It’s debatable on that one imo, Halo 2/ Halo 3 matchmaking servers built lifelong friendships, if you could endure the sometimes hell that was public voice chat. The more “professionalized” the matchmaking systems have gotten, and the more that the culture overall shifted towards matchmaking as the only type of multiplayer (no split screen no couch coop), I think it’s been detrimental to human connection
which is not exactly the topic of the thread, but not completely unrelated either
idk, I’ve spent a lot of time playing discord fighters, and now whenever I wanna play a fighting game I just play sf6 even though I hate it, because I can turn my brain off and press a button and fight someone I have a reasonable chance of winning against whenever I want for however long I want (or don’t want). but yeah it’s not fun or engaging. idk.
Whoa, whoa who said anything about needles
Not having had time to read the convo in full, but from my perspective.
I honestly think the act of playing a video game itself or “gameplay” is often a thing that gets in the way of easy addiction, even outside of difficulty. Slot machines, tiktok, twitter, doom scrolling, are all reliant on minimizing gameplay as anything other than transitional state between the actual spectacle (sound, video, light, text, drama, etc). In terms of difficulty in winning, slot machines are one of the hardest games out there.
Like, the point of algorithmic addiction and data scraping isn’t a savvy player consciously generating friction to trick them for an interesting result. Whereas gameplay does (to a degree) often mean internalizing/understanding and pushing against an antagonistic or indifferent algorithm. Similarly most “video games” are nowhere near as popular or used as those platforms .
Vampire Survivors and Balatro both seem to have stripped out a lot of interactivity of their respective predecessor genres in favor of a smoother curve of repetition, set points of progression, and a semi-linear power curve. And also, importantly, both immediately read as familiar extensions of games and systems someone who can navigate a gaming purchase platform has certainly played before.
The other point to me is, I really don’t find myself interested in mobas, when I try them and have a bad time I think - fair enough not for me. But I do find hooks in like some Fighting games or Roguelikes. I think a big part of the distinction is like - I wanna shoulder the victory/blame , not diffuse it among a team. Although to a degree it’s arbitrary (does someone shoulder the blame for a slot machine more than Craps? aren’t I really just playing out the matchmaking algo as set odds rate?). I see a lot of posts here where people express their immunity/vulnerability to varying genres.
My takeaway from this arbitary preference is that it illustrates more about my attitude towards winning and losing than the structural difference between experiences, or whether the game has a steep or gentle difficulty curve. In that they are often ends in themselves, and honestly kind of removed from the greater value structure of society that other ‘learning’ hobbies are (learning to read music has significantly broader applications than learning Loom spells). Games’ value is in part, that distinctions and preference is reflective of desire (and in turn, culture). (Art in general?)
“Flow”, to me, is only concerning in the context of the general emptiness of game content (& the desires implied). I think theres a difference between someones personal confessional vn on itch and a structurally identical game edited by 100 middle managers thats about romancing focus-tested anime girls. Even if both inspire the same sort of intense interest via gameplay systems. Or have the same difficulty structure.
Also, “Addiction by Design”, the book repeatedly referenced in that article, specifically states the popularity of slots as correlating to “recession-stricken states (whose federal funding had been cut by the Reagan-Bush administration) sought new ways to garner revenue without imposing taxes”. I think, for better or worse, we can track a lot of these financially manipulative addictive structures, independent of games, as due to, uh, financial structures.
board games aren’t so tightly tied to the dopamine hit of flashing lights/Great Job! rewards. but anything with non-deterministic outcomes has a touch of it. the thrill of pulling the right card/rolling a six is still fundamentally similar to a slot machine, even with skill needed to improve your outcome
thinking about how fun Camel Up! is, when it’s pretty much just in-game horse betting. but even a high-skill random-outcome-free game like Chess has the uncertainly and delight of blunders, now I got them
thinking about a ttrpg where you roll to [do thing] but the numerical value is completely obscured from players and the gm just says whether it worked and how well
that must exist now right? like, the gm does the rolling for everyone?
this used to be a thing in the early days of the hobby. Players were often not even told the rules. It fell out of fashion before rpgs were even named because it was both too much work for the GMs to roll for everyone in any sufficiently complex game, and less fun than everyone engaging with the rules directly instead of through gm as mediator.
Nowadays, it is a technique sometimes used in a more constrained fashion. For example, in Unknown Armies, a horror rpg, the GM tracks all damage secretly and only describes the injuries in narrative or qualitative terms, without mentioning numbers.
we did this for a bit in a recent campaign of Delta Green, which is also a horror type rpg. it works well in that setting but it is a pain and I don’t think thaaat substantially different from rolling for yourself
I think I like the party game CANT STOP because it’s a really quick distillation of degenerate gambling,and I wanna press my damn luck! WHAT A THRILL
like I want these dark rewards and evil patterns I just want them in bursts that I control. as someone with a personality that wants excitement and drugs and novelty all the time staying in control is hard! but with games they have this fake layer where yes, I’m in control, I move the pieces. then 2 hours pass and I’m still glued to a screen having to set stretching timers
this post has no point I just woke up and am waiting for therapy
oh yeah here’s the man on this:
Csikszentmihályi writes about the dangers of flow himself:
- …enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative effect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.
Further, he writes:
- The flow experience, like everything else, is not “good” in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strengths and complexity of the self. But whether the consequence of any particular instance of flow is good in a larger sense needs to be discussed and evaluated in terms of more inclusive social criteria.[113]