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>2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire

>2. Decouple real money from in-game money. If you can buy something for real money, you should not be able to acquire it with in game money. If you can acquire something in game, you should not be able to buy it with real money instead. So there is a standard argument developers make for this. They're wrong, but I'll articulate it because I think it's worth articulating. Some people have more time than money and for other people it's reversed. You design a game to meter out rewards based on time spent for the former group and provide a fast-track for the latter group. Allowing people to spend money to get certain rewards is just a way to allow people who are too busy to sink that kind of time into the game to also be able to participate. Moreover, if the desire to buy stuff for real money is there, the market will provide. If we, the developers, don't build that function in then the niche will be occupied by dodgy black and gray market deals like those gold farming outfits in Diablo II and World of Warcraft. The counterpoint, of course, is that they're designing the games to meter out "fun" as a function of time spent specifically because they're trying to keep you stuck in an addiction loop. The "just use real money as a shortcut through the nonsense" takes Skinner box game design as a given, but the Skinner box is what we're trying to discourage, not the exchange of money.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
I've played mobile games where the option to pay just gets your through the game faster, and in my experience, if the game is any fun, why would I want to spend money to be able to play it less? But if people want that, I guess it's OK. On the other hand, if the game requires endless grinding, and let's face it, a lot of these games are really just tedious work with a reward system built in, with little or no strategy or even decision making (beyond to play or not play), and you are literally paying to avoid drudgery. I've tried plenty of games where I soon realized it was nothing more than working towards a reward, and there was literally no "game" to it. Well, if playing the game is drudgery, then it's not a good game. At this point, I would say the market should sort things out, but that doesn't appear to be working. People are clearly playing these games and getting hooked on them. So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way.
- naravara 8y ago
  >So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way. Yeah it's a tough issue to handle. The Spider-Man PS4 game, for example, uses the "here's a checklist, go do the thing and get a reward" model too. But I hesitate to call it a "skinner-box" because usually the goal is just an excuse to have fun web-slinging across the city and to play with the combat, which is the actual rewarding thing about the game. The gratification, in that case, comes from performing the task rather than from having finished it. So it really does come down to how you implement it. Whether the goals and rewards are there as a framework to have fun in, or whether they're presented as a barrier you need to clear to find fun on the other side.
wanderfowl 8y ago
This is one of the things I dislike most about modern games: We used to have cheat codes in single player games which allowed you to skip the BS and have a different kind of fun. Now, we have money that does the same thing. As a result, new games not only tend not to support cheats, but they also treat the users as hostile, preventing even things like memory read hacks and config file edits. Some of the most fun I've had was editing lua config files to modify how units moved in single player games like Command and Conquer Generals, to change the game entirely. User hostile, anti-hacky, 'skinner-box-or-nothing' design in single player gaming is only a symptom of the problem, but it's a nasty one.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago

I've played mobile games where the option to pay just gets your through the game faster, and in my experience, if the game is any fun, why would I want to spend money to be able to play it less? But if people want that, I guess it's OK. On the other hand, if the game requires endless grinding, and let's face it, a lot of these games are really just tedious work with a reward system built in, with little or no strategy or even decision making (beyond to play or not play), and you are literally paying to avoid drudgery. I've tried plenty of games where I soon realized it was nothing more than working towards a reward, and there was literally no "game" to it. Well, if playing the game is drudgery, then it's not a good game. At this point, I would say the market should sort things out, but that doesn't appear to be working. People are clearly playing these games and getting hooked on them. So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way.

naravara 8y ago
>So, yeah, I agree with you... it's the Skinner box we need to discourage, but that's not always a black-and-white thing, because hard work and accomplishment, with the rewards that provide, are very similar in many ways. Ultimately, the Skinner box is an attempt to simulate the process of working hard to accomplish something and receiving the rewards for it without the whole "providing an engaging and challenging experience" aspect. It's exploiting a human instinct and subverting it in a harmful way. Yeah it's a tough issue to handle. The Spider-Man PS4 game, for example, uses the "here's a checklist, go do the thing and get a reward" model too. But I hesitate to call it a "skinner-box" because usually the goal is just an excuse to have fun web-slinging across the city and to play with the combat, which is the actual rewarding thing about the game. The gratification, in that case, comes from performing the task rather than from having finished it. So it really does come down to how you implement it. Whether the goals and rewards are there as a framework to have fun in, or whether they're presented as a barrier you need to clear to find fun on the other side.

wanderfowl 8y ago

This is one of the things I dislike most about modern games: We used to have cheat codes in single player games which allowed you to skip the BS and have a different kind of fun. Now, we have money that does the same thing. As a result, new games not only tend not to support cheats, but they also treat the users as hostile, preventing even things like memory read hacks and config file edits. Some of the most fun I've had was editing lua config files to modify how units moved in single player games like Command and Conquer Generals, to change the game entirely. User hostile, anti-hacky, 'skinner-box-or-nothing' design in single player gaming is only a symptom of the problem, but it's a nasty one.