The Psychology of Playing Diablo

Albert Bandura famously established the idea of social learning theory decades ago, where he basically showed that we can learn behaviors by watching others get punished or rewarded for them. Playing Diablo and other games like it isn't a whole lot different than pigeons playing ping pong when you kind of apply the psychology lens to it. The power of loot based games really relies on random reward schedules as they're called. And rewards on a fixed schedule are predictable and kind of actually boring relative to random. But not knowing like what you're going to get, that's mesmerizing. That's fun. It's not really though the loot that's so engaging or that gets us so excited.