Unfortunately the more I read the less this seems like a long overdue accounting of the video game industry’s hubris and the more it seems like someone with looking for someone to blame for their failson. These companies have literally hired psychologists to come up with ways to more effectively manipulate their players into buying their digital bullshit, and surprise surprise many of the things those psychologists have come up with are basically unregulated gambling.
This is the same as Trump saying he was just challenging the results of the election.
Namely, nobody is trying to prosecute him for his legal challenges…and nobody is complaining that games are too entertaining. They are bold strawman arguments that most people see through immediately. “Complete bullshit” is now a common argumentative tactic.
In some respects, I can see this. Games such as unscrupulous MMOs are often carefully engineered to distort your ability to manage time and money. However, many games are still produced as entertainment products meant to compete on a basis of artistic or entertainment value. The addictive aspect doesn’t come from a manipulative design, but Rather just plain old fun, and in those cases similar arguments could be made about strawberries or books.
I would like to reiterate that there are addictive video games which really do try to manipulate you. Just like how a breakfast cereal might market itself as healthy and balanced while loaded with sugar and deceptive portion sizes, leading to unhealthy habits, a money first video game will contain elements carefully crafted to distort player’s perception and reasoning.
Gamers can understand this. Casinos understand this. But how do you articulate the difference to a court or actually legislate against it? FOMO is usually used in a predatory way, like with daily rewards. Paid random lootboxes are definitely predatory, but other rng systems can be genuinely fun. Not an easy problem to solve without stepping on toes.
Dailies are probably something that could be solved with targetted legislation. Harmful to player mental health just to boost stats for investors. Some games need to limit progression, but there are loads of ways to do so other than dailies.
I can’t get into the whole debate because I’m not knowledgeable enough to articulate the difference between a genuinely good game and games using skinnerbox mechanics to force operant conditioning. However, I have an anecdote.
I used to play a mobile game that was mid level fun, but a very obvious skinnerbox with time based turns (energy? Mana stones? Hell, I don’t remember), daily and weekly battles, sporadic new releases where you had a chance to get some kind of cool stuff, and clan activities. I had to put it down for a couple of weeks due to real life and just never picked it back up. I still talk to some of the guys on discord but after not being on every day I stopped caring about the game entirely.
I know people tend to joke about having a Civ addiction, but the number of people who have in fact binged an entire night or more playing civilization and have experience addiction like relationships with it should tell you that the line is thinner than I think most people are comfortable with.
Few games are “just good old fashioned fun.” Every game is designed to draw our attention. The distinctions between intent/accident, “it’s just fun”/designed to be addicting, etc. are not always very clear.
I did some research on quest system design and found a Unity plugin that reduced them down to basically eight core tasks, which means you treat it like data entry. Just have the writers draft up the elements at each part of the timeline and fuck it. Have to think more holistically and probably do the writing first, tasks once you’re happy with where to go.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne