Slender and Operant Conditioning

I once wrote a simple poem after I played the indie horror game Slender for the first time:

I am Slender
I am tall
My long arms 
Will hug you all.

Wait.  That's not how it goes?  Well...

The problem with this is that we don't know what Slender really is trying to do.  We don't know anything about the game.  Maybe Slender's a nice guy and we dropped our wallet while we are actually a malevolent, insane inmate who is trying to escape into a forest with it.  Maybe our perception of him is threatening; maybe it's all in our mind.  But maybe that's what makes the game so scary.

Let's talk about the goal of the game; let's talk about the little pieces of paper around the forest.  I guess collecting them is how to beat the game, but in a psychological standpoint, there is actually no indication that it may be the correct thing to do, besides the instructions.  (I'll get to those in another post.)

In operant conditioning, or learning by associating a behavior and a consequence, behaviors are strengthened by reinforcement and are weakened by punishment (Thorndike's law of effect).  The instructions tell us to collect paper, but every time we do so, Slender chases us faster.  That's a punishment because if he catches us, the game ends.  So logically, we would not continue to collect paper because we were punished.

On the other hand, nothing in the game really reinforces us to collect them.  A simple one line phrase tells us how much paper we collected.  And even if we do collect the paper, Slender catches us at the end anyways.  It's not very encouraging, honestly.

So, I guess playing Slender is like touching a hot stove because you don't like being burned.

But, that's exactly what makes it scary.  The unnatural illogic of collecting those pieces of paper is a direct contrast to normal behavior and natural learning.  We're adapted to learn and acquire new behaviors through conditioning.  The stark contrast between what is natural and what we must do to beat the game causes a survival response--anxiety.

It's sneaky, but it's there.