Comment by cercatrova
5 years ago
Habits can be good or bad. In this case, one would want the user to be rewarded for coming back every day to learn programming. Habit acclimation is a neutral process, just because the parent uses the same tactics as those who use them for building bad habits does not mean that those processes are bad in and of themselves.
Of course! I'm not ascribing any moral weight to it, just pointing out the similarity in tactics. Engagement can be a good thing if you're using it to improve someone's life rather than simply trying to extract as much time and money from them as possible.
>Engagement can be a good thing if you're using it to improve someone's life
Can we agree that entertainment and being entertained can improve someone's life? If we can agree to that, then we can also agree that games designed to entertain an individual are good for said individual.
It's not a leap from there to say that a game that is engaging and keeps someone playing is good for them, because it's entertaining them, and that, as we've established, is good.
Once you take the step to make a product addicting, as a formal part of your business model, everything after that is just shades of grey, I believe. Morality and justification of your own truth is a fascinating process. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.
I wouldn't say you're overthinking it at all! You make an excellent point, and as a game developer it's something I have to consider. Our mission is to craft joy for our players, but I certainly cannot afford to rule out any potential in terms of designing our games to be more engaging.
On the other hand, I've witnessed many instances of gamers who have fallen victim to habit-forming mechanics that continue sinking hours and dollars into a game daily but also say that they no longer truly enjoy the time they spend in that game. There's many aspects that play into that sort of behavior which games can be designed to exploit, not least of which being the sunk cost fallacy and fear of missing out: a player who has reached the endgame might have run out of interesting content to play through but feel obliged to continuously "defend their title". They're encouraged to keep coming back long after it stops being fun by being constantly presented with what appears to be an existential threat to the supremacy they have labored towards.
At that point I think we can safely say that such a game is no longer a positive impact on that person's life.
My way of attempting to ameliorate these sorts of conflicting interests is to structure our organization as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, in a way that gives players meaningful influence over business, design and development decisions.
The issue is these games stop being entertaining. Pulling the lever on a slot machine might be fun the first few pulls, but after that it’s simply waiting for a dopamine rush.
MMO’s basic gameplay without leveling, item drops, or any form of progression have some fun aspects. But, they need to tell players to collect 50 rat tails because otherwise players wouldn’t.
Mobile games have distilled this down even further, with the minimum possible amount of actual gameplay possible.
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