I saw @ellaguro posting this article on social, post interesting imo. I do feel single player games that engender Too Much Flow and have dark patterns to increase time-on-game are deeply evil, TO ME, even if they’re not actively taking your money (Balatro, Stardew Valley, 3d Fallout, Hades, Skyrim, etc)
I kind of think difficulty barriers are good because they create a natural stopping point where you decide, no I won’t die to Fuel Rod Grunt for the 18th time, I need to do the dishes. By the same token roguelikes are deeply evil. MMOs with too much to do are evil. EVE is good because it’s boring. etc
I think about this a lot, particularly how these loops can be used as counterproductive coping mechanisms. I have had several times in my life where I have felt extremely stressed about tasks and I made my situation worse by getting into a “flowstate” or “the machine zone.”
What strikes me as interesting about this in recent years where you see awards season put forward nominations and a Balatro or Vampire Survivors stands out from the pack is how little that kinda design really has much artistry to it. It’s kinda just psychological satiation except it doesn’t really end. Casino psychologists have figured it out and the recipe is there. There’s not much else to do because human psychology hasn’t changed. To achieve it is relatively simple compared to the craft and flavour you can see in other avenues of game design.
I thought about this recently playing Dungeon Crawl Classics (not a videogame but) and the difficulty there is unreasonably hard, like the devs are either doing a hack job or laughing at you it’s so deadly. It really added a lot of spice and investment into dice rolls and other decisions as well as just chaotic improv energy from the group about what ridiculous thing happens next. I see it as a similar appeal of eating extremely spicy food and suffering but also revelling in that friction. Not all games need to do this but the flow stuff just feels like the antithesis to that. I can’t have an interesting conversation about Balatro with anyone because it’s just an effusive checklist about how it let’s you get the big numbers. When you get big number it good.
balataro and vampire saviors are crack and I’ve had drug problems so I won’t touch em. I played vampire saviors for a couple of days and was like WHOA WHOA WHOA I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING
I count my blessings that I only feel revulsion for fast action real time strategy games, (most) roguelikes, roguelites, modern bethesda games, post-wow mmorpgs, trading card games, and other games that need to rely on dark patterns to keep people playing
It was interesting when I first started my job at the game company I work for, and the first buzz word-y initiative I heard about was this push to highlight “quality” in player creations. And what this meant was things that other players spent more time doing, meant the thing was higher quality than others. I asked in a company meeting once if our intent was to push players into, basically, clicker game experiences and my CEO just responded “what’s a clicker game?”
there is a phase in the life of a rimworld colony that is like this to me. i have intended to post about it for a long time but keep playing or totally forgetting about the existence of rimworld instead
Balatro and its ilk are fascinating to me because of how its fans get incredibly defensive if you criticize the game as a game. As a card game, it’s incredibly shallow, with a very low skill ceiling and only a couple of viable strategies.
Being good at balatro mostly means following a script. Once you reach the skill floor of being able to win with regularity, you stop making decisions. You’re just going through the motions of playing a game but without any sense of playfulness or exploration.
The possibility space is exhausted and yet people can somehow spend hundreds of hours doing the same thing over and over and convince themselves that they’re winning because they are good at the game instead of because the game is good at training them.
I don’t necessarily think that mmos with a lot going on are the same kind of addiction especially when all the content inside the game is so different. I think it’s jus the rote stuff that puts you in a non-dexterity based flow state is dangerous. I’m not saying it’s good it’s just different. different flavors of poison
I mean the good evil stuff is obviously a bit flip and I don’t mean to imply that people don’t get addicted to eve, just that it has enough tedium to allow stopping points.
I do play picross specifically to engender the flow state in myself but that’s a game/genre of games I only play while also listening to an audiobook. I have found that if I keep my hands and mind semi-occupied with an active, nonverbal task, I can focus much better on language. The flow state isn’t inherently negative, as it can be really useful if it can be directed to something actually edifying and enriching (but most games are not set up for that sort of approach)
God I wish I could do this!!! whenever I try to listen to something while playing picross or proverbs or whatever I constantly have to rewind the audio because I zone out and hear nothing for minutes.i want to be able to two things so bad
lol I mean I don’t know besides the general libertarian fascism of the player base and how the game functions they encourage people to have multiple accounts. The entire timer skill system is part of a scheme to keep you playing and coming back, also PLEX is literally worth real money and you can buy it by grinding in game currency…there’s like a million fucking things that suck about it. There are a bunch of stopping points in RuneScape too, for similar reasons even, but that doesn’t exclude that game from also being an incredibly shitty waste of time!
I think a lot about how the evil stuff in wow that’s influenced every mmo since is from ex gemstone devs and how gemstone has always been the most evil predatory game and that permeates through the whole industry. like gemstone won just not in the way they desired
The sense I’ve gotten with grinding/bloat in AAA games (horrible term) is that it rose in proportion to full retail prices, that in order to justify 70 bucks you need to offer the veneer of as much “content” & as many hours of entertainment as possible. Simply diluting the gameplay loop is the cheapest way to do so. I think this is why the AAA space converged so much on open worlds and RPG elements
I wish then I wouldn’t be as enamored with it but it does so much that muds never do. it’s more like a graphical game than a mud because of how much there is. I wouod love to play a non evil game with thst battle and skill system. every time I play a non-simu mud it feels empty mechanically. bring back modus operandi. make private gemstone servers, wahh. NO NO I MEAN BAD EVIL GAME GET OUT OF MY LIFE AHHH