Dominic Kao will present his MSE thesis talk on Monday April 16 at 2PM in room 402. The members of his committee are: Yael Niv (PSY), her postdoc Carlos Diuk, and Adam Finkelstein, reader. Everyone is invited to attend his talk. His abstract follows below. --------------------- The world has already spent 5.93 million years playing the video game World of Warcraft. What makes video games rewarding? We suggest that one important factor in a player's enjoyment of a game is the schedule of rewards, specifically, we hypothesized that variable rewards are more interesting and enticing than a fixed reward size. To test this hypothesis we studied several variable reward schedules contrasted with a fixed reward schedule in a custom-built video game. We found that variable reward schedules were preferred, except when the schedule’s range included very small or non-existent (zero) rewards. Participants consistently mischaracterized the variable reward schedule as having a higher mean than the fixed schedule. We further hypothesized that reward schedule preference is an indicator for game genre preference. Ultimately, the conclusions made can be applied more broadly to the now ubiquitous game mechanics that surround us in both the real and virtual world.