this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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I don't want to be all old man yells at cloud, but back in my day popular games were played a lot because they were primarily enjoyable for the story, the achievement of completing a particular level or boss, playing against friends, etc. And sure, you'd have the odd bad parent trying to claim their kid was addicted to Counterstrike 1.6, but it was broadly speaking nonsense. The vast majority of games were offline, or had very limited online modes built around direct competition with other players (FPS, sports games, etc), and publishers would get all their money from the initial sale, with only a few games having expansion packs, most notable The Sims.
But in the early 2010s a few things changed:
So we went from a situation where video games were fun for the same reasons traditional games, or sports, are fun, to one where many video games include a lot of gambling mechanics in their core gameplay loops - loot boxes being the obvious one, but any lottery-based mechanic where you spend real money counts - in an industry with no relevant regulation, nor age limitation.
It is definitely possible for people to get addicted to these mechanics, the same way people can get addicted to casino games, or betting on horse racing, especially when for some games that is literally what the developer wants.
I agree with all your major points, well said. I will only add that back in the late 90s, MMOs started to become more popular among PC gamers, and that those were definitely designed for mild addiction (to keep players paying a monthly fee).
After WoW took MMOs mainstream (by around 2010-2012 when its playerbase peaked), I feel that lines up perfectly with your observation that developers began incorporating more and more positive feedback loops into games. I only bring this up since I wonder if there's an actual correlation there (along with the other elements you pointed out regarding accessibility, etc.) or if it's just coincidental timing.
It had nothing to do with WoW, smartphones were basically to blame. 2007 was when the iPhone came out, Android followed next year, and by the early 2010s, smartphones became ubiquitous. Both the App Store and Google Market exploded exponentially in the number of apps and games. Mobile game makers soon figured out that microtransactions brought in more money than upfront payments. All the popular games started exploiting this model, such as Angry Birds, Temple Run and of course the infamous Candy Crush.
King, the company behind Candy Crush, generates over a billion dollars of revenue per year - their turnover exceeding that of several traditional PC/console game makers. In 2012, they staggering 1000% growth in just an year - and that was the trigger. That was when everyone looked at them going, "tf, why the hell are we wasting so much time and money developing AAA games, and making way less money than some cheap mobile game?"
And the rest as they say, is history.
WoW is a stepping stone, it's used as a frequent example in Reality is Broken, which is good place to start if you want to understand where all this comes from, as well as the rather utopian hope psychologists had at the time.
I was there, and it didn't "come from" WoW. Mtx were already popular in South Korea and China, with games like MapleStory (2003) and ZT Online (2006) being early examples, which predates mtx in WoW. Farmville also had them back in 2009, around the same time WoW started selling pets. And back then Zynga were making like a $1mil a day from Farmville mtx, and this was before WoW pet sales really took off.
Yes, WoW did play a role, but it wasn't as big as you think - after all, it had a very niche audience, whereas games like Farmville, Candy Crush, Angry Birds etc had a much wider appeal that reached out to several age groups and audiences, whilst simultaneously being a lot more accessible - which made them so much more dangerous (in terms of addiction).
WoW appealed to the hardcore MMO gamers, gamers who were used to paying for virtual goods, whereas games like Farmville normalized mtx across for the general and wider public. Paying for virtual items was no longer something that nerds did, it was a completely normal thing. And then Candy Crush tweaked the formula even further. WoW's mtx was a lot more benign compared to some of the shady psychological designs games like Candy Crush implemented.
I absolutely agree that Farmville had a bigger impact, especially as it was geared towards a more casual market. Showing that people who would not describe themselves as gamers would spend a lot of money on games was a huge thing that a lot of people set out to copy.
I worked at GameStop when Farmville was big. Regularly had older women come in and spend $40 to $100 dollars on Farmville cards. A couple of these women came in every week, outspending almost every "traditional" gamer I knew.
Yes! There’s a reason Microsoft bought Activision-Blizzard-King
Has everyone forgotten coin-ops? Or maybe I'm just old.
This started a long, long time ago, pretty much at the birth of popular casual gaming. It's not part of the evolution, it was part of the blueprint.
The thing with coin-ops, and arcades in general, is that you still had to physically go somewhere, and have the coins to keep playing. If you walked away, someone would take the machine. Worst case scenario, the machine stopped working when it ran out of coin/token space.
I'm not denying that there are similarities, and that ultimately every game ever has been built on a fundamental mechanic of risk/reward, but it was rudimentary and broadly speaking deterministic and visible to the user (you knew how to get a free ball in most pinball games, for example).
The combination of easy payments, of very high amounts, and online competitive play where the high rollers can be multi-millionaires from anywhere in the world, and a pay-to-win mechanic makes certain modern games not just addictive, but financially crippling, if played by someone susceptible to addiction.
I agree, but I was responding specifically to the claim that the use of psychology to tweak the design of a game in favour of profitability happened in 2010 / 1990 / etc.
The fact that it's now orders of magnitude worse is, of course, true, but it didn't start there by any definition.