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Comment by ganfortran | Hacker News Reader

Not quite. Actually, it is not coincidence, 4chan is primarily a video game/anime forum while being the one of the online centers of alt-righters.

Unemployment stays as the center of all issues here. Or bad employment if we look from a higher perspective. With low income and bad job, video game, as a way of pleasure, it is cheap per hour, very little requirement for room, easy obtain of the feeling of achievement, make it the best option of entertainment for frustrated young males out there.

Bad job market creates video game addicts. It is quite logical this demographic will find alt-right philosophy appeal to them. What I disagree with the author, is that a lot of young men don't have the luxury to live a more 'normal' life, which is getting more and more expensive every year, as the society demands.

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I think you and others on HN also need to consider a very critical issue on game design:

SKinner boxes posing as games.

While youth unemployment in itself generates flight/distraction direct behavior, game designers themselves are creating absolutely unethical skinner boxes which will generate addictive behavior.

This is like dumping a slot machine into the hands (literally) of vulnerable children/young adults (also literally).

I argue very strongly that this shit needs to be banned, and people on HN need to pick up that torch fast. Because if its not carried by the tech industry to clean its own house, its going to be used by those inimical to it.

This comment totally needs to be higher. Every other comment on this thread makes little to no mention of "Skinner Box Design", when design tactics like these are almost certainly the #1 factor for creating video game addicts.

The issues we're discussing in this thread start with the game designer. Cognitive flow is a real thing, and game designers have learned through decades of research and testing how to put players into a state of cognitive flow. They've only recently (within the last 5 or 10 years) begun learning how to monetize your cognitive ability, bringing players to the brink of a flow state only to hide reward behind a paywall. The player is psychologically conditioned into a purchase by simply playing the game.

Nearly everything else being discussed in this thread is a secondary issue stemming from the game designer's desire to increasingly monetize their game. This desire to monetize has given rise to the use of tactics that permeate the gambling industry. These tactics are designed to do little more than CREATE addicts - players who will return to your game and continually spend money.

This, I believe, is the root cause of this issue - game designers who do not respect their players or their time. Designers who have specifically chosen to abuse and extort the emotions of their players in order to increase profits.

These designs are evil, and as a game designer myself, I find the practice abhorrent. If you are a game designer reading this post, and you build games that fall into this category, YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

Also a game designer here (and programmer). I think you should be clear that a game designer is not always the one who makes the decisions on how to monetize a game. Often it's the people who are in charge of financing the game's development, i.e. publishers or executives.

In fact, often game designers would rather not do this pay to win crap, although it's hard to ignore that it does seem to be the primary way people are willing to give you money in certain markets nowadays (mobile especially), and they would like to keep making games for a living, instead of making one game while ignoring current market trends, the game failing spectacularly, and the company shuts down as a result (I've worked for three game studios which have done basically exactly that, although two of them did try making free to play games eventually and still failed).

I would love to make mobile games where I just charge $1-3 and still see success, but the stats just do not back it up. Yes, there are people who have successes that way, but they are either much larger, much more networked in the industry and know how to get a ton of media coverage (Just getting 'some' coverage is not enough. I've worked on games that have gotten 'some' media coverage. They've done poorly), or have worked on something so beautiful and compelling people feel they have to share it with others (Monument Valley comes to mind).

I've actually mostly given up on video games right now and I'm focusing more on board games, where it's much easier to actually charge money for what you produce, since there's a physical component to it. That industry has exploded in the last 5 years also and it's starting to get harder to find success there as well, but I'm more passionate about that right now. Plus there's the bonus that you can make a video game version of your board game and existing fans would be willing to pay money for your app, as well as some cross-promotion between the two.

Personally I don't think there's a problem trying to make your game as fun as possible (and fun and addiction are very closely linked) as a designer, you almost have to in order to get people to talk about and share your game.

It's when you actively try to snare people into giving you a constant feed of money for virtual benefits that I think is a bit dodgy, but again the public has already voted with their wallet and said they won't download a mobile game unless it's free, so game developers/publishers have to get money for the game somehow.

This is NOT going to work, You alone can do nothing.

There is NO way, an indie, or a Game firm, can afford to NOT make as much money as their competitor in the industry is making.

1) Margins and discovery is difficult in this industry.

2) If you are a public company, you will face management and market pressure to improve your numbers which means going ahead and making a skinner box.

This is straight up a case for legal frameworks and avenues for legal recourse to be made available.

So no - you wont manage it on your own. Its not possible.

You WILL manage it by connecting with other game devs, writers, reviewers, indies, game houses, parents, programmers - especially people who get why this is an issue (as opposed to the ones who are happy with the status quo)

I know that there is at least one other Game dev who recently spoke out against this (<5 months ago).

Also consider that NOT having addiction boxes as your competition means the hooks and attention grabbers in gamers are shallower. This both reduces the size of the population.

You are definitely not alone. This is precisely what needs collective effort at an international scale. Farmville/candy crush is as effective as it is in California, as it is in Cochin, or Trindiad.

Frankly, I wouldn't be damned surprised if eventually a law firm does catch on, and then targets the entire industry.

I'm not sure what you're claiming I'm planning to do is not going to work. I'm not trying to fight the market trends, I understand they're bigger than me. My main job isn't even in the game industry right now, but in the healthcare industry.

My plan right now is design board games, get them published somehow (I'm slowly working on that front, my games have been evaluated by some publishers and professional designers, but nothing is signed yet), then developing an app/PC version in Unity and releasing that while promoting it on the channels I know people would be interested (i.e. board game sites). But I'm getting older and don't have the free time I used to, so it's going pretty slowly. I'm also not expecting to get rich off these games, it's more about getting things out there again and making some side money, hopefully more than a couple of games I worked on for other companies which sold abysmally due to some unfortunate timing and inadequate PR coverage (I've already made games and released them on my own that have performed better than those did, it's not a high bar to clear).

But yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you. It is what it is. And if a much more well known game designer than I am, Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), can rail against these types of games in multiple talks while having almost zero effect in changing the trends in the industry, then I, as an almost completely unknown designer, can not expect to make any significant changes.

It just makes me less excited to get back into mobile game dev industry when I'm almost guaranteed to work on a skinner box type game.

My point is that This is an advocacy issue, not a design issue.

My deep concern is that this is also an issue with media and political legs. It's got "think of the children" and "evil video games." Built into it.

As an avid board game player to a board game designer:

Please make sure that the chance to win isn't determined purely by random chance (die rolls), or at the very least enough rolls to average out for the players, or, in the worst case, some way to optimize for the most probable die rolls (like Catan)

Losing a game from a critical success or critical failure from a die roll makes me never want to play the game again.

I'm an avid board gamer as well. I've averaged over a hundred new board games tried every year the past 3 years. I'm pretty aware of the state of the hobby board game industry, and that's mostly what I'm targeting (albeit the simpler card game end, not the eurogame end, at least not yet. Think something like Arboretum, Parade, or Sushi Go). Tonight I'm excited I'm going to finally get to try Imperial out, and I'm going to try to get an older game I had to order from Canada, Pack & Stack, to the table.

That being said, there are benefits to having randomness. It helps to broaden its appeal. If you've got the time, I recommend checking out one of Richard Garfield's many talks on Luck vs Skill. He talks about his experiences with Magic the Gathering, as well as how Valve designed Team Fortress 2 based on his articles and juggling luck vs skill. Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSg408i-eKw

I know how worrying it can be when a video game designer switches to board game design though. You get some that will just slap something together without considering the industry, and then you get something more akin to Exploding Kittens or some sprawling miniatures game that looks beautiful but plays like garbage.

This issue gets little traction, and has been going on for way too long.

I argue that this problem be posed as one of collective action as opposed to individual responsibility.

As comments have already shown, people will point out that if they don't do it, the competition will. IF the larger group uses abhorrent systems, people will just say its normal, and do nothing.

Individual responsibility will only get us as far as comments on social media.

There is instead a larger coalition of people ranging from devs, non dev coders, game houses, parents who will be able to collectively push for changes and organizations to manage this.

This will require legal frameworks and legal recourse. Private incentives are not aligned to create a healthy environment.

It is also possible that the entire industry can soon get sued, which I suppose is one way of attempting to deal with it.

I think what you are describing might be called 'Weaponized Flow State'. Flow states that arise while [acting, playing music, playing sports, programming] are really hard to generate. You have to develop those skills without "dynamic difficulty setting" that the author refers to. But when your basic skills are enough for you to do well, you can get drawn into a flow state much quicker.

I disagree that these flow states are difficult to generate. While they are extremely more common within designed experiences (such as video games), they can and have been applied with great effect to more "common" tasks, such as acting, playing music, or sports.

The very best article I've found on the subject is here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/166972/cognitive_flow_...

Highly recommended reading.

I've never been able to replicate the flow states I used to have from Starcraft/Civilization elsewhere (I've played very few games in the last couple years.) I don't miss the time spent playing them, but my life is much emptier without them.

Sort of exception is when everything breaks down at once and I have a ton of stuff to fix/do in emergency style. That's comforting.

What I'm saying is that 'common' tasks that generate flow states take much longer than video games to generate the same cognitive effect. For example, when I play guitar I _must_ deliberately practice. I play the same 30 second melody half as slow, then only a quarter slow, and then finally i try really hard to play it at the right rhythm, and after a little more practice I'm playing it mechanically. I now can enter a flow state much easier.

Looking at your link- I start out with low skill, but with something that has high difficulty. I wratchet my skill upwards until I enter flow state. Video games, on the other hand, use dynamic difficulty settings to change the difficulty to my skill. They generate the flow state programmatically.

Nice article though.

Look at it from another way - jobs don't intrinsically fill any need on Maslow's hierarchy. We do then to get the money we need to do the things that we want. Gaming - alone or in a group - does fulfill some high level human need. Obviously not for everyone, some people prefer getting drunk in company to sitting quietly at home, but that's what makes us human.

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