is almost “too good” of an example of a variable-ratio schedule, because the entire gameplay loop is just that, and nothing more. No need to solve puzzles, or fight combats, or strategize, or really use one’s brain in any sort of capacity. One merely clicks, until they are rewarded. Psychology tricks can be used to enhance a game. But psychology tricks cannot just be the game.
If you strip away everything in Sonic, apart from the hedgehog itself, you’d still have a super speedy, slick blue-swirl. Strip everything from Halo, and you’re still left with rock-ass intergalactic gunplay. But remember those experiments B.F. Skinner and Charles Ferster explored? Where they put pigeons in boxes and made them push buttons for rewards? Strip away all the non-necessities in High Seas Hero and that’s what it personally feels like, to an almost intrepid degree. Cover you in confetti and content as it might, but High Seas Hero cannot hide the fact that its players are mere helpless pigeons in its grandiose Skinner box, dangling candy in front of the gamer’s very eyes, as if teasing them, telling them, you thought you were to experience a compelling and strategic real-time action-RPG, don’t you want a Transcendental engine instead? You’re so close to leveling up, forge ten more equipment for some free tickets, wait a few more minutes for another chance at the roulette, don’t you want that? Stimulation? So sit there, and click. And click, and click, and click.
Enjoy that system all you want. But I beg for an answer to this question:
Where is the game?
Inadvertent Consequences
The continual degradation of the modern mobile game from soul to tropes, from casual enjoyment to psycho-addictive-hell perigee, has two consequences in my eyes.
The constant and consistent usage of predatory tropes and mechanisms, like variable-ratio schedules, compulsive loops, and dopamine-inducing systems, has the ability to hide a lack of quality. Many, especially those unentranced by the greater gaming industry, may equate their playtime for enjoyability. Besides, if you’re playing the game, surely you must be having fun, correct? Therefore, mobile games have realized that it’s far more effective to coax the unbeknownst into draining hundreds of hours on their product through mind management, rather than spending those resources on creating an actually compelling concept.
“… players did not necessarily have to enjoy playing a video game to order to play for long periods of time. Their participants reported that concurrent reward structures kept them playing for long periods.”
Look, I still strongly believe that gaming is an artform. But seeing games like High Seas Hero get pushed out – mindless, monotonous mockeries made to infiltrate people’s minds – is staggering. As soon as a company figures out a way to get players addicted to a mobile game, almost everyone else follows suit, like a red bandwagon, destination City of Homogeny, completely obliterating any sense of originality any idea could have had. I look back at those trailers and promotional screenshots of High Seas Hero, with the fantastic 2.5D visuals and ARPG mechanics, and a description underneath stating “You, a survivor, emerge as a hero of high seas,” not the most original concept but an intriguing one nonetheless, excited to see what it’s about, only to then open the game, and realize. The land of art has vanished, under the rising seas of business.
But far more importantly, and the biggest reason why I warn readers regarding these psychological traps ever present today, is it could lead them to addiction7. I believe that I used to have gaming addiction. Maybe I still do. But it was through writing in this blogsite that I was able to obtain a real hobby for myself, and start anew. But being addicted to anything, be it a video game or a drug, is genuinely debilitating, especially when you’re made aware of what you’re doing, and, most painfully, what you’re losing. A review by Mohammad et al. (2023) showed that gaming addiction can lead to social and psychological withdrawal, loss of interest in other activities, and outright forgetting to eat, and drink, and sleep. These cheap psychological tricks are not so cheap after all, for they come at the cost of one’s mental and emotional stability. If you have ever felt like you were in a similar scenario, where you felt so eager to open your favorite game in your wake, and be on it for hours, and feel sad after you’re done, put the phone down, there’s still people to meet in the day.
Conclusion
High Seas Hero is a fascinating game salad. It’s a great example of a game that has barely any complex systems (nor, in my opinion, enjoyable systems) but it still utilizes many different psychological traps to keep players playing for long periods. It does so primarily by using the all-too-common variable-ratio reinforcement schedule, giving rewards only ever so often, mimicking the addictive nature seen in that of gambling, without actually creating the appearance of gambling. Not only that, but the game has many other instances of psychological tactics within it, ranging from classical conditioning (in the form of red dot notifiers) to rote routinization (in the form of daily tasks and rewards). In fact, there’s still more instances I’m aware of, which I chose not to discuss within this article, for brevity.
Because at the end of the day, the primary lesson to be learned here is to stay on the lookout. Far too often do we take casual games for granted, playing them for hours each session, without actually analyzing why. Was it because we enjoyed the game? Or because it was tricking us into playing? If you feel like the truth is the latter, try digging deeper into the systems of that game and see where it tries to suck you in, and decide whether or not it’s worth your time. I’m not necessarily calling High Seas Hero “evil” for including so much babble in its design, nor am I labeling those attached to such games negatively. What I am saying, is, the definition of the word “play”, according to Oxford Languages, is “to engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation.”
Play with a sharp mind. And, as always, have fun.
Footnotes
- Operant conditioning is a theory by Burrhus Frederic Skinner, with his work proceeding from the ideas – particularly the “Law of Effect” – by Edward L. Thorndike. Read the Wikipedia articles on reinforcement and operant conditioning for more info. ↩︎
- It is important to know that what you often hear as “negative reinforcement” is most likely conflated with negative punishment. Negative punishment refers to the removal of something desirable, such as taking a kid’s phone away like in the example above. Negative reinforcement refers to the removal of something undesirable, like avoiding the belt by cleaning one’s bedroom. There is also the notion of positive punishment, which, as paradoxical as it may seem, simply refers to the addition of something undesirable, like a kid being fed his least favorite food after being too noisy. ↩︎
- – Or more, with upgrades. ↩︎
- All too often do people cite sunk-cost fallacy when describing gambling addiction, when the sheer mental hold of wanting to win on a person is just as equally potent. Sunk-cost is part of it, but not all of it. ↩︎
- I claim that rewarding players for every 5 levels they beat is a fixed-ratio schedule, but because beating levels in High Seas Hero is automatic, and participating in the combat is optional, it becomes moreso a matter of time, making the system arguably a fixed-interval schedule instead. I think it depends on how the player chooses to… “play the game”, which itself is quite fascinating. ↩︎
- Some may call this habituation, that is, to make the game part of one’s habit. But in psychology, habituation is something different, referring to the idea of emotional or psychological responses diminishing over repeated applications of the same stimuli. The word often conflated with habituation, and the one used here, is routinization, or the automaticity of behavior. See Ohly et al. (2006) for more info. ↩︎
- Of course, gaming addiction is still a relatively recent field of research, and it’s hotly debated whether or not gaming addiction is even a real form of addiction, and if it is, whether or not it stems from gaming in the first place. I believe that gaming addiction is real, but not necessarily as a result of gaming as a medium, but as a result of the mentally entrapping mechanisms many modern games have. ↩︎
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