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I’ve been thinking about why Vanilla WoW was so good apart from nostalgia:
Unwanted reinforcer satiation was reduced as much as possible. If you want the player to feel awesome upon obtaining a colorful cloak or a new spell, then you don’t want everything in the world vivid and dazzling, because the novelty and pleasure of these things reduces the power of those reinforcers. If the mobs are colorful and the characters around you are all wearing awesome things, then picking up some basic “red cloak” is no longer as pleasant, and thus no longer reinforced. Pleasure from stimuli are competitive to each other. (In a boring classroom, even a black and white VHS is a good reinforcer; not so in a mall).
The above applies even to the aural components of the game. The ambient environmental “background sounds” in original WoW are low stimuli, in between music and sound effects. This means that the aural cues for looting, leveling up, fulfilling quest are more reinforced than if the game has a default high level of aural pleasure (a soundtrack too dazzling).
The greatest reinforcers are reserved for compelled immersion. By the time you’re bored with your spells, you travel to buy a new spell in a specific familiar environment. All of this immersion is secondarily-reinforced by the more primary reinforcer of Fun Ability + Novel Animation + Growth-Feeling. You have to spend money, which heightens and potentiates this experience. To get a new spell, you might have to travel for 10 minutes, remembering the things you did in the environment. Other great reinforcers are the discovery of a new area where the environmental cues (novelty) change abruptly, which only take on so much reinforcing power because the previous environment was not filled to the brim with novelty.
Summarizing some of these above points: you want to reduce the novelty and fun of every single part of the game which is not earned after immersion. This is a balancing act, because obviously it can’t be so boring that you don’t want to play at all. But you actually want the player to be as bored as possible while still playing, so that all of the great reinforcement occurs when he is compelled to feel immersed in the character and world.
I think Vanilla devs were like wizards of psychology, at least in practice, because they arranged boredom in an intelligent way. The WoW player is actually bored, and even in a state of annoyance and displeasure, when he has collected 8 leather scraps and needs 2 more to go. But he keeps playing, because of the Ovsiankina Effect (w wish to continue what we started). There is even a “biological preparedness” factor at play, because when we are frustrated we don’t mind bashing some enemies. So the WoW player is put into a carefully-managed negative and bored state for an amount of time, which he might associate with a particular set of mobs (rather than the game entirely), and by the time he has collected 10/10, he is now biased toward collecting the reward for the quest rather than quitting. The period of boredom is forgotten. There is now something else to do. And it’s also forgotten because the “frustrated / boredom state” occurs at a mnemonically-weak point in the game. Finding a new mob is fun and memorable; returning home for a reward is fun and memorable; but the weaponized boredom happens at a moment that is naturally unforgettable, lacking serial-position bias or novelty bias.
The reason why immersion is essential is not because it’s just one pleasant feeling among many. It’s an essential condition for continued engagement with the product, because if the fun you’re having in the game can be found elsewhere, then you may decide to simply have that fun elsewhere. If “exploring” is the fun, you might decide to explore a new game. If “fighting”, you might play a better fighting game. But you can’t find Azeroth or ChunkNorris the dwarf warrior anywhere else, and you’ve become addicted to that as it exists as a collection of cues which govern all the greatest rewards (reinforcers) of WoW.
There are then some other things worth exploring, but I’ve already written too much: the zone soundtracks often contain an odd sound you would never hear anywhere else, increasing the power of its associative memory potential because of uniqueness; there is a “biological preparedness” factor of increasing status and strength as a grunt character (versus already being a hero).
I’ve had thoughts about this in real life and have come to the opposite conclusion. One thing I love looking at the buildings of North Korea for (Yeah. I know.) is their obsession with pastel colors, looking like a city full of abandoned colored marshmallows. When I walk around the parking lot of my employer and I see the same silver, white, gray, black colored cars everywhere, it really leaves things looking incredibly sterile, with the life having been sucked out of everything.
I don’t think you want an actively hostile environment like American suburbia in a game. But as an example, if Elywnn Forest had too much beautiful red foliage and flowers and apples galore, then it’s not as nice to receive a small red cloak, as you’ve seen red everywhere. If the starting castle wasn’t so small, it wouldn’t be nice to get to Stormwind. Or if it already contained different kinds of grasses, then there’s no novelty reinforcement from entering Westfall. In a theoretical gamified North Korea, maybe they’d want to reinforce the loyal citizen of Pyongyang by introducing a new color or color scheme every 5-15min walking pace, like with WoW zones.
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