21 ms·

The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

187 points by cjauvin 7y ago

doctorpangloss 7y ago
It’s a flavorful point of view but it really is about IAP. Only truly mad people go out and defend virtual slot machines, and that’s definitely the virus (smallest reproducing harmful life form) of the game industry.
i_am_proteus 7y ago
I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing. >I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
- gnat 7y ago
  I've been reading Vogel's writing for something like 25 years now, and it always repays the time. He's entertaining but thoughtful with it.
  - pvg 7y ago
    First heard of him reading this which is very nearly 25 years old. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bvcs/LniQHEyxP-UJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bv...
taneq 7y ago
> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops. I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear. Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
- jordanmorgan10 7y ago
  I would also add that constant, small incremental progress is also easier to monetize and it's also more successful at doing so. Look at the model that Candy Crush popularized. It lures that dopamine hit right in front of you, just within reach - but the "reach" costs 24 candy crush coins or whatever they call it.
- girvo 7y ago
  Note: This is likely not as neat an analogy/example as I would like, but it seems relevant. I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself. In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug. Brains are crazy.
  - rosser 7y ago
    I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?
    - girvo 7y ago
      Genuinely mitigated the runny nose, aches and pains in my back, etc.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - bloopernova 7y ago
        I wish I could trick my stupid brain like that. (not saying that your brain is somehow easier to trick than mine or whatever. My brain is just stupidly stubborn when it comes to feeling pain) I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)
akozak 7y ago
A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc? A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc). I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security) edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.
- inlined 7y ago
  But modern games are often much more like casino machines than books. There are countless studies over the last decade to make games more addictive. The key step that I hate most is the intentional use of grinding. Not only does it stretch out gameplay, but doing your “chores” (eg gathering materials for hundreds of hours) makes the reward feel more earned. This makes the virtual sword feel more tangible and feeds into a sunk cost fallacy when we consider quitting.
- cousin_it 7y ago
  > Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"
  - 7y ago
yahnusername 7y ago
I dunno, calling people unsophisticated drug dealers because their game designs don't value the same dimensions of fun as your game designs seems pretty judgemental. > This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.
goodside 7y ago
Bad, sloppy, breathless writing. Reiterating the central metaphor for pages on end doesn’t make it right. It’s like the author really wanted to vent with their preferred insult for more successful game developers and needed a few pages of folksy pop-psych nonsense to justify it. If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago
Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time. If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game more addictive? Purchasing the sequel? Wouldn’t the developer instead be incentivized to make a game with novel and compelling gameplay that isn’t necessarily addictive?
- socialist_coder 7y ago
  If your game only has 10 hours of gameplay, people will complain that it's too short. Then your game gets bad reviews and you don't eat. So you need to have more gameplay, and that's either through cleverly addictive game mechanics or a ton of expensive to produce content.
  - karlp 7y ago
    Plenty of games have less than 10h of gameplay, and an even bigger amount of games have less than 10h of non grind gameplay. Portal is a good example
  - baud147258 7y ago
    It depends on the game and on how it's advertised. And I personally prefer 10 fun hours than 25 padded to hell and back. Other than Portal, there's also the latest Wolfenstein game, which had less than 10 hours of gameplay.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's only if you didn't tell the players your game has 10 hours of gameplay, and made them expect it to have much more. I.e. you engaged in dishonest marketing. If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.
- seventhtiger 7y ago
jancsika 7y ago
> Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right. I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.
- xg15 7y ago
  Well, the article provides some good points why a free market system does not work. The basis of free markets is that participants act rational and have full knowledge. Yet here we are researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut their rationality...
  - sien 7y ago
    The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do. Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above. Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models. Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations. Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering. So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes. Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice. Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.
LMYahooTFY 7y ago
I have a lot of (my own, highly speculative and uncertified) thoughts on this, and if you'll indulge me in some cynacism I'll try to highlight what doesn't feel quite right. If you're curious about how this is developing, try Black Desert Online. It's a really remarkably polished game that is truly unique. It's a PvP action fighting game encapsulated by an immersive RPG with a load of different ways to play the game. It's almost terrifyingly well crafted. There is a startlingly well designed progression system pivoted around raising your attack and defense rating to fight against other players in the various fields of battle. In every one of the sub routines within this intricate Skinner Box there is an efficiency modifier which can be metered through the use of USD, All of these sub routines inevitably connect at the central purpose of pumping black stones, or as I'll refer to them, probability stones into your gear with a chance of either raising their rating, lowering their rating, or in certain cases destroying them completely. Sometimes the undesired outcomes can be negated through further remittance of USD, for this and certain other mini-games as well. There is a tightly controlled exchange of goods through a central system (which collects a tax unless you pay for a buff every month), with only a small number of consumable items being transferable between players. You are utterly economically isolated in the game. This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving. Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs". Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay, has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam... I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe. Edit: I'll add that I've read supposedly regulatory action is being taken, I read somewhere that China was or is imposing a rule for disclosure of probabilities in at least some circumstances. Not confident on veracity. Curiously, in certain regions there are apparently varying or no limits on purchase of "cash shop" items, while in others (like NA) there are. Also worth noting that within the game, players who've paid the most into the cash shop are called "whales". Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.
seventhtiger 7y ago
I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money. If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy. If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool. Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young. If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.
- ps101 7y ago
  Upfront sale is not like the others at all because it doesn't interact with addictive behaviour in the same way.
  - seventhtiger 7y ago
    It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
    - ps101 7y ago
      It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model. Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.
crawfordcomeaux 7y ago
As a recovering gaming addict, the author doesn't realize behavioral addictions can lead to a person becoming suicidal. Or doesn't care. Or cares and has no idea how to live an ethically sustainable and interdependent life.
john_minsk 7y ago
I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry. Fast forward 15 years - all the progress and tools, developing practices, experience accumulated in the industry - but no real progress or innovations. There are still games that push quality mark forward, but mass market is going away from it. Companies like EA have to make a choice: do we fund this game that will sell for 60$ and give 100s of hours of diverse gameplay or do we fund this online game with proven gameplay and sell ingame items for 1$/piece for next 2 years. Both of these games not only differ in terms of money they make, but also in terms of time people spend on them. So EA is better not to fund game 1 at all, to let people spend more limited gaming time on the game that has a potential for more profits.
- ehnto 7y ago
  I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games. One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?
- kace91 7y ago
  Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content). Their logic is quite flawless: Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.
  - ardani 7y ago
    I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.
vinceguidry 7y ago
One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources. A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array of items that grant you limited control over the environment, and you start grinding towards your first resource generator, which gives you resources which let you make the second one. Now you're scaling. Build speed becomes the bottleneck for awhile, you're grinding the farm. Eventually you reach the next tier of generators, and this unlocks new mechanics. Finally at the end of the game you get artifacts of immense, game-breaking power. Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again. The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.
- Haghn 7y ago
  >Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again. With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end. One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft". We never played it again.
- Ntrails 7y ago
  Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc. We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build. So we started a new one :)
bloopernova 7y ago
This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing. I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does. Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience. In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z. Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course. But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  > The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.
stillsut 7y ago
Me: I can't see how people can put money into a slot machine or a video game and take pleasure from that. Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20) watches error trend downwards
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Most people find pleasure in it once they do it. But perhaps it's not for everybody. Have you ever tried?
p1mrx 7y ago
Compare this to a game like Beat Saber, where you can play any level, at any difficulty, in any order, and the computer just keeps track of your score. 99% of the game state is in your brain, so the only way to progress is by learning how to interpret the patterns and coordinate your body. It's also anti-addictive, because playing for more than a few hours is physically exhausting.
ahaferburg 7y ago
Great talk from the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs > In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.

187 points by cjauvin 7y ago

It’s a flavorful point of view but it really is about IAP. Only truly mad people go out and defend virtual slot machines, and that’s definitely the virus (smallest reproducing harmful life form) of the game industry.

i_am_proteus 7y ago

I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing. >I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.

gnat 7y ago
I've been reading Vogel's writing for something like 25 years now, and it always repays the time. He's entertaining but thoughtful with it.
- pvg 7y ago
  First heard of him reading this which is very nearly 25 years old. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bvcs/LniQHEyxP-UJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bv...

taneq 7y ago

> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops. I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear. Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.

jordanmorgan10 7y ago
I would also add that constant, small incremental progress is also easier to monetize and it's also more successful at doing so. Look at the model that Candy Crush popularized. It lures that dopamine hit right in front of you, just within reach - but the "reach" costs 24 candy crush coins or whatever they call it.
girvo 7y ago
Note: This is likely not as neat an analogy/example as I would like, but it seems relevant. I used to be an actual heroin addict, many many years ago. Finding the next hit every day/every couple of days was nearly as satisfying as the actual rush of the drug itself. In fact, this effect was so powerful, that the "come thru" message from my dealer, and driving over to his, would make my withdrawal symptoms subside nearly entirely, well before I'd actually taken the drug. Brains are crazy.
- rosser 7y ago
  I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?
  - girvo 7y ago
    Genuinely mitigated the runny nose, aches and pains in my back, etc.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - bloopernova 7y ago
      I wish I could trick my stupid brain like that. (not saying that your brain is somehow easier to trick than mine or whatever. My brain is just stupidly stubborn when it comes to feeling pain) I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)

akozak 7y ago

A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc? A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc). I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security) edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.

inlined 7y ago
But modern games are often much more like casino machines than books. There are countless studies over the last decade to make games more addictive. The key step that I hate most is the intentional use of grinding. Not only does it stretch out gameplay, but doing your “chores” (eg gathering materials for hundreds of hours) makes the reward feel more earned. This makes the virtual sword feel more tangible and feeds into a sunk cost fallacy when we consider quitting.
cousin_it 7y ago
> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Great Gatsby 2?"
- 7y ago

yahnusername 7y ago

I dunno, calling people unsophisticated drug dealers because their game designs don't value the same dimensions of fun as your game designs seems pretty judgemental. > This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.

goodside 7y ago

Bad, sloppy, breathless writing. Reiterating the central metaphor for pages on end doesn’t make it right. It’s like the author really wanted to vent with their preferred insult for more successful game developers and needed a few pages of folksy pop-psych nonsense to justify it. If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

SOLAR_FIELDS 7y ago

Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time. If it’s a single fixed price, what is incentivizing the developer to make the game more addictive? Purchasing the sequel? Wouldn’t the developer instead be incentivized to make a game with novel and compelling gameplay that isn’t necessarily addictive?

socialist_coder 7y ago
If your game only has 10 hours of gameplay, people will complain that it's too short. Then your game gets bad reviews and you don't eat. So you need to have more gameplay, and that's either through cleverly addictive game mechanics or a ton of expensive to produce content.
- karlp 7y ago
  Plenty of games have less than 10h of gameplay, and an even bigger amount of games have less than 10h of non grind gameplay. Portal is a good example
- baud147258 7y ago
  It depends on the game and on how it's advertised. And I personally prefer 10 fun hours than 25 padded to hell and back. Other than Portal, there's also the latest Wolfenstein game, which had less than 10 hours of gameplay.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  That's only if you didn't tell the players your game has 10 hours of gameplay, and made them expect it to have much more. I.e. you engaged in dishonest marketing. If you present the game honestly, then people can evaluate the price you're asking for vs. what's being offered, and they have no reason to complain that it was too short.
seventhtiger 7y ago

jancsika 7y ago

> Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right. I was ready to write an angry 10,000 word response on the importance of private property and the free market system. But reading this paragraph de-escalated the situation enough for me to realize this article was only a general overview of the industry they work in.

xg15 7y ago
Well, the article provides some good points why a free market system does not work. The basis of free markets is that participants act rational and have full knowledge. Yet here we are researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut their rationality...
- sien 7y ago
  The basis of free markets is that on balance people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge than other systems do. Markets perform better than other allocation systems for many things. It's an observed principle rather than something that was directed from above. Some economic models assume people are rational because on aggregate it works for those models. Mostly market systems have substantially outperformed centrally controlled systems.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    If you take a descriptive (vs. prescriptive) view of the free market, you have to include all observations. Yes, we've observed that under free market, "people with radically different preferences will make better choices more aligned with their preferences and local knowledge", at least on many occasions. We've also observed countless of occasions when they'll make a worse choice. Sometimes idiotically worse choice. We've observed the cases where those choices, aggregated, cause wide-spread suffering. So many people were asking a question - why does free market work perfectly in some cases, but fails so badly in others? That's where the "rationality" and "full knowledge" things come from. Economists have figured out that these are necessary conditions for the free market model to work the best. When you make people behave irrationally, or refuse to give them full knowledge, the free market model results in suboptimal outcomes. Free market isn't a silver bullet. It's a process that gives particular outputs for particular inputs, and we've been mapping the relationship between its domain and codomain for a while now. We know that the more rational participants and the more symmetrical information come in, the more ethically positive transactions come out. This can be seen in both theoretical models and in practice. Now when the game industry is "researching increasingly sophisticated ways to undercut [players'] rationality", what that means is that they're weaponizing the free market to fuck fellow human beings over.

LMYahooTFY 7y ago

I have a lot of (my own, highly speculative and uncertified) thoughts on this, and if you'll indulge me in some cynacism I'll try to highlight what doesn't feel quite right. If you're curious about how this is developing, try Black Desert Online. It's a really remarkably polished game that is truly unique. It's a PvP action fighting game encapsulated by an immersive RPG with a load of different ways to play the game. It's almost terrifyingly well crafted. There is a startlingly well designed progression system pivoted around raising your attack and defense rating to fight against other players in the various fields of battle. In every one of the sub routines within this intricate Skinner Box there is an efficiency modifier which can be metered through the use of USD, All of these sub routines inevitably connect at the central purpose of pumping black stones, or as I'll refer to them, probability stones into your gear with a chance of either raising their rating, lowering their rating, or in certain cases destroying them completely. Sometimes the undesired outcomes can be negated through further remittance of USD, for this and certain other mini-games as well. There is a tightly controlled exchange of goods through a central system (which collects a tax unless you pay for a buff every month), with only a small number of consumable items being transferable between players. You are utterly economically isolated in the game. This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving. Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs". Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay, has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam... I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe. Edit: I'll add that I've read supposedly regulatory action is being taken, I read somewhere that China was or is imposing a rule for disclosure of probabilities in at least some circumstances. Not confident on veracity. Curiously, in certain regions there are apparently varying or no limits on purchase of "cash shop" items, while in others (like NA) there are. Also worth noting that within the game, players who've paid the most into the cash shop are called "whales". Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.

seventhtiger 7y ago

I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting them for money. If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money If you sell in-game items, like weapons or maps, the players think you are intentionally weakening the free items in favor of the power you can buy. If you sell in-game cosmetics, like skins, which have no impact on gameplay, the players think you are trying to make every look stupid and you have to pay to look cool. Video games are inherently manipulative in the sense that the game is designed for you to behave in fun ways and do fun things. Once monetization is in the picture it completely poisons the whole dynamic. It doesn't help that the audience skews young. If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.

ps101 7y ago
Upfront sale is not like the others at all because it doesn't interact with addictive behaviour in the same way.
- seventhtiger 7y ago
  It doesn't relate to addictive behavior, but there's still continuous uproar about deceptive marketing and lack of support. Developer interviews are picked around and lists of promises are made. Any monetary incentive a developer has will be viewed through a bad faith lens at every turn. That can't win.
  - ps101 7y ago
    It's not about winning - people will complain because that's what people do. Users complain about free products as well, sometimes rightfully and sometimes with too much entitlement. It's not about the monetisation model. Creating something and putting it out there for free or for a one-off payment is the cleanest possible model.

crawfordcomeaux 7y ago

As a recovering gaming addict, the author doesn't realize behavioral addictions can lead to a person becoming suicidal. Or doesn't care. Or cares and has no idea how to live an ethically sustainable and interdependent life.

john_minsk 7y ago

I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end. In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money. There is no way to explain how 15 years ago developers were able to build incredible open worlds with hours of dialog and tons of possibilities worth 100s of hours of gameplay on a single pay model, except priorities change in the industry. Fast forward 15 years - all the progress and tools, developing practices, experience accumulated in the industry - but no real progress or innovations. There are still games that push quality mark forward, but mass market is going away from it. Companies like EA have to make a choice: do we fund this game that will sell for 60$ and give 100s of hours of diverse gameplay or do we fund this online game with proven gameplay and sell ingame items for 1$/piece for next 2 years. Both of these games not only differ in terms of money they make, but also in terms of time people spend on them. So EA is better not to fund game 1 at all, to let people spend more limited gaming time on the game that has a potential for more profits.

ehnto 7y ago
I would also point the finger at Free to Play games simply undercutting the single purchase games and diluting the market for AAA studios big budget games. One more thought is the idea of the "Forever Game". It seems the longtail development cost of already released games keeps growing. So how do you fund it? Is that a cause or a symptom of the drive toward profit?
kace91 7y ago
Sony is going in the opposite direction ( single player, story based games with rich content). Their logic is quite flawless: Online games depend on a large userbase to be successful, which forces them (or at least greatly pressures them) to be multiplatform. That's a bad direction to move towards if your business is selling a console and its walled garden - so they are pushing for content that is more compatible with console exclusives, ie. single player games.
- ardani 7y ago
  I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

vinceguidry 7y ago

One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources. A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array of items that grant you limited control over the environment, and you start grinding towards your first resource generator, which gives you resources which let you make the second one. Now you're scaling. Build speed becomes the bottleneck for awhile, you're grinding the farm. Eventually you reach the next tier of generators, and this unlocks new mechanics. Finally at the end of the game you get artifacts of immense, game-breaking power. Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again. The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.

Haghn 7y ago
>Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again. With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end. One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft". We never played it again.
Ntrails 7y ago
Weirdly I've only played vanilla survival but this genuinely sounds precisely like my experience. First we built a zombie farm. Which gave us some weapons and xp. Then a chicken farm, for food. Then a spider farm. Then we found an underwater temple. Guardian farm time! Oooh, and an ender pearl/xp farm, iron farm, gold farm etc etc etc. We spent days and days in game automating away as much resource gathering as we could. Until the server was basically finished - there really were no more farms to build. So we started a new one :)

bloopernova 7y ago

This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing. I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does. Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience. In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z. Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course. But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.

blaser-waffle 7y ago
> The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty That sounds like Stellaris, tbh. Eventually it just turns into waiting for things to complete so you can launch the next war. And without the historical immersion (EUIV, VIC II), or personal connection (CKII) of other Paradox games it just feels like a complicated menu simulator.

stillsut 7y ago

Me: I can't see how people can put money into a slot machine or a video game and take pleasure from that. Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20) watches error trend downwards

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Most people find pleasure in it once they do it. But perhaps it's not for everybody. Have you ever tried?

p1mrx 7y ago

Compare this to a game like Beat Saber, where you can play any level, at any difficulty, in any order, and the computer just keeps track of your score. 99% of the game state is in your brain, so the only way to progress is by learning how to interpret the patterns and coordinate your body. It's also anti-addictive, because playing for more than a few hours is physically exhausting.

ahaferburg 7y ago

Great talk from the author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs > In this GDC 2018 talk, Spiderweb Software's Jeff Vogel presents a retrospective on his company's history and how they've managed to stay in the game-making business since 1994.