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The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

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Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#81

Post by konstmonst »

cousin_it wrote: post #51
akozak wrote: post #6

A 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…

> Is there a chemical difference between this and the pleasure some get from reading great literary works Yes, and that difference is the whole point of art vs entertainment. After consuming entertainment, you want more entertainment. But after consuming art - after reading The Great Gatsby - your eyes get yanked back to your own life. You start thinking "what doomed dreams do I have?", not "when will they release Gr…

I had the same feeling after playing Sekiro (And I read a lot)

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#82

Post by Haghn »

vinceguidry wrote: post #80

One of my favorite Minecraft Mods was equivalent exchange. It foretold the coming of modern idle games. You work hard in the beginning to earn your first magical item, that gives you some sorcery that lets you spend less time gathering resources. A small amount of time later, you get another magical item that lets you transmute a little more efficiently. A few dozen grinding hours later and you've acquired an array o…

>Once I started playing, I couldn't stop until I had done all the things. And when I was done with that, I never picked it, or Minecraft, back up again.

With a friend I played Minecraft for years. Every time we met I would bring my xbox360 controller and we would dig, build, whatever, for hours and days on end.

One week, we decided to go for the nether dragon, at the time newly added to the game. We spent hours farming items, going to hell and losing stuff there, but we went on, arrived on the nether world, spent ten minutes finding out how to deal with the dragon and we killed it. Then we looked at each other and said "oh, now we have finished Minecraft".

We never played it again.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#83

Post by jgtrosh »

seventhtiger wrote: post #26

I've thought about this a lot. Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. If you sell games for $60 upfront then your marketing will be perceived as a scam in the face of any failures or shortcomings in your game. You're trying to hype people up and sell them something bad. If you sell attempts, or lives, like an arcade or candy crush, then when players lose a level they think you're extorting t…

> If you want to make a game just for the passion of it, if you want to have a healthy relationship with gamers, you are literally not allowed to monetize. You have to give it away fully for free.

You are literally allowed to do it. It does mean more effort to preserve the desired healthy relationships.

I don't think free games actually tend to result in perfectly healthy relationships either; but monetisation just provides a single point of failure for such dynamics.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#84

Post by ionised »

seventhtiger wrote: post #35
Spedeman1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every way to monetize a game will be interpreted with hostility. I would say that in almost any business there is always small amount of people who intrepret the pricing and/or the business model of the business with hostility. I think it is quite natural - people would rather not pay for things. However the majority of people are not the ones bitching loudly about it, they pay for services happily and are somewhat…

This is the dominant tone of discussion in video game communities. I certainly haven't seen that in other places. No one accused Disney of using cliff hangers to scam them.

Plenty of accusations of Disney plagiarising most of their work over the yeas from public-domain fairy tales though.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#85

Post by IggleSniggle »

seventhtiger wrote: post #33
sudhirj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Netflix or Apple Music model might work. Fixed price per month for a catalog of games, with revenue shares happening based on play time. This a basically a solved problem for video and audio content, games don’t need to be different.

Video and audio content are not interactive. You never feel active manipulation from static media. Games in that model will be accused of manipulating players into having as much play time as possible even sacrificing quality. The same addictive mechanics can be used for time instead of money.

That is true, and is also happening in other mediums where the incentives are setup this way. The biggest culprit I’ve seen is recipes. What you want is the ingredients and instructions laid out with minimum fluff. What you get is pages and pages of useless storytelling to improve the metrics of the page so that the page gets ranked better for engagement so that it can sell ads.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#86

Post by madog »

inlined wrote: post #21
taneq wrote: post #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…

Randomness of rewards has been repeatedly shown to increase duration spent with skinner boxes. There seems to be a magic middle spot where the small rewards are frequent enough to avoid disillusionment and the big rewards are infrequent & random enough to feed addiction

It's called a variable ratio reward schedule [1]. It's at play in slot machines for example. Very effective at getting rapid and persistent responses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Gambling_%E2%80%...

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#87

Post by bloopernova »

This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing.

I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.

Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience.

In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z.

Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course.

But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#88

Post by bloopernova »

girvo wrote: post #20
rosser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine you saw a bit of a dopamine spike when that message came in. Was it enough to mitigate the physical symptoms at all, or was that purely mental, I wonder?

Genuinely mitigated the runny nose, aches and pains in my back, etc.

I wish I could trick my stupid brain like that. (not saying that your brain is somehow easier to trick than mine or whatever. My brain is just stupidly stubborn when it comes to feeling pain)

I'm really very deeply glad you kicked that habit and killed the dragon. This internet stranger is rooting for you :)

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#89

Post by tk75x »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #79
ardani wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

In an alternate reality, 3D TV really took off and split screen was replaced by polarized-screen. Wouldn't that have been neat?

https://www.tweaking4all.com/video/gaming/split-screen-game-...

Re: The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

#90

Post by ardani »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #79
ardani wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they develop more splitscreen games! That's really the main edge to consoles for me.

In an alternate reality, 3D TV really took off and split screen was replaced by polarized-screen. Wouldn't that have been neat?

Wow super neat, you reminded me of a family member who has a 3D TV!

And with modification this technique also works with laptops and colorized glasses!

gaming intensifies

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