The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
jeff-vogel.blogspot.com
The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
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Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#2It’s a flavorful point of view but it really is about IAP. Only truly mad people go out and defend virtual slot machines, and that’s definitely the virus (smallest reproducing harmful life form) of the game industry.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#3I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing.
>I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#4> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops.
I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm after? will that item go to me?) to really kick the intermittent-reward circuitry into gear.
Constant small incremental progress is just easier to implement.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#5I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing. >I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
I've been reading Vogel's writing for something like 25 years now, and it always repays the time. He's entertaining but thoughtful with it.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#6A lot of what we do can be explained (or "reduced") to chemical processes that reward or reinforce behavior. Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works, building a birdhouse, playing with your kids, etc?
A key question on the ethics of it all is - I think - whether there is some externality from the behavior that leads to social utility. Reading literature might make you more understanding and empathetic of others' experiences for example. Gambling in a casino, maybe not so much (though certainly it creates jobs, etc).
I'm excited by the idea that neurochemical feedback loops in gaming could create some positive social utility. Certainly the storytelling in a lot of games is artistic and meaningful, but maybe we'll find even better ways to directly channel those brain cycles, along the lines of protein folding games but with more depth. (Neal Stephenson had some interesting ideas for this in Fall or Reamde - can't remember - where an MMORPG had an API similar to mechanical turk where players were rewarded for cognitive tasks in the real world like airport security)
edit: I guess we shouldn't forget that games are fun too, and doesn't necessarily need to be deeper than that to be good.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#7I dunno, calling people unsophisticated drug dealers because their game designs don't value the same dimensions of fun as your game designs seems pretty judgemental.
> This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#8Bad, sloppy, breathless writing. Reiterating the central metaphor for pages on end doesn’t make it right. It’s like the author really wanted to vent with their preferred insult for more successful game developers and needed a few pages of folksy pop-psych nonsense to justify it.
If there’s any kernel of truth here, it’s nothing new. Likening commercial online games to drugs is as old as “Evercrack”.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#9> Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops. I don't think that's necessarily true. WoW moved more and more towards this model and all it did was make the game predictable and grindy. You need big chunks of uncertainty (will we kill the boss? will it drop what I'm…
I would also add that constant, small incremental progress is also easier to monetize and it's also more successful at doing so. Look at the model that Candy Crush popularized. It lures that dopamine hit right in front of you, just within reach - but the "reach" costs 24 candy crush coins or whatever they call it.
Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction
#10I appreciate the direct mention of his motivation for writing. >I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.
I've been reading Vogel's writing for something like 25 years now, and it always repays the time. He's entertaining but thoughtful with it.
First heard of him reading this which is very nearly 25 years old.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.mac.games/-ShSyZ8bv...