Introduction
You might not believe it with the current state of AAA gaming, but good games are an art form that can put you in the place of someone else, and they can tell impactful stories and evoke strong emotions. A good game is not an app that is designed for maximum satisfaction or addiction, even if that makes the most money. In my decades of gaming, the games that have had the most impact on me were games like Batman Arkham, because they communicated a story and a character to me. I could feel the real humans behind the game, the artists, the voice actors, writers, the programmers. I could tell these people had poured their own heart into the game, not focus grouped what they deemed people would like. I’d argue in piece gaming needs more of that in the modern age.
Definition of addictive design
I will be strictly speaking about psychological tricks that game companies do, which they are aware of, to maximize attention spent on a game and/or the money spent. These tricks range from daily quests, difficulty walls, to leaderboards, simplification of mechanics, colour choices etc… For example, daily quests are designed to get you to play every day which can maximize eyeballs and ads. Another example, difficulty walls can cause someone to spend money as they felt they were progressing fast before and felt satisfied, but to get the same satisfaction they spend money now. These tricks are designed to be exploitative, and companies even hire psychologists to maximize them.
I don’t claim to know what every game studio or gamer should do. The line between addictive because the game is just good and addictive in a skinner box way is not always clear. Take a game like factorio for example, due to its good game design and ability to always throw thing at you, many players have called it “cracktorio”, but I would not call it guilty of the sins above. Firslty, I think the factorio developer set out to build a good game not an addicting one. Secondly, I think its addictive nature is more like the addictive nature of programming or writing, where it just feels good due to quick bursts of satisfaction. “Anno 1800” is another game like that. These games might feel addicting but they are not designed for whales or maximizing attention. There are also many quality of life improvements games can make. As Gabe Newell once said “you play games to have fun not to be in real life”. I don’t claim games need to be realistic or feel the same as real life to be good. Some games you also simply feel the urge to keep playing to finish the story, same way you don’t want to leave a movie half way through. For this piece, I strictly have an issue with trying to apply psychology to create games to maximize attention spent on them or money extracted by them.
The Problem with Addictive Game Design
There seems to be this weird thing among a certain sect of population (hustlers), who feel like they can distill games down to a skinner box. This is the concept of the rat in a box pressing the lever to get a reward, so it keeps pressing the lever as it is conditioned to it. They relate this to how video games make you feel good but they’re not real so they think of them as this weird dopamine machine that is just psychologically addictive. I will not deny that some games can be addicting and that some games are literally designed to be addictive (a lot of mobile games literally hire psychologists), but this is far from all of gaming.
These type of games only work because “whales”, who are players addicted to said games, spend money on them. They are literally designed to extract money from the suckers. Or they are designed to maximize the amount of attention on them to maximize ad revenue (more prevalent in mobile games). I believe this is a race to the bottom, and a really bad trend the industry is maximizing. It is usually only one of these types of apps that is hot at a time, because the percentage of the population that gets addicted to a game can not be addicted to two games at once. Game companies see the success of warcraft or other similar games and think if they just make their products as addicting as possible, they can make the same amount of money, but the market only demands so many games trying to appeal to no life whales. There is just only so many of them.
This design is bad from the root
These designed has escaped gaming to social media and even has led to apps like Duolingo which boast that they can use the same tricks to teach you something. I’d argue they don’t actually accomplish any teaching because the psychological tricks are mindless so it turns those games into mindless button presses same as candy crush or any other designed to be addicting. They simply are only good for you to press buttons and feel a little bit of satisfaction not anything else. Due to the marketing though, those games are deemed more socially acceptable, as they are productive. I think this is simply the wrong way for society and the industry to go. Psychological tricks are real games and have little value in my opinion, and they need to be removed from the stem not adopted to make them “productive.” They should be removed from games, teaching apps, and alike. Recently I have been trying “language transfer” app, for learning French, and it is much more effective than Duolingo as it gets you actually thinking about things you’re learning, significantly boosting its effectiveness.
I believe AAA game studios have lost the plot. Rocksteady, which created the Arkham series and is my favourite game series, released suicide squad game, which while still you can tell has some heart (voice acting and animations are great), is very clearly focused group towards the whales. It has “live service” elements with loot similar to warcraft, designed to get you to pay to escape the grind. This game was a massive failure in both sales and player count. This game should be a cautionary tale and a reminder to big game studios that they are in the business of making art not skinner boxes. The market can only take so many casinos, and the easier path to success is to create good artistic games rather than compete on who can make the bigger skinner box.
Play good games
While the game market as a whole has risen to become the biggest entertainment industry in the world, I believe its cultural impact is still minuscule to what it can be. Most of the money produced as a whole seems to be coming from gambling addicted whales, practically wasting their money on the hot new free to play addiction machine. Many games, especially AAA ones, have then started to introduce these mechanics into their games because they all want a piece of the pie.
I wrote this piece to urge both game developers and players to think from the first principle of games as an art form, not as a way to maximize human misery to extract money. The most recent game I played which gave me this feeling was “Disco Elysium”. I could tell the people behind the game had poured their heart into it. Every bit of the game reeked of personality and character, especially the writing and the art. I hope players keep supporting these kinds of games, because in my opinion gaming can be so much more than skinner boxes.