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Just because everyone has different thresholds for addiction doesn't mean that we should therefore not care about it. Some people can enjoy heroin responsibly,

Just because everyone has different thresholds for addiction doesn't mean that we should therefore not care about it. Some people can enjoy heroin responsibly, therefore opioid addiction is a just a matter of personal responsibility? Of course, total prohibition is the other extreme, but surely there's a middle ground that makes more sense than total apathy. And I'm not really even talking about regulation here, I'm just saying that some people delineate ethical standards in their line of work - with game design, I personally draw the line at exploiting users through addictive design and leaving them worse off.

bryans 5y ago
You're twisting my words. I never suggested that nobody should care about addiction, nor that severe opioid addiction (how'd we even get there?) is purely a matter of personal responsibility. In fact, the whole "line" commentary was about the potentially exploitative actions of developers crossing the line -- not the addictive thresholds of users. And you're still missing the point. You say that you draw the line at "exploiting users through addictive design." And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. So that brings us right back to figuring out where that arbitrary line is. Is one addictive mechanism the right amount? Two? Ten? Given that we've already established people have different thresholds, how do you even quantify addiction at the design level? You could implement something completely innocuous by your own standards, but somebody out there gets addicted to it and you make money from them. Does that make you exploitative? The whole point is that you can draw your own personal line, but you don't get to dictate that line to others, nor publicly declare that any developer on the other side of your personal line is automatically a malicious asshole trying to harm people. Because I guarantee there are developers whose maliciousness threshold is even lower than yours, which makes you the exploitative one in their eyes.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  Everything is fuzzy and a lot of things are subjective, but that doesn't disqualify them from being a point of contention. I brought up opioids because the same logic applies. Although finer, there's still a fuzzy line between manageable recreational use and destructive addiction. Not knowing exactly where the line is doesn't turn it into a special case where nothing can be said. You're talk about drawing lines but I haven't mentioned anything about that. I don't have some personal line where everyone past it is bad. I'm just saying that exploiting addictive design is bad, and people taking advantage of that are being unethical in proportion to the extent that they are doing it. Also, I was careful to not blame addictive design itself, it's not evil inherently, because like you said, many games have some degree of addictiveness. I said exploiting addiction is the bad part. You can use it to incentivize healthy behaviors that make for a better game, one that respects the player's time and ideally even enriches them in some way, by telling the narrative in a stronger way, or teaching competition or hand-eye coordination in a better way, or just being more fun in a better way. You can also use it to extract more money from players, or more ad views, or more social anxiety, or shallowly pad the experience to feel like you're getting more "value" out of the game. Again, all of this is fuzzy, not black and white evil, it's just that responsible creators should take the time to consider their own values and be conscious of the decisions they make, understanding that what they do have repercussions on others. We should create things in reference to our values - it's easy to just blindly autopilot to the default rubric of "maximize revenue".
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  > And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. Now I see our problem. You've only played shit games. Procedural content and random generation are a wave of the future of gaming, happening right now; new techniques that makes games fun without exploitation of brain chemistry. By actually being good, by actually being replayable.

bryans 5y ago

You're twisting my words. I never suggested that nobody should care about addiction, nor that severe opioid addiction (how'd we even get there?) is purely a matter of personal responsibility. In fact, the whole "line" commentary was about the potentially exploitative actions of developers crossing the line -- not the addictive thresholds of users. And you're still missing the point. You say that you draw the line at "exploiting users through addictive design." And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. So that brings us right back to figuring out where that arbitrary line is. Is one addictive mechanism the right amount? Two? Ten? Given that we've already established people have different thresholds, how do you even quantify addiction at the design level? You could implement something completely innocuous by your own standards, but somebody out there gets addicted to it and you make money from them. Does that make you exploitative? The whole point is that you can draw your own personal line, but you don't get to dictate that line to others, nor publicly declare that any developer on the other side of your personal line is automatically a malicious asshole trying to harm people. Because I guarantee there are developers whose maliciousness threshold is even lower than yours, which makes you the exploitative one in their eyes.

lifeformed 5y ago
Everything is fuzzy and a lot of things are subjective, but that doesn't disqualify them from being a point of contention. I brought up opioids because the same logic applies. Although finer, there's still a fuzzy line between manageable recreational use and destructive addiction. Not knowing exactly where the line is doesn't turn it into a special case where nothing can be said. You're talk about drawing lines but I haven't mentioned anything about that. I don't have some personal line where everyone past it is bad. I'm just saying that exploiting addictive design is bad, and people taking advantage of that are being unethical in proportion to the extent that they are doing it. Also, I was careful to not blame addictive design itself, it's not evil inherently, because like you said, many games have some degree of addictiveness. I said exploiting addiction is the bad part. You can use it to incentivize healthy behaviors that make for a better game, one that respects the player's time and ideally even enriches them in some way, by telling the narrative in a stronger way, or teaching competition or hand-eye coordination in a better way, or just being more fun in a better way. You can also use it to extract more money from players, or more ad views, or more social anxiety, or shallowly pad the experience to feel like you're getting more "value" out of the game. Again, all of this is fuzzy, not black and white evil, it's just that responsible creators should take the time to consider their own values and be conscious of the decisions they make, understanding that what they do have repercussions on others. We should create things in reference to our values - it's easy to just blindly autopilot to the default rubric of "maximize revenue".
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. Now I see our problem. You've only played shit games. Procedural content and random generation are a wave of the future of gaming, happening right now; new techniques that makes games fun without exploitation of brain chemistry. By actually being good, by actually being replayable.