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Comment by pixelbro | Hacker News Reader

Uh, it's interesting that you see the design of your product as a counterexample, because to me it looks exactly like what mobile games have been doing as a mechanism for maximizing engagement.

You want to stop them from playing through too much of the game's content and burning themselves out on it. So you lock them out with a timer, forcing them to come back later. Then you reward them for coming back every day. This encourages them to turn the game into a habit and integrate it into their routine.

Looks to me like you've accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics games use to turn people into addicts.

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Habits can be good or bad. In this case, one would want the user to be rewarded for coming back every day to learn programming. Habit acclimation is a neutral process, just because the parent uses the same tactics as those who use them for building bad habits does not mean that those processes are bad in and of themselves.

Of course! I'm not ascribing any moral weight to it, just pointing out the similarity in tactics. Engagement can be a good thing if you're using it to improve someone's life rather than simply trying to extract as much time and money from them as possible.

>Engagement can be a good thing if you're using it to improve someone's life

Can we agree that entertainment and being entertained can improve someone's life? If we can agree to that, then we can also agree that games designed to entertain an individual are good for said individual.

It's not a leap from there to say that a game that is engaging and keeps someone playing is good for them, because it's entertaining them, and that, as we've established, is good.

Once you take the step to make a product addicting, as a formal part of your business model, everything after that is just shades of grey, I believe. Morality and justification of your own truth is a fascinating process. Or maybe I'm overthinking this.

The issue is these games stop being entertaining. Pulling the lever on a slot machine might be fun the first few pulls, but after that it’s simply waiting for a dopamine rush.

MMO’s basic gameplay without leveling, item drops, or any form of progression have some fun aspects. But, they need to tell players to collect 50 rat tails because otherwise players wouldn’t.

Mobile games have distilled this down even further, with the minimum possible amount of actual gameplay possible.

But again, splitting hairs into dopamine rush versus actual fun is simply semantics. Fun = dopamine rush. Does it matter if you are cognizant of the fun, or do the chemicals matter?

To be clear, I am 100% in agreement with you. Most mobile games (and honestly, most pc games at this point with their item and resource gathering mechanics; and I am absolutely talking about MMO's - there's a reason many many many franchises are working toward a multi-player experience instead of focusing on the single player game) aren't supposed to be 'fun'. They're supposed to be addictive, and I believe it is a real problem, especially for kids growing up learning that a dopamine hit is just one iphone game away.

Anyway, though, I guess my point is - it's all semantics. When you say, it's not 'fun', it's just a dopamine rush, developers and sales people can say that's just the same thing. They can argue that people wouldn't play unless they received some kind of value out of it.

To be honest, I've forgotten where I started with all this, other than to say - when you have to split hairs on the definition, it leaves room for people to interpret their own meaning and ignore nuance. Therefore, this is an argument that people don't want to hear, engage with, or consider, I believe.

I don’t think you can say fun = dopamine rush. A dopamine rush works when the periods between them aren’t fun. However, when drunkenly singing drinking songs with your friends it’s overall a pleasant experience rather than having moments of happiness and long segments of boredom.

So what I am saying is gamers have mostly forgotten what it is to have fun in games. Playing around with cheese wheels in Skyrim is different from grinding a character to game breaking power and killing everything in one hit. Challenges based in getting better at the mechanics are different than challenges based on pure time investment.

IMO the three pillars of a great game are entertainment, fun/joy aka playing, and dopamine rushes. Portal 1 was a standout for having all three, but it’s hard to pull off.

I wouldn't say you're overthinking it at all! You make an excellent point, and as a game developer it's something I have to consider. Our mission is to craft joy for our players, but I certainly cannot afford to rule out any potential in terms of designing our games to be more engaging.

On the other hand, I've witnessed many instances of gamers who have fallen victim to habit-forming mechanics that continue sinking hours and dollars into a game daily but also say that they no longer truly enjoy the time they spend in that game. There's many aspects that play into that sort of behavior which games can be designed to exploit, not least of which being the sunk cost fallacy and fear of missing out: a player who has reached the endgame might have run out of interesting content to play through but feel obliged to continuously "defend their title". They're encouraged to keep coming back long after it stops being fun by being constantly presented with what appears to be an existential threat to the supremacy they have labored towards.

At that point I think we can safely say that such a game is no longer a positive impact on that person's life.

My way of attempting to ameliorate these sorts of conflicting interests is to structure our organization as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, in a way that gives players meaningful influence over business, design and development decisions.

> You want to stop them from playing through too much of the game's content and burning themselves out on it. So you lock them out with a timer, forcing them to come back later. Then you reward them for coming back every day.

Simultaneously offering a pay-to-play option that enables the user to bypass the timeout with money

This is the key difference. They mobile games don't want you to wait and come back tomorrow. They want you to pay to remove the blocks and just keep playing, today, tomorrow, every day.

But since they know not everyone is addicted, they want both.

Hardcore addicted people and people who are at least so on the hook to come back regularly.

This is not _entirely_ true, not that it changes anything significant about the predatory nature of f2p developers.

They absolutely want you to come back tomorrow. Apparently (inferring from what e.g. Mihoyo says and does about "total lifetime income") a whale that spends a bit less at once, but keeps doing this for years is far more valuable than one that blasts through the game and burns out immediately. You also need some dolphins and free-to-play people, both to fill out the multiplayer lobbies and appear less predatory.

Yes... I build iOS apps for learning Japanese ( https://reader.manabi.io https://manabi.io ) and recognized how the same kind of SRS system I was building is both optimal for learning and habit-forming in the same way as game dark patterns. It felt economically and morally fortunate but I recognize it’s not an easy or light responsibility to customers to get it right.

Bummer this isn't available for android

Try Memrise!

> Uh, it's interesting that you see the design of your product as a counterexample, because to me it looks exactly like what mobile games have been doing as a mechanism for maximizing engagement.

Addiction is a habit that interferes with other areas of your life. Smoking isn't bad because you're having something to do with your hands during a break, it's bad because it's expensive and impacts your health. Playing games for 8 hours is fine if you have time for that, but bad if it stops you from keeping your bathroom clean.

So yeah, intentional habit forming is using the same techniques as addiction building. The difference is, essentially, in the informed consent involved in the former.

>Looks to me like you've accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics games use to turn people into addicts.

You're confusing something. It's the exact opposite.

"Games accidentally stumbled onto one of the very tactics you use to turn people into addicts."

Industries take advantage of human behavior, they don't invent them.

That reads like such a weird take on that statement, that I think I had to have misunderstood what you're saying. Please clarify.

Is your claim that industry isn't at fault for addiction, because people are able to be addicted to things?

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