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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The lure of mastery is perhaps the most addictive one that could ever be dreamed.
I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If you sell time, like a subscription, then players think you are trying to force them to grind to pay money<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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 <i>me</i>?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear.<p>Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
I wouldn't mind DLC and virtual slots model, if only it delivered better games in the end.<p>In reality games became just a gateway to these slot machines or DLCs. i.e. development happened only in one direction: money.<p>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.<p>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.
This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing.<p>I love strategy games. From <i>Carrier Command</i> back in the 80s to <i>Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri</i> to <i>Stellaris</i>. I've recently picked up <i>Surviving Mars</i> in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's <i>Red Mars</i> 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.<p>But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing.<p>>I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
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?<p>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).<p>I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming <i>could</i> 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)<p>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.
<i>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.</i><p>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?
> 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.<p>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.
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 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.<p>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.<p>It's almost terrifyingly well crafted.<p>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,<p>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.<p>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.<p>You are utterly economically isolated in the game.<p>This is not a new phenomenon, but I think it's clearly evolving.<p>Casinos were built on it, and so are many of these so-called "Korean MMOs".<p>Pearl Abyss has enjoyed massive success and, to my dismay,
has purchased CCP Games, developer of EVE Online.<p><a href="https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_gam...</a><p>I hope these system designs are less insidious than my experience has led me to believe.<p>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.<p>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".<p>Edit2: Last I looked they boast a player base in the 2-3 million range.
As a recovering gaming addict, the author doesn't realize behavioral addictions can lead to a person becoming suicidal.<p>Or doesn't care. Or cares and has no idea how to live an ethically sustainable and interdependent life.
Me: I can't see how people can put money into a slot machine or a video game and take pleasure from that.<p>Also me: gcp compute model.fit(epochs=20)
<i>watches error trend downwards</i>
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.
Great talk from the author: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs</a><p>> <i>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.</i>
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.<p>> 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.
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.<p>If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.