Comment by wyldfire
3 years ago
> “I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.
A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me, I'd never heard the term before. Although if I try to take a step back I suppose this term could be used to describe any game and not just one of the lootbox-mania or idle games.
However, the wikipedia article [1] states:
> A core or compulsion loop is any repetitive gameplay cycle that is designed to keep the player engaged with the game. ... A compulsion loop may be distinguished further from a core loop; while many games have a core loop of activities that a player may repeat over and over again, such as combat within a role-playing game, a compulsion loop is particularly designed to guide the player into anticipation for the potential reward from specific activities
For some reason, all I can think of is that game from ST:TNG [2]. I'd like to say that I am somehow above it all but back when I used to play FPS games, it was probably just the same thing. Nonstop dopamine infusion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
Compulsion loop does sound rather dystopian and "attention-hacking" but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around. An hour long compulsion loop sounds like it could be an immersive experience.
That said, I'm not hearing nice things about IronSource and it sounds like maybe there's better ways to get user feedback than the particular implementations they're using and are going to use with IronSource.
From what I've seen of mobile games, in practice it means that it starts off fun and well balanced. Then after [x] minutes it starts to get a bit frustrating, and suddenly you're unable to make progress without sitting and waiting or banging your head against the wall. This presents a choice to the player. They can choose to put the game down until they unlock some power up that helps them pass the level. Or, they can pay money to receive the instant dopamine hit of getting back to the beginning of the "compulsion loop".
The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.
Yup, and these scummy games will leverage social connections as well. They'll show your friends progress in a way designed to produce FOMO, without showing you that they're buying their way past the pay gates too.
To my way of thinking it's only slightly more reputable than bitcoin slot machine crap like stake.
I've developed to be a terrible gamer: Great games that are finished in 7 hours usually don't feel worth the money, while games that do these compulsion loops quickly feel like a waste of time.
I think I'm not alone in that, and the few games I really enjoyed in the last couple of years were significantly text-based and/or complex simulations for this reason.
Why aren't shorter games worth the money? I really dislike the way modern games inflate their length because it's usually tons of padding.
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> but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around.
Didn't sound very nice to me. More like an elder drug lord who knows that too many overdoses are bad for business or a virus that evolves to be less lethal because dead hosts don't spread.
Or in this case: a two minute compulsion loop would probably make it really obvious that the game is trying to hook you and might trigger some kind of counter reaction: Players realizing it's a slot machine and uninstalling it to stop themselves from wasting time. Whereas a hour-long loop might keep a player hooked without them realizing it.
Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.
And most of them were tuned for profit too, so it's not like this is a new concept. It does feel like a lot of the mobile and F2P monetization folks are the same ones that enjoyed profiting from arcade games and see them as being similar to slot machines (except better, because they only pay out in neurochemicals, not money!).
There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.
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My pinball machines actually track average ball times in the audits. It’s a KPI for operators. Machine setups will be changed to increase difficulty if necessary.
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Compulsion loop aka Skinner Box aka Operant Condition Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
I wonder if there is a point that a game or other experience can become "predatory" solely focusing on the time someone spends on it regardless of monetization. To my own mind, there are many games that I can't put down for hours, sometimes missing out on sleep entirely for days. But the capitalistic part doesn't apply to me since I never play games with in-game monetization. Still, a lot of my time is sucked away by those activities (sometimes >18 hours a day), and I sometimes have to stop myself and question my priorities.
As an example, Minecraft is only a $20 one-time purchase, but free and/or open source mods made by people who are motivated by fun instead of profit have created a staggering amount of content that happens to be really addictive to someone like me. For the $20 I got the equivalent of years of content and novelty that I can never hope to fully explore.
I wonder if any given computer program that's given a colossal amount of development resources thrown behind it will ultimately come somewhere close to irresistible, and would suck away various parts of our less interesting hopes and dreams regardless of how much monetary currency the creator is expecting the user to pay. There just happens to be a motive to tack on some extra profit if the game is pseudo-irresistable, where all that time would have been "wasted" on someone's freeloading video game addiction instead. It makes me wonder if what is known as "predatory" is just a pathological explosion of what someone thinks of as a successful accomplishment (my "any given side project could one day addict us all" theory).
I noticed something like this with Nintendo's early Switch games. Both Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey had a design philosophy that something should always be just over the horizon, waiting for you to explore. It sounds romantic in theory, but the problem is that the game never gives you a good place to take a break, and it drives that same kind of addictive behavior you're describing.
It's a set of design habits that served the industry well back when they were trying to get people to pump in money, but which don't really do anyone any good when it's just you at home on a fully paid-up console game. It's not malicious, it's just a habit that got uncritically elevated to a Best Practice.
Having read Wheel of Time recently.. "[The Forsaken] Graendal in the Age of Legends was famous as a great psychologist and a noted ascetic. After her conversion to the Shadow, she became a master manipulator and an extraordinarily skilled user of Compulsion weaves... She is very particular about her servants, often choosing people of great status, power, or renown and reducing their minds to empty husks"
But be carful, she uses compulsion like a hammer to distract from the fact that she is also amazing a light touch compulsion.
Another term for this is grinding. The CEO is saying they should have made the grinding parts of the game longer. Grinding is usually boring and repetitive part of the game that's required to advance. A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.
Grinding is just one way to lengthen the loop. Or you can create lots of compelling content, like Elden Ring, which did not feel grindy to me at any point in 130 hours.
ER has a couple loops, with dungeons taking O(hour), and regions taking O(10hour). But there is no hard requirement to grind baked in at any level. (Of course, there is a requirement to Git Gud, which might make it feel grindy to some.)
> A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.
A great RPG however, provides you with the tools to advance without ever grinding.
Most Fire Emblem games for example, are carefully tuned (thanks to a pretty interesting experience point formula) to rig your "active members of the party" to a particular level. Fire Emblem effectively asymptotes your character's level to what is expected for a particular map.
In Fire Emblem, 100 experience points is a level up. However, a stronger character gets less experience points, while a weaker character gets more. So weaker characters grow much faster, maybe leveling up after defeating just one foe. While a strong character ("the Jeigen" as Fire Emblem fans call it), may need 20+ wins before they level up.
As such, most Fire Emblem games feel like "there's no grind", because the experience point system is designed to never have a grind to begin with. Weak characters feel weak for their first few combats, but exponentially level up and catch up to the rest of the party in just a few maps. While your strongest characters feel like they're "wasting the precious enemies" (there's only a set number of enemies per map. Killing an enemy for +5 exp on your strongest character is just not good tactics when the same enemy is +100 exp on your weakest character).
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Even Pokemon to a large extent does this well. You can defeat all the gyms without ever "Grinding". It gets harder and harder to advance, but the game has enough tactics (Swords Dance, X Attack, etc. etc.) to allow you to win even with 10-levels or 15-levels behind the computer.
I think "no grind" Pokemon playthroughs are pretty fun. It completely changes the game and kind of provides the player an entry point into the competitive scene (you need to use competitive meta strategies vs the CPU if you expect to win with 10-to-15 level disadvantages against them).
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EDIT: It should be noted that Fire Emblem / Pokemon does offer a grind, but only as a method of last resort. Children who are incapable of ever understanding advanced tactics like Swords Dance or Calm Mind, are given a "grind" which guarantee progress.
Similarly, Fire Emblem has "grind levels" that serve as a way to increase your character's strength. But a lot of "hardcore" Fire Emblem fans try to avoid the grind levels and beat the game "grind free".
From this perspective, "Grind" exists as a way to allow casual players to advance, while trying to stay balanced so that stronger players (on their 5th or 6th playthrough with deep understanding of the mechanics of the game) can play without that "emergency escape hatch" so to speak.
That's the general theme among turn-based RPGs. The games are either too undertuned to warrant grinding for skilled players, or they are tuned so they do require some form of grinding. It's an inherent problem with stat sticks and fairly simplistic strategies. Almost no moderately difficult RPG is tuned to not have some of its player base grind, bar introducing difficulty selection.
Pokemon is absurdly easy because the story appeals to a wide variety of players. Most of which include "just give a single fast Pokemon 4 coverage moves and blast everything to pieces". Only gen 5 had a counter mechanic to this by adjusting experience to level difference.
Fire Emblem doesn't really have a grind because you fight the mobs you need during the campaign, and beyond higher difficulties the games have changed to accommodate lesser skilled players into not having to restart the entire campaign. Because it turns out, few people are looking forward to replaying 20 hours only for your 1-5 super pumped up units to not be able to beat the game (read: leaving almost all your other units underleveled or dead, no skirmishes / arena to catch up, and your remaining party can't clear the map).
Paper Mario, you can beat the entire game skipping every non-required battle and still have room to spare. Strategies are even based around keeping your HP low.
And despite not needing to grind, the former two still suffer from similar issues (beating weaker enemies with no sense of strategy to stall getting to the meat of the game). Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.
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> A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.
That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.
Yet a lot of people love this and there are multiple genres (MMOs and ARPGs) built around it. Heck even Minecraft is just a mindless grind for some
I think a lot of the people don't understand the 'modes' a person can be in when playing a game.
There are some games that you want to play with your full attention, and you want it to be an intense and immersive experience.
But there are also games that you want to play 'in the background' while having a discord conversation about something else. It's fun and simple, and doesn't come with stakes.
Some analogies to this are throwing a ball back and forth in the yard. Or having a show play in the background. It's comforting.
'Grinding' doesn't have to be bad if it's in that context
Thank you for the "The Game" wiki link. It's pretty much a software virus on intelligent beings' minds. Very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if something like it has been deployed in other intelligent worlds.
Explicit references to a "compulsion loop" make me want to delete all my non-indie video games and take a shower.
> A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me
Yes, it is bad. Crack cocaine has a really tight compulsion loop, for example.
It's not a great sounding phrase, but a compulsion loop can be a pretty harmless thing. Think about a cliffhanger in a book or a tv show -- something that gets you to come back to the next episode/chapter. That's really the same thing. Right now I'm playing God of War, and there's a compulsion loop of doing side quests to make my character stronger. There's definitely a compulsiveness to that -- I stayed up too late last night doing that -- but it's not particularly evil.
For more information on the Skinner Box theory and how it is applied to exploit human psychology for monetization purposes:
https://levelskip.com/how-to/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games
Path of Exile has the most exquisite set of compulsion loops within loops. Even when you’re aware of it they’re so satisfying.