Comment by actinium226
3 years ago
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.
When a game dev says "vast area and lots of things to do", I hear "lots of walking across empty lands with sporadic fetch quests".
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I wouldn't call a 7 hour game short, I'd define that closer to 2 hours. The reason it's bad is that they usually fail to fully explore whatever idea the game is built around or they never really had an idea good enough to carry an entire game.
> 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.
Comparing arcade machines to gambling is a sore spot, especially for pinball. Ostensibly arcade machines are skill based. They are not random. You may be able to win an award or prize but that will be based on some objective measure of performance with little to no randomization. This is important because arcades operate where gambling is illegal, so suggesting they are anything like gambling threatens the security of those businesses.
Roger Sharpe [1] saved pinball by demonstrating it is a game of skill.
RE: art vs profit I think there is room for both. Games are probably the best example of that. Game designers are very much artists but they are also engineers and business people.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sharpe_(pinball)
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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.
Have any pinball machines ever been designed to change the difficulty during game play. Some sort of algo to make the bumpers less bumpery, restrict the movement of the flippers, adjust the angles of things, etc?
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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.