I watched the whole thing and still have no idea what Skinner boxes are beyond that it has something to do with making people want to push a proverbial button one more time. So how do you actually do that? What ways do games do this? They mentioned some loot drops but I never played a game with loot drops and so don't know what that means either. (The only gaming context I have for the word loot, aside from the dictionary definition, is loot boxes, a word which doesn't make any sense to me: what did you plunder to get that loot---other than your wallet, that is?)
Looking at Wikipedia instead, the Skinner Box page says about games:
> Slot machines and online games are sometimes cited as examples of human devices that use sophisticated operant schedules of reinforcement to reward repetitive actions.
So I guess it's just about wanting to play the game more because it's fun and it's not some magic method that game designers use to get more eyeballs for a not-so-fun game (the way that the linked video explained it)?
A Skinner box is just a feedback loop. You perform an action, and the game gives you some kind of information. Along the way people noticed that some types of information from the game make the player less likely to play again, and other types make the player more likely to play. Games which do well usually reward the user for playing the game. (There are also other criteria such as effective advertising, branding, celebrity, good engineering, and others that I'll ignore for the moment.)
An underhanded game will use this to reward you for actions which directly earn the developer more money. For example, imagine a hypothetical game where you find or earn powerups as you go along. These are both rewards and items that give you the opportunity for another reward. You enjoy using them because they allow you to make progress in the game, and because they are graphically and audibly satisfying to use. So far so good, but if you really want to make some money then you can introduce a way to buy more powerups. If the player is having some trouble with the level they're on, offer to let them buy a powerup that would help them. They'll get all the same reward feedback from obtaining and using the powerup as before, except you earned some extra money. If you want to really earn some money, all you have to do is make powerups rarer the further the user progresses in the game, and more and more necessary. The game can gradually change from a game of skill that rewards player skill to a game of money that rewards the player for giving up money.
Factorio, on the other hand, is a much, much better game than that. If you build a small assembly line that makes some items, the feedback you get is a visual display of the machine operating. When it's operating efficiently, raw materials stream in at speed from one side, and finished goods stream out at speed from the other. If you do the job less well, the effect is visually less satisfying. Perhaps the machines are idle part of the time, because they're not getting enough raw materials. Perhaps the items are not zipping past on the belts like you would want. Maybe the belt isn't quite full of material. Your first attempt succeeded, but only imperfectly. You can then revise your design to improve it, which is a very satisfying feedback loop indeed. The more you engage with this feedback loop, the more your skill at the game improves. The more your skill at the game improves, the better you can play the game. The skill ceiling is really quite high, and building an exceptional factory requires a lot of advance planning and forethought as well as the optimization and debugging skills you have gained from your earlier play.
Either way it's just a game. Many people say that playing games is always a waste of time, because you gain nothing from it. That's not really true. You can gain satisfaction, excitement, catharsis, knowledge, understanding, relaxation, friendship, and so on from games. It's just that some games give you those in exchange for your time invested, and others give you that for your time invested plus a continuous stream of cash purchases.
