Which of these statements do you agree with: "all games will rot your mind", or "all games will make you a better person"? Neither? Then you're picking a more nuanced position than a lot of politicians and commentators nowadays, who seem to think all games are either Grand Theft Auto or the educational edition of Minecraft. Along with being more profitable than TV and movies, games are also far more varied, which means we have to work much harder to talk about which games or genres might have positive or negative effects.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9661499166.jpg]
Contrary to popular belief, videogames weren't immediately demonised when they appeared in popular culture. At worst, they were seen as "a frivolous pastime with minimal benefits", as Sid Meier recalls in Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, but not much different from other niche interests, such as jazz music or the work of Frank Gehry. It was only later that they were wrongly accused of fostering violent tendencies. As frustrating as that period was, it is largely over: videogames now dominate the world of entertainment, and fans who were quick to cast doubt on research studies criticising games are now just as quick to champion those that praise their hobby.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5621661126.jpg]
There are a few clouds marring this cultural victory, though, including the plague of loot boxes and microtransactions that have multiplied across the industry. Unusually, politicians and players have been united in disliking this kind of exploitative monetisation and gameplay, with proposals to regulate loot boxes receiving widespread support from consumers. Where things become more complicated is when we consider the less harmful but more widespread sin of games that waste players' time by means of compulsion loops.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9844666412.jpg]
'Compulsion loop' is a scary-sounding term for a simple process. First, make players anticipate a reward, such as a more powerful sword or the prospect of travelling to a new game area. Next, give them a challenge, such as killing monsters or solving a puzzle. Completing that challenge earns them their anticipated reward, which in turn presents or unlocks yet more challenges for yet more rewards (eg, the new game area includes a new quest-giver). If this sounds a little behaviourist, that's because it is, though the challenges are usually far more fun than those in generic gamification. The most fun games have a kind of looseness and play to their loops such that you barely notice them, or they can be so wide and subtle that they're more of a suggestion than a mechanical system. But if it sounds like compulsion loops could in some circumstances lead to compulsive behaviour, well, that's the entire point. Some might even call the resulting behaviour addictive.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/2284412922.jpg]
The suggestion that videogames can be addictive is widely accepted among people who play them. In fact, it's often used as a compliment for especially fun or replayable games. At the same time, it's strenuously denied by the industry, which is so wary of any comparison to drugs that anyone making the suggestion is attacked - including me.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5256652255.jpg]
In 2010, I appeared on Panorama to describe how some games might have been deliberately designed to create compulsion loops to keep people playing; the programme's researchers confessed they hadn't been able to persuade anyone else from the game industry to be interviewed, presumably because they were afraid of the backlash from their colleagues. During the interview, I was extremely careful not to say "addiction" given the industry's rules-lawyering insistence that "addiction" only applies to physical substances, yet writers for industry publications were still outraged. This was despite the fact that compulsion loops were, and continue to be, promoted in important game industry conferences and publications to little resistance.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6146951129.jpg]
Writer Jini Maxwell detected the same defensiveness in response to a 2021 episode of Australian investigative programme Four Corners covering videogames' predatory monetisation models. In a statement, the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association called the programme "unbalanced", preferring to highlight the positives of videogames, especially during COVID-19. However, it had nothing to say about loot boxes and effectively blamed any excessive unwanted spending on players' failure to regulate their own behaviour. This kneejerk defensiveness has a chilling effect on even the mildest criticism of videogames, which has prevented the industry from confronting any responsibility over its creations. It is also strangely out of proportion with the threat of regulation, given that limiting loot boxes for children remains theoretical in most countries.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6656961592.jpg]
One of my favourite videogames is Sid Meier's Civilization, a turn-based strategy series first released in 1991. Civilization features a compulsion loop that's so well designed, it's practically a work of art. Every turn, your units uncover a little bit more of the blank world map that might hold all sorts of surprises and riches and threats; your cities build a little bit more of their new granaries and temples that will make them grow faster or improve their happiness; and your scientists research a little bit more of a new technology that will unlock yet more exciting buildings and weapons and technologies. The compulsion to keep playing is so strong it coined the saying "Just one more turn".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5266919169.jpg]
After many years of playing Civilization, I finally gave it up when I realised that if I started a game, I would be unable to do anything else but play for the following six hours, even if that meant staying up until three in the morning. It didn't matter whether I set an alarm for myself or committed to go to bed at a reasonable hour I simply had to play for just one or two or five or ten more turns to build a World Wonder or finish my invasion fleet or complete a road network. It was fun and engaging, but seeming lack of control felt disturbing. More embarrassingly, I had the same experience playing FarmVille for a couple of years, repetitively harvesting and ploughing and planting crops just to... buy new tractors?
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/2492691956.jpg]
Game designer Melos Han-Tani sees similar mechanics in popular Roguelike games such as Hades and Rogue Legacy, calling them "treatmills". A refinement of compulsion loops, treatmills are designed to engage players indefinitely "by placing incremental mechanics behind all kinds of systems... [with] the intention to occupy a gigantic amount of your time, maximise the period in which you might share it with others, and thus, also occupy 'The Conversation' of game players for as long as possible". I thoroughly enjoyed Hades and it didn't interfere with my sleep anywhere near as much as Civilization, but it's disquieting to see how easily it consumes hundreds of hours of players' time by incrementally unlocking a few more secrets and a few more power-ups after every 30-minute loop.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9461956926.jpg]
Though players may laugh at the late nights and bleary mornings caused by Civilization and Hades, and say it's all fine in moderation, it is deeply disingenuous to suggest that some videogames aren't designed to keep us playing for far longer than we intended to, much more so than the most bingeable TV, or page-turning novel, or any other solo activity I can think of. Braxton Soderman, assistant professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, argues videogames are particularly effective at using 'flow' (a concept developed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi) to induce a state of unbroken attention - more so than TV - partly due to games' ability to dynamically adjust difficulty so that challenges are never too hard or too easy. It cannot be the case that games' uniquely interactive nature, which brings so much entertainment and joy and fulfilment, cannot also cause harm, even inadvertently.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/1269692646.jpg]
Admitting this doesn't mean we should reject games, let alone ban them, but it does mean we ought to be attentive to the power of compulsion loops and treatmills and how they might be moderated. As Han-Tani notes, "I can accept that a treatmill is a source of relaxation, but I just feel the way they are designed does not really encourage, from the start, a healthy type of engagement. If someone wants to form a bond with my game and play it for 1,000 hours, I'm fine with that. But I don't want to add in elements of design that encourage that playtime via addictive loops and retention techniques. It feels coercive".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/1516261240.jpg]
This is gamification that works so well, it's frightening. And though there is no comparison to the harm done by casino-style games - you can't lose thousands of dollars playing most videogames there may be tools we can use from the world of gambling that can help players moderate their own behaviour, such as time-out periods. It's easy to scoff at the effectiveness of these measures (surely players would just override them or play another game instead?), but, speaking from experience, they can work.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6679292056.jpg]
I've never been an avid gambler, but during the 2020 US elections I ended up betting hundreds of pounds on various political races. After downloading one betting app, I was asked to set an account deposit limit. I entered what I felt was a fairly high number. Within a day, I hit that limit and downloaded a second app, circumventing the deposit limit. Another couple of days later, I hit the limit again, so I got a third app. But when I hit the third limit, I stopped - the friction was just high enough to finally dissuade me. So while gambling deposit limits aren't perfect, they worked for me eventually, and probably prevented me from spending hundreds of pounds more.
Similarly, we shouldn't expect time-out periods for videogames to be a panacea, but neither should we dismiss them as totally useless. If limits were available at the platform level (eg, on consoles, Steam, Epic Games Store, iOS, Android, etc) and prompts to opt in only appeared after repeated excessive aggregate playtime, individual game developers would not have to unilaterally disarm, and it would be harder for gamers to circumvent whatever limits they had chosen to moderate their own behaviour. (Who knows, I could even start playing Civilization again!)
Achievements, grinding, loot boxes, treatmills, and compulsion loops: videogames can look a little bit sordid in this light. But it doesn't have to be this way. One major company chose not to follow Microsoft's lead in ...
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9661499166.jpg]
Contrary to popular belief, videogames weren't immediately demonised when they appeared in popular culture. At worst, they were seen as "a frivolous pastime with minimal benefits", as Sid Meier recalls in Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, but not much different from other niche interests, such as jazz music or the work of Frank Gehry. It was only later that they were wrongly accused of fostering violent tendencies. As frustrating as that period was, it is largely over: videogames now dominate the world of entertainment, and fans who were quick to cast doubt on research studies criticising games are now just as quick to champion those that praise their hobby.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5621661126.jpg]
There are a few clouds marring this cultural victory, though, including the plague of loot boxes and microtransactions that have multiplied across the industry. Unusually, politicians and players have been united in disliking this kind of exploitative monetisation and gameplay, with proposals to regulate loot boxes receiving widespread support from consumers. Where things become more complicated is when we consider the less harmful but more widespread sin of games that waste players' time by means of compulsion loops.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9844666412.jpg]
'Compulsion loop' is a scary-sounding term for a simple process. First, make players anticipate a reward, such as a more powerful sword or the prospect of travelling to a new game area. Next, give them a challenge, such as killing monsters or solving a puzzle. Completing that challenge earns them their anticipated reward, which in turn presents or unlocks yet more challenges for yet more rewards (eg, the new game area includes a new quest-giver). If this sounds a little behaviourist, that's because it is, though the challenges are usually far more fun than those in generic gamification. The most fun games have a kind of looseness and play to their loops such that you barely notice them, or they can be so wide and subtle that they're more of a suggestion than a mechanical system. But if it sounds like compulsion loops could in some circumstances lead to compulsive behaviour, well, that's the entire point. Some might even call the resulting behaviour addictive.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/2284412922.jpg]
The suggestion that videogames can be addictive is widely accepted among people who play them. In fact, it's often used as a compliment for especially fun or replayable games. At the same time, it's strenuously denied by the industry, which is so wary of any comparison to drugs that anyone making the suggestion is attacked - including me.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5256652255.jpg]
In 2010, I appeared on Panorama to describe how some games might have been deliberately designed to create compulsion loops to keep people playing; the programme's researchers confessed they hadn't been able to persuade anyone else from the game industry to be interviewed, presumably because they were afraid of the backlash from their colleagues. During the interview, I was extremely careful not to say "addiction" given the industry's rules-lawyering insistence that "addiction" only applies to physical substances, yet writers for industry publications were still outraged. This was despite the fact that compulsion loops were, and continue to be, promoted in important game industry conferences and publications to little resistance.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6146951129.jpg]
Writer Jini Maxwell detected the same defensiveness in response to a 2021 episode of Australian investigative programme Four Corners covering videogames' predatory monetisation models. In a statement, the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association called the programme "unbalanced", preferring to highlight the positives of videogames, especially during COVID-19. However, it had nothing to say about loot boxes and effectively blamed any excessive unwanted spending on players' failure to regulate their own behaviour. This kneejerk defensiveness has a chilling effect on even the mildest criticism of videogames, which has prevented the industry from confronting any responsibility over its creations. It is also strangely out of proportion with the threat of regulation, given that limiting loot boxes for children remains theoretical in most countries.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6656961592.jpg]
One of my favourite videogames is Sid Meier's Civilization, a turn-based strategy series first released in 1991. Civilization features a compulsion loop that's so well designed, it's practically a work of art. Every turn, your units uncover a little bit more of the blank world map that might hold all sorts of surprises and riches and threats; your cities build a little bit more of their new granaries and temples that will make them grow faster or improve their happiness; and your scientists research a little bit more of a new technology that will unlock yet more exciting buildings and weapons and technologies. The compulsion to keep playing is so strong it coined the saying "Just one more turn".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/5266919169.jpg]
After many years of playing Civilization, I finally gave it up when I realised that if I started a game, I would be unable to do anything else but play for the following six hours, even if that meant staying up until three in the morning. It didn't matter whether I set an alarm for myself or committed to go to bed at a reasonable hour I simply had to play for just one or two or five or ten more turns to build a World Wonder or finish my invasion fleet or complete a road network. It was fun and engaging, but seeming lack of control felt disturbing. More embarrassingly, I had the same experience playing FarmVille for a couple of years, repetitively harvesting and ploughing and planting crops just to... buy new tractors?
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/2492691956.jpg]
Game designer Melos Han-Tani sees similar mechanics in popular Roguelike games such as Hades and Rogue Legacy, calling them "treatmills". A refinement of compulsion loops, treatmills are designed to engage players indefinitely "by placing incremental mechanics behind all kinds of systems... [with] the intention to occupy a gigantic amount of your time, maximise the period in which you might share it with others, and thus, also occupy 'The Conversation' of game players for as long as possible". I thoroughly enjoyed Hades and it didn't interfere with my sleep anywhere near as much as Civilization, but it's disquieting to see how easily it consumes hundreds of hours of players' time by incrementally unlocking a few more secrets and a few more power-ups after every 30-minute loop.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/9461956926.jpg]
Though players may laugh at the late nights and bleary mornings caused by Civilization and Hades, and say it's all fine in moderation, it is deeply disingenuous to suggest that some videogames aren't designed to keep us playing for far longer than we intended to, much more so than the most bingeable TV, or page-turning novel, or any other solo activity I can think of. Braxton Soderman, assistant professor of film and media studies at UC Irvine, argues videogames are particularly effective at using 'flow' (a concept developed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi) to induce a state of unbroken attention - more so than TV - partly due to games' ability to dynamically adjust difficulty so that challenges are never too hard or too easy. It cannot be the case that games' uniquely interactive nature, which brings so much entertainment and joy and fulfilment, cannot also cause harm, even inadvertently.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/1269692646.jpg]
Admitting this doesn't mean we should reject games, let alone ban them, but it does mean we ought to be attentive to the power of compulsion loops and treatmills and how they might be moderated. As Han-Tani notes, "I can accept that a treatmill is a source of relaxation, but I just feel the way they are designed does not really encourage, from the start, a healthy type of engagement. If someone wants to form a bond with my game and play it for 1,000 hours, I'm fine with that. But I don't want to add in elements of design that encourage that playtime via addictive loops and retention techniques. It feels coercive".
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/1516261240.jpg]
This is gamification that works so well, it's frightening. And though there is no comparison to the harm done by casino-style games - you can't lose thousands of dollars playing most videogames there may be tools we can use from the world of gambling that can help players moderate their own behaviour, such as time-out periods. It's easy to scoff at the effectiveness of these measures (surely players would just override them or play another game instead?), but, speaking from experience, they can work.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1662560442/articles/nmhmU0OFu1662979602555/6679292056.jpg]
I've never been an avid gambler, but during the 2020 US elections I ended up betting hundreds of pounds on various political races. After downloading one betting app, I was asked to set an account deposit limit. I entered what I felt was a fairly high number. Within a day, I hit that limit and downloaded a second app, circumventing the deposit limit. Another couple of days later, I hit the limit again, so I got a third app. But when I hit the third limit, I stopped - the friction was just high enough to finally dissuade me. So while gambling deposit limits aren't perfect, they worked for me eventually, and probably prevented me from spending hundreds of pounds more.
Similarly, we shouldn't expect time-out periods for videogames to be a panacea, but neither should we dismiss them as totally useless. If limits were available at the platform level (eg, on consoles, Steam, Epic Games Store, iOS, Android, etc) and prompts to opt in only appeared after repeated excessive aggregate playtime, individual game developers would not have to unilaterally disarm, and it would be harder for gamers to circumvent whatever limits they had chosen to moderate their own behaviour. (Who knows, I could even start playing Civilization again!)
Achievements, grinding, loot boxes, treatmills, and compulsion loops: videogames can look a little bit sordid in this light. But it doesn't have to be this way. One major company chose not to follow Microsoft's lead in ...
You're reading a preview of
Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2022