11 ms·

Former Fortnite UX lead digs into ethical game design

135 points by smacktoward 8y ago

empath75 8y ago
That seems like the last person who should be taking about that.
- learc83 8y ago
  Whatever issues you have with Fortnite probably don't have much to do with her. She left in 2017. Until the tail end of her tenure, Fortnite was a very different game.
  - briatx 8y ago
    Well, Fortnite Save the World launched with paid loot boxes, so...
    - orbat 8y ago
      Doesn't mean she's personally responsible for that choice, though. More likely than not the requirement was handed down by suits with MBAs
      - ge0rg 8y ago
        As was said in other threads, what she writes is more comparable to cigarette industry or casino operators than to ethical design. Therefore, even if she wasn't directly responsible for the loot boxes, she seems to have thoroughly internalized and rationalized the unethical design of the game.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  I get what you're trying to say, but I don't think we should turn off industry experts because of their past.
dleslie 8y ago
This is a worthy video on the subject of Fortnite's successful, and altogether addictive, design: https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q
- jbj 8y ago
  interesting. And they dont even mention that some online influencers are taking sponsorship money to randomly pop into a game and donate thousands of dollars to the winner. I am not sure where the motivation comes from, but it surely generates some uncertainty and reward for playing. https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to+fortnite+streamers+if+they+win https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to...
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  I haven’t played fortnite so take my comment for what it is worth. Isn’t fortnite not as resource intensive as other games? Which makes it possible that more and more people have it? I remember when I played bf3 and bf4, the three points mentioned in the video still apply. I guess he does mention the scale and amazon web services in the video to allude to the amount of people playing I guess.
  - vxNsr 8y ago
    yeah w bf3 and bf4 even as a novice you were still likely to get 5-10 kills with a death count possibly in the high double digits, but you valued those kills anyway because it was so easy to get back into the game. I've been playing fortnite fairly regularly over the past year, but that video is making me consider uninstalling. I'm not that good and I do waste way too much time on it...
  - mhh__ 8y ago
    Fortnite runs pretty well, not as good as CS:GO on bad hardware but better than (say) siege.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
There seems to be a trend of people making a lot of money designing/building stuff that erodes privacy and ethics and then leaving the company where they made that money and talking about privacy and ethics. Take for example Justin Rosenstein who invented the Like button. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/facebook-like-inventor-deletes-app-iphone-justin-rosenstein-addiction-fears-a7986566.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fa...
- jimminy 8y ago
  He may have created the icon, but the like was invented and released by the team at FriendFeed about 18 months before Facebook copied the feature (in Feb 2009, the article you linked got that wrong). [1] http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html
- itronitron 8y ago
  Yeah, it's sort of like large corporations lobbying for regulations in order to prevent future competition. Also, a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods, an environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.
- mar77i 8y ago
  Reminds me a bit of "get woke, go broke", except this time it looks a bit more like "go broke, get woke"... :) Except I don't think that's what's happening with Hodent. As far as I can tell, she's pushing towards having a conversation, she's taking a stand against misinformation campaigns that the gaming industry is struggling with just like big pharma - think GMOs, vaccines et al. I'll encourage all parties to actually have that conversation with Hodent, because otherwise she might just be the next person to be instrumentalised by the trolls and unproductive opinion-shaping forces out there.
mikekchar 8y ago
I'm not sure I can relate to her stance. It's very possible I'm getting it wrong, but what I understand from what she is saying: - It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games -If you aren't an addict then any negative consequences from playing games you experience are your own responsibility - Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games). - Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money. It's not really the narrative that I expect when I see someone discussing ethics ;-) It's not so much that I disagree with the points from a practical perspective, I just think that they have completely dodged all of the ethical implications of the behaviour of the game companies. It's well known that strategies for engaging players can lead to negative consequences. Even if you can't make money unless you let players choose those negative consequences, it doesn't really absolve you of the ethical issue. As described by the person being interviewed, actual "addiction" talks about a compulsion for repeated self-harm. Even if the player is not an addict, it doesn't mean that they don't sometimes engage in self-harm. Giving them that option because there is no other profitable way to create the game, still results in self-harm by your player base. One could write a lot about these kinds of issues, but I find it disturbing that someone apparently interested in discussing ethics in the gaming industry seems to be saying, "Yeah, there are problems, but they totally aren't my fault".
- tcbawo 8y ago
  It's been a long time since I played the Ultima series, but it would be refreshing if they could incorporate character-building (in the moral sense) into a modern game.
  - mikekchar 8y ago
    That's a really cool idea. As I am secretly (read: slowly to the point that nobody could tell that I was actually doing it) writing a game, I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding on that idea. I probably only ever played the first Ultima game and I totally forget it :-) I'd be grateful for some insight since it's a mechanism I was hoping to incorporate. Feel free to ping me at my email address in my profile.
Causality1 8y ago
>Most of the case, when you have an addiction, it's not coming from the product Except the products (specifically "live services" and "free to play" games) are specifically designed to cause addiction. They're Skinner boxes. I forget the title of the work but there's a book on designing casino games that's required reading at half of these dev studios. If it's possible for a company to get an ongoing revenue stream from a game then the game is designed to extract the maximum possible amount of revenue from its players.
- bladewolf47 8y ago
  Are referring to Addiction by Design? This article reminded me of that book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...
  - Causality1 8y ago
    Bingo. That book is one of the greatest driving forces behind loot boxes and live services.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Clickbait link. Site wants a sign-in. Wikipedia article.[1] Author's site.[2] Princeton University Press PDF of book introduction.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design [2] https://www.natashadowschull.org/addiction-by-design/ https://www.natashadowschull.org/addiction-by-design/ [3] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf
    - r3bl 8y ago
      > Site wants a sign-in. Interestingly, they show the pop-up only in the US. Accessing from other locations doesn't show it.
rainonmoon 8y ago
> Research by Przybylski and colleagues in 2016 revealed that less than 1% of gamers might qualify for a potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder. Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers. > Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.
- didibus 8y ago
  Wouldn't 1% of the population be huge? 1 out of 100 people would be addicted to games? That's really high if true.
- sbuttgereit 8y ago
  This is from the abstract: "Method: Four survey studies (N=18,932) with large international cohorts employed an open-science methodology wherein the analysis plans for confirmatory hypotheses were registered prior to data collection. Results: Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. Comparison to gambling disorder revealed that Internet-based games may be significantly less addictive than gambling and similarly dysregulating as electronic games more generally." I think they mean to say the general population of their study population, not the population at large. I could be wrong, and I'm not overly fond of the wording of the first "results" sentence, but I think that's what they are talking about.
ydb 8y ago
As a writer, this is a fascinating topic. I admire the gall it takes to make this leap, especially as a UX lead working at a company whose business model is addiction. If I write a book, and I don't hook you, nobody wins. You wasted some twenty-odd quid for a stack of paper worth nothing to you. The entire task of a novel is to suck you into its narrative, so that you want to be apart of that world - just as children and teenagers, say, want to be in the Harry Potter universe. It would be working against my own interests to - in public - attack the very position that puts food on my table.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Books end, though. Even those of us who have stayed up all night to finish a huge book aren't going to come back and do the same again tomorrow. Or pay for cosmetic DLC.
  - magpi3 8y ago
    That is arguable. I am sure there are a lot of Harry Potter (and Star Wars, etc.) fans that have spent a lot of money on merchandising，which is not as accessible as DLC but is kind of the same idea.
  - Khanhanhan 8y ago
    Well, it happened to me more than once when I was a kid. I would finish the last page and go back to the first page. More often I would just open another book though. I was about 8 when I skipped two weeks of school just reading. Every morning I went to a library, read a book, went back home at the right time and read another book or two. Unfortunately, people notice when a child doesn't show up to classes :/
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There's a difference between a book or a (ethically) good game (like the ones we used to have a decade ago), that try to suck you into the narrative so that you can experience the fictional story, and the modern games that try to suck you into spending time and money on them to secure recurring revenue for the publishers.
sus_007 8y ago
> But that's not addiction! That's just managing time so kids can do a lot of [other] things. The problem with Fortnite and many games is this is where they have their social life. And they meet with friends and they play with friends. They hang out and are creative. It's not like they're mindlessly shooting, they do a lot of other things. This statement just sounds very wrong. Why are they glorifying virtual platforms as a common social gathering ? Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it - building scientifically impossible structures to jump/hide from enemies to begin with. Alas, it's indeed "mindless shooting" and showing off expensive in-game virtual purchases.
- DanBC 8y ago
  >Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it There's a fairly recent creative mode where players can create their own levels.
- mhh__ 8y ago
  The game is very social. Within a group of 4 you can talk continuously and do custom (non shooting) maps. It's hard to explain, but young teenagers do basically congregate in Fortnite (and not in a bad way).
glasseverything 8y ago
You really did her a disservice by recording the sound in a bathroom stall.
brownbat 8y ago
Bit OT, but I'm curious about whether the UX team ever discussed the ethics of Fortnite silently installing BattlEye, anti cheat software that's difficult to remove and yet breaks the Windows preview build upgrade process. I'm fine with anti cheat software in general, but this one felt like malware.
ninefoxgambit 8y ago
Oh those UX designers, aren't they just gods. So gifted, with their ability to shape the minds of the pesants and turn every product into gold. Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses. Games have been addictive since the beginning. Long before UX came along to claim the credit. I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software. Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game. In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime. Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.
- throwayEngineer 8y ago
  Yeah, your game might be fun, but I'll get bored of it. They have the network effect, where friends are playing it. When friends stop playing and its no longer interesting, people will stop playing. Updates can be good, but even my favorite games have gotten old. I'm just glad I got most of my gaming out when I was young. Now, nothing seems to hook me.
  - Wowfunhappy 8y ago
    > Yeah, your game might be fun, but I'll get bored of it. This is healthy. You should get board of particular creations, at which point you'll move on and discover new experiences. There will be exceptions—some people become very engaged with Chess and go on to play in international tournaments and such—but a majority will find other pursuits. This of course runs counter to the business of "Games as a Service" products—which is why those products are inherently "evil" in a sense.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  > Games have been addictive since the beginning. Ignoring your assertions about UX, I strongly disagree with this statement. Fortnite, like many modern games and some old ones, has design elements that encourage compulsive play. Elements like random loot drops and leveling are often detrimental to the core game mechanics—why would you want to artificially advantage the more experienced player in a competitive multiplayer game, for instance—and yet an increasing number of games include them. Not all games do this. Super Mario World contains compulsive elements. Nor does Journey, Monument Valley, Wii Sports, Hellblade, Mario Kart, Sim City, Threes, etc etc etc.
annews24 8y ago
Am not sure http://annews24.com http://annews24.com
0_gravitas 8y ago
> Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money. Except... they can, and they do. There are plenty of companies out there that don't act like scumbags, its low hanging fruit and almost a meme at this point but CDprojektRed is a classic example. And just about anything published by Devolver is pretty non-predatory, and there a plenty of indie studios making bank without being shifty, like Risk of Rain 2 that just released, or the even more recent Mordhau.
hartator 8y ago
Fortnite is a direct clone of PUBG. Not sure why I would want to hear about ethics from their leadership.
maxxxxx 8y ago
She talks exactly like PR people for fast food, soda, opioids, guns and cigarettes talk. “Let’s be rational”, “only a small number”, “responsibility”. They will never admit that they are engineering their products to be as addictive as possible to make more money.

135 points by smacktoward 8y ago

empath75 8y ago

That seems like the last person who should be taking about that.

learc83 8y ago
Whatever issues you have with Fortnite probably don't have much to do with her. She left in 2017. Until the tail end of her tenure, Fortnite was a very different game.
- briatx 8y ago
  Well, Fortnite Save the World launched with paid loot boxes, so...
  - orbat 8y ago
    Doesn't mean she's personally responsible for that choice, though. More likely than not the requirement was handed down by suits with MBAs
    - ge0rg 8y ago
      As was said in other threads, what she writes is more comparable to cigarette industry or casino operators than to ethical design. Therefore, even if she wasn't directly responsible for the loot boxes, she seems to have thoroughly internalized and rationalized the unethical design of the game.
bluntfang 8y ago
I get what you're trying to say, but I don't think we should turn off industry experts because of their past.

dleslie 8y ago

This is a worthy video on the subject of Fortnite's successful, and altogether addictive, design: https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q

jbj 8y ago
interesting. And they dont even mention that some online influencers are taking sponsorship money to randomly pop into a game and donate thousands of dollars to the winner. I am not sure where the motivation comes from, but it surely generates some uncertainty and reward for playing. https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to+fortnite+streamers+if+they+win https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to...
iscrewyou 8y ago
I haven’t played fortnite so take my comment for what it is worth. Isn’t fortnite not as resource intensive as other games? Which makes it possible that more and more people have it? I remember when I played bf3 and bf4, the three points mentioned in the video still apply. I guess he does mention the scale and amazon web services in the video to allude to the amount of people playing I guess.
- vxNsr 8y ago
  yeah w bf3 and bf4 even as a novice you were still likely to get 5-10 kills with a death count possibly in the high double digits, but you valued those kills anyway because it was so easy to get back into the game. I've been playing fortnite fairly regularly over the past year, but that video is making me consider uninstalling. I'm not that good and I do waste way too much time on it...
- mhh__ 8y ago
  Fortnite runs pretty well, not as good as CS:GO on bad hardware but better than (say) siege.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

There seems to be a trend of people making a lot of money designing/building stuff that erodes privacy and ethics and then leaving the company where they made that money and talking about privacy and ethics. Take for example Justin Rosenstein who invented the Like button. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/facebook-like-inventor-deletes-app-iphone-justin-rosenstein-addiction-fears-a7986566.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fa...

jimminy 8y ago
He may have created the icon, but the like was invented and released by the team at FriendFeed about 18 months before Facebook copied the feature (in Feb 2009, the article you linked got that wrong). [1] http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html
itronitron 8y ago
Yeah, it's sort of like large corporations lobbying for regulations in order to prevent future competition. Also, a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods, an environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.
mar77i 8y ago
Reminds me a bit of "get woke, go broke", except this time it looks a bit more like "go broke, get woke"... :) Except I don't think that's what's happening with Hodent. As far as I can tell, she's pushing towards having a conversation, she's taking a stand against misinformation campaigns that the gaming industry is struggling with just like big pharma - think GMOs, vaccines et al. I'll encourage all parties to actually have that conversation with Hodent, because otherwise she might just be the next person to be instrumentalised by the trolls and unproductive opinion-shaping forces out there.

mikekchar 8y ago

I'm not sure I can relate to her stance. It's very possible I'm getting it wrong, but what I understand from what she is saying: - It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games -If you aren't an addict then any negative consequences from playing games you experience are your own responsibility - Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games). - Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money. It's not really the narrative that I expect when I see someone discussing ethics ;-) It's not so much that I disagree with the points from a practical perspective, I just think that they have completely dodged all of the ethical implications of the behaviour of the game companies. It's well known that strategies for engaging players can lead to negative consequences. Even if you can't make money unless you let players choose those negative consequences, it doesn't really absolve you of the ethical issue. As described by the person being interviewed, actual "addiction" talks about a compulsion for repeated self-harm. Even if the player is not an addict, it doesn't mean that they don't sometimes engage in self-harm. Giving them that option because there is no other profitable way to create the game, still results in self-harm by your player base. One could write a lot about these kinds of issues, but I find it disturbing that someone apparently interested in discussing ethics in the gaming industry seems to be saying, "Yeah, there are problems, but they totally aren't my fault".

tcbawo 8y ago
It's been a long time since I played the Ultima series, but it would be refreshing if they could incorporate character-building (in the moral sense) into a modern game.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  That's a really cool idea. As I am secretly (read: slowly to the point that nobody could tell that I was actually doing it) writing a game, I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding on that idea. I probably only ever played the first Ultima game and I totally forget it :-) I'd be grateful for some insight since it's a mechanism I was hoping to incorporate. Feel free to ping me at my email address in my profile.

Causality1 8y ago

>Most of the case, when you have an addiction, it's not coming from the product Except the products (specifically "live services" and "free to play" games) are specifically designed to cause addiction. They're Skinner boxes. I forget the title of the work but there's a book on designing casino games that's required reading at half of these dev studios. If it's possible for a company to get an ongoing revenue stream from a game then the game is designed to extract the maximum possible amount of revenue from its players.

bladewolf47 8y ago
Are referring to Addiction by Design? This article reminded me of that book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-design https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...
- Causality1 8y ago
  Bingo. That book is one of the greatest driving forces behind loot boxes and live services.
- Animats 8y ago
  Clickbait link. Site wants a sign-in. Wikipedia article.[1] Author's site.[2] Princeton University Press PDF of book introduction.[3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design [2] https://www.natashadowschull.org/addiction-by-design/ https://www.natashadowschull.org/addiction-by-design/ [3] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf
  - r3bl 8y ago
    > Site wants a sign-in. Interestingly, they show the pop-up only in the US. Accessing from other locations doesn't show it.

rainonmoon 8y ago

> Research by Przybylski and colleagues in 2016 revealed that less than 1% of gamers might qualify for a potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder. Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers. > Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.

didibus 8y ago
Wouldn't 1% of the population be huge? 1 out of 100 people would be addicted to games? That's really high if true.
sbuttgereit 8y ago
This is from the abstract: "Method: Four survey studies (N=18,932) with large international cohorts employed an open-science methodology wherein the analysis plans for confirmatory hypotheses were registered prior to data collection. Results: Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. Comparison to gambling disorder revealed that Internet-based games may be significantly less addictive than gambling and similarly dysregulating as electronic games more generally." I think they mean to say the general population of their study population, not the population at large. I could be wrong, and I'm not overly fond of the wording of the first "results" sentence, but I think that's what they are talking about.

ydb 8y ago

As a writer, this is a fascinating topic. I admire the gall it takes to make this leap, especially as a UX lead working at a company whose business model is addiction. If I write a book, and I don't hook you, nobody wins. You wasted some twenty-odd quid for a stack of paper worth nothing to you. The entire task of a novel is to suck you into its narrative, so that you want to be apart of that world - just as children and teenagers, say, want to be in the Harry Potter universe. It would be working against my own interests to - in public - attack the very position that puts food on my table.

pjc50 8y ago
Books end, though. Even those of us who have stayed up all night to finish a huge book aren't going to come back and do the same again tomorrow. Or pay for cosmetic DLC.
- magpi3 8y ago
  That is arguable. I am sure there are a lot of Harry Potter (and Star Wars, etc.) fans that have spent a lot of money on merchandising，which is not as accessible as DLC but is kind of the same idea.
- Khanhanhan 8y ago
  Well, it happened to me more than once when I was a kid. I would finish the last page and go back to the first page. More often I would just open another book though. I was about 8 when I skipped two weeks of school just reading. Every morning I went to a library, read a book, went back home at the right time and read another book or two. Unfortunately, people notice when a child doesn't show up to classes :/
TeMPOraL 8y ago
There's a difference between a book or a (ethically) good game (like the ones we used to have a decade ago), that try to suck you into the narrative so that you can experience the fictional story, and the modern games that try to suck you into spending time and money on them to secure recurring revenue for the publishers.

sus_007 8y ago

> But that's not addiction! That's just managing time so kids can do a lot of [other] things. The problem with Fortnite and many games is this is where they have their social life. And they meet with friends and they play with friends. They hang out and are creative. It's not like they're mindlessly shooting, they do a lot of other things. This statement just sounds very wrong. Why are they glorifying virtual platforms as a common social gathering ? Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it - building scientifically impossible structures to jump/hide from enemies to begin with. Alas, it's indeed "mindless shooting" and showing off expensive in-game virtual purchases.

DanBC 8y ago
>Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it There's a fairly recent creative mode where players can create their own levels.
mhh__ 8y ago
The game is very social. Within a group of 4 you can talk continuously and do custom (non shooting) maps. It's hard to explain, but young teenagers do basically congregate in Fortnite (and not in a bad way).

glasseverything 8y ago

You really did her a disservice by recording the sound in a bathroom stall.

brownbat 8y ago

Bit OT, but I'm curious about whether the UX team ever discussed the ethics of Fortnite silently installing BattlEye, anti cheat software that's difficult to remove and yet breaks the Windows preview build upgrade process. I'm fine with anti cheat software in general, but this one felt like malware.

ninefoxgambit 8y ago

Oh those UX designers, aren't they just gods. So gifted, with their ability to shape the minds of the pesants and turn every product into gold. Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses. Games have been addictive since the beginning. Long before UX came along to claim the credit. I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software. Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game. In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime. Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.

throwayEngineer 8y ago
Yeah, your game might be fun, but I'll get bored of it. They have the network effect, where friends are playing it. When friends stop playing and its no longer interesting, people will stop playing. Updates can be good, but even my favorite games have gotten old. I'm just glad I got most of my gaming out when I was young. Now, nothing seems to hook me.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  > Yeah, your game might be fun, but I'll get bored of it. This is healthy. You should get board of particular creations, at which point you'll move on and discover new experiences. There will be exceptions—some people become very engaged with Chess and go on to play in international tournaments and such—but a majority will find other pursuits. This of course runs counter to the business of "Games as a Service" products—which is why those products are inherently "evil" in a sense.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
> Games have been addictive since the beginning. Ignoring your assertions about UX, I strongly disagree with this statement. Fortnite, like many modern games and some old ones, has design elements that encourage compulsive play. Elements like random loot drops and leveling are often detrimental to the core game mechanics—why would you want to artificially advantage the more experienced player in a competitive multiplayer game, for instance—and yet an increasing number of games include them. Not all games do this. Super Mario World contains compulsive elements. Nor does Journey, Monument Valley, Wii Sports, Hellblade, Mario Kart, Sim City, Threes, etc etc etc.

annews24 8y ago

Am not sure http://annews24.com http://annews24.com

0_gravitas 8y ago

> Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money. Except... they can, and they do. There are plenty of companies out there that don't act like scumbags, its low hanging fruit and almost a meme at this point but CDprojektRed is a classic example. And just about anything published by Devolver is pretty non-predatory, and there a plenty of indie studios making bank without being shifty, like Risk of Rain 2 that just released, or the even more recent Mordhau.

hartator 8y ago

Fortnite is a direct clone of PUBG. Not sure why I would want to hear about ethics from their leadership.

maxxxxx 8y ago

She talks exactly like PR people for fast food, soda, opioids, guns and cigarettes talk. “Let’s be rational”, “only a small number”, “responsibility”. They will never admit that they are engineering their products to be as addictive as possible to make more money.