Behaviourist Game Design →
It doesn’t strike me as ethical to train a player to want to do something that they wouldn’t want to do in the absence of an external reward.
One particular example that always sticks with me is how closely the reward system of item drops in most modern roguelike games closely mirrors psychological research on the most effective methods to encourage repeated human (and animal) behaviour. By which I mean they could train mice to hit buttons over and over again by rewarding them in a certain way for this behaviour, even though the mouse would never normally perform that action.
