Comment by nonbirithm
3 years ago
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.