Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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> This comes up a lot nowadays due to the 2010-era explosion of "skinner box" games on mobile platforms e.g. Candy Crush, or presumably Farmville and Clash of Clans. I saw a lot of people around me get addicted to these games, and seeing how much time they put into them made me pro-actively avoid them at all costs.

It's interesting to look at those games from a business/economic perspective.

Imagine you create a mobile game called "Data Entry Crush" where the game would send players an image of a document and they would carefully type in the text for it. You give the game to players for free. On the backend, you sell this as a service to companies needing data entry where they pay you to turn their images into text.

In other words, like Mechanical Turk, without paying the Turks.

Of course, this would never fly because people don't find data entry very fun and it's pretty obvious to them that they are being had. They know they are providing something of value to you and won't do it for free.

What Candy Crush and friends did was find an exploitable loophole in human pyschology. It's hard to get people to do something that clearly looks like valuable work for free. But it turns out people aren't good at realizing their own attention itself has value. So what do you do? Make a game that's a little fun to play to keep people going, and then pepper it with ads. Those ads take some of the player's attention but since humans seem to undervalue that resource, the players allow it to happen without getting irate or expecting compensation.

And then, as before, you make all your money on the back end. You let companies pay you to put those ads in front of people. It's like an arbitrage opportunity where human attention is more valuable to (A) companies than it is to (B) the individuals who have it, so you take it from B, sell it to A, and keep the profit.

This reminds me of an episode of the old Clerks cartoon show. They were playing an arcade game about pushing blocks around to build a pyramid, which turned out to be a Last Starfighter type qualification exam. Except, of course, what winning qualified you to do was be enslaved and forced to push actual stone blocks to build a pyramid.

But you’ve sort of just rediscovered the business model of all advertising? All kinds of media are in the business of attracting attention. Then, if you want, you can sell that attention to someone else in the form of advertising. The trick with candy crush etc is that the content attracting attention doesn’t actually have to be “good” in the way that honest creators intend, just addictive.

Some time ago I realized, while standing in the midst of the Oakland Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, surrounded by old game boxes, this:

"Most of these games are all marketing."

That is, if you look at the art, and look at the back of the box bullet points, you'll see something like "Go on an epic journey", or "Choose who lives or dies", or "Build an empire to stand the test of time".

To the extent that these games express these things, it's through clever rearrangements of stock tropes: Your typical murderering and looting game protagonist, able only to communicate down the barrel of a gun, is now justified through the plot and given many new backdrops so as to make the journey "epic". A scripted choice is added here and there, but not everywhere, to make "choosing who lives or dies" feel consequential, but without ascribing particular meaning to the choice either(since all choices should be gratifying for marketing purposes). Empire-building is signalled through various reports of legible progress in gaining territory and developing cities and armies, but nothing resembling the actual political structure or dynamics of an empire - the fantasy is simply one of a "rise and further rise".

And so in playing these games, you get an aesthetic impression, but not something with a solid grounding to it that you would spend time thinking about afterwards or relating to your real-world experiences. When a speedrunner sets out to conquer these sorts of games they look for software vulnerabilities that short-circuit the impression of what is going on and attack the underlying data model and logic.

In that way, video games have been pushed through industrialized practice quite a ways away from the natural state of games as a tradition, which is to fully and honestly explore simple concepts. You can't speedrun basketball, because you're playing within the laws of nature and against opponents who do the same. But if you go to market a basketball video game, you are trading on the impression of basketball, not its reality: and so licenses for professional players, superlative simulation techniques, etc. come to the fore.

So as I see it, games like Candy Crush are further extensions of industrialization: The game concept is simply a tool for the marketing framework, which in this case has been designed towards metrics-optimized microtransactions and customer retention. If a particular level is failing to retain players or to induce a purchase, it gets reworked until the metrics line up.

Despite all this, good work in games does tend to shine through. Nintendo's franchises, for example, are all built on "honest explorations" of their basic themes, and the play concepts tend to have something intrinsically interesting going on. And the breakthrough indie hits usually have this quality, too. The games that get buried, in contrast, usually aren't achieving the same degree of cohesiveness and direction - even if they're huge AAA productions.

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