In my first article from the Develop conference I spoke about the WMD portal and how the gaming community can get involved in the development and investment of games rather than just being a consumer. In the second article of this series Ill take a look at “Ethics and Designing Addiction in games”.
Article 1: World Of Mass Development
Article 2: Ethics and Designing Addiction in Games
Article 3: Whales, True Fans and the Ethics of Free-to-Play
Article 4: Where is the Fun: Measuring Social Interaction, Production
Article 5: Convergence is Change and Change is Good!
Article 6: Strategies for survival in the Games industry
Article 7: Developer’s Question Time
This session at the Develop Liverpool conference was by Dr Bennett Foddy, a philosopher at Oxford University. For the last 10 years his forte has been neuroscience philosophy, the ethics of drug addiction and related issues such as obesity and gambling. He is also a video game developer and is responsible for the infamous games QWOP, GIRP and several others.
During the session he explained what it actually is about games that make them so addictive and discussed the interesting topic of whether addictive behaviours inserted into games are actually a bad thing. Some of the points being made will be quite obvious, but a lot of it came as a bit of a shock to me so im hoping you’ll find it interesting too. Either way the next 10 minutes of your life should be more interesting than the previous 10.
One thing that I’m sure every gamer can agree on is that a good game is an addictive game.
“Just a note to say thank you very much for inventing Little Master Cricket. We may fail our dissertations and have no work for our degree shows but we simply don’t care!”
-Liam Allan and Calum McClure.
As you can see from the above fan mail that Dr Bennet received, gamers love addictive games, to the point where these guys could be failing their studies. In fact, some game reviewers rate games based on how addictive they and in many cases, its a “back of the box bullet point” used to sell games. Saying that though, we gamers also like to hate games as much as we love them,
“I have spent the last hour dying inside and trying to resist the temptation to rip my eyeballs out my ******* while playing your flash games, particularly QWOP and Winner vs Loser.”
- Anonymous
If we take things to one side of the spectrum, we could even look at video game addiction in the same way we look at drug addiction, as there are rare cases where games can be so addictive that certain people end up losing their jobs, marriages or in the worse cases, babies die out of neglect. For game developers this can be seen as a puzzling issue as they’re the ones involved in addiction design. So this then raises an interesting question ‘Are game developers responsible for the result of creating addictive games?’
To answer the question, we need to look at how addiction works. The main finding in addiction neuroscience shows that within our brains there is a reward system. A pathway of neurons in our brains that light up when we receive rewarding stimulus, as you repeat the action over and over, you gradually build up an appetite to continue repeating that stimulus, eventually causing addiction to repeat that action more and more.
Humans by nature, get addicted to a range of different actions and substances. The picture above shows several drugs and the affect they have on the brains of humans. Those that are in control are on the left and those that are addicted on the right. These same affects can be seen in obese people that are addicted to food and gamers that are ‘gaming addicts’. Basically, if you are itching like the local junkie for your next hit of WoW, that’s your brain in that picture above.
Is Reward the same as Pleasure?
Reward has 2 faces. There is the ‘enjoyment and liking of things’ and then there is the ‘wanting’ of things. “Brain” reward is getting rewarded without actually being aware that you are being rewarded, this is the type that that is exploited in video games. Interestingly enough though, you don’t just get addicted to any type of video game experience.
The image above is from an experiment in which 2 rats in an enclosure have a funnel inserted in to their head through which they receive an injection of cocaine directly in to their brain when they push the button. The rat on the right is getting the exact same dose whenever the rat on the left presses the button, but its own button is not hooked up to anything. The obvious part of this experiment is that the rat on the left that pushes the button, becomes addicted to the Cocaine and the behaviour of pushing the button becomes compulsive for the rat on the left.
Interestingly enough however, the rat on the right who isn’t in control of pressing the button, yet received the cocaine dose, did not get addicted to Cocaine. If you put both mice in a box where they can both freely obtain as much cocaine as they like, the rat on the right doesn’t seem to care about it. The findings are that you have to be involved in seeking a reward or your actions have to produce a reward in order for it to become addictive. So right about now you should be starting to see where video game design and video game addiction fits into all of this.
Why is Wow more addictive than My Little Pony?
So what makes some games more addictive than others? Ill run through another 2 experiments that will hopefully shed some light on this. The following experiment was done by Wegner and Wheatley (no, not Wheatley from Portal 2).
In the picture above, they ask the person on the left and right to move the Weegie board around and periodically stop to write whether they intended to stop. However, the person on the left doesn’t know that the person on the right, is actually a scientist in disguise and she is actually in control of whenever the board stops. Interestingly enough, the person on the left is actually convinced that she is in control and that she did in fact intend to stop, even though she was never in control.
This is followed by another experiment where people are asked to move a joystick whilst looking at a digital representation of a joystick on screen. Sometimes the virtual joystick moves the same way, sometimes it moves a different way. Sometimes it moves at the same time and sometimes there is a delay. The results showed that people controlling the joystick felt like they were in control of the virtual joystick so long as the delay was less than 150 milliseconds. So it could be that you moved the joystick left and the virtual joystick went right, but the difference didn’t matter as long as the latency was less than 150ms.
So if you now put the learnings from the joystick experiment together with the learnings from the weegie experiment, you can see that a game is going to be more addictive when there is a shorter latency period. So pressing a button in order to gain some kind of video game reward, is going to be more addictive if the reward is given shortly after you complete an action. The main point being that this happens within 150 milliseconds.
So pressing A in Super Mario shouldn’t result in Mario spending time winding up or getting ready to jump, he should instantly jump in the air, which he does. This then creates a strong connection between your actions and the reward, adding to the addictive nature of the game. Usually when people think of video game rewards (myself included), they usually think Trophies, high scores or achievement. However this is not always the case, as rewards are much more basic than that, they pervade all of video game design and some of them are going to be more addictive then others.
Dr. Bennet then then went on to show an example of a non effective reward system. In this case he used Prince of Persia (2008) where the character is flying towards a pole and the player has to press A. The thing is, the player has to press A before he actually lands on the pole. This action is then followed up by the character landing and then about half a second later he jumps again. All in all, the sequence and action delay is a lot more than 150ms. The end result is that the player does not actually feel in control of the character on the screen. Instead the player feels as though they are issuing a series of gentle suggestions that the Prince may or may not follow. As a result of this, the sense of embodiment in the character is lost, the reward is lost and the game is perceived as being less compelling.
Intermittent Reinforcement
Another important mechanism of addiction in games is called intermittent reinforcement. Again we can thank our friendly rats for these experiments too. Similar to the previous experiment, the rat presses a button and a reward is given. The difference is that this time the reward is given more randomly, so it could receive food every time it presses the button, every tenth time or just completely randomly. So sometimes the rat would have to press the button 10 times and other times it would be 5 to get that reward.
It turns out that the rat is far more likely to press the button a lot, if it is been given this uncertain and random reward scheme, in fact this same method is heavily used in gambling games (slot machines for example). Im sure you have already come to the conclusion, but a video game example of this is the loot drop in games such as Diablo or many of the mmo’s out there today.
Diminishing Rewards
Another mechanism of addiction is called diminishing rewards. Our friendly rat is this time put through a situation where the first time it presses a button it receives food, then the second time it takes two presses to get the same reward, then three, then four etc. Essentially getting a diminishing reward for the same amount of work. So again, I am assuming you can see where this is going. It turns out that that the rat will press the button hundreds of times just to get the same reward it had received initially. To get the rat to do this they used the “diminishing reward”. Any gamer can see that this is used in games where getting to the first and second level is relatively fast and then it slowly takes more and more time and effort to get that next level.
Another addiction mechanism is “Harnessing the feeling of responsibility or nurturing”. this is where there is a threatening loss of progress if you don’t play everyday.
How do you determine which mechanism is unethical?
Bennet thinks that the way to answer this question is by asking: ‘Does a player have a good reason to do what they do?’
To give an answer, Dr Bennet showed the above picture of some cigarette adverts. The one on the left has “it’s toasted” as its catch phrase. This is even though all cigarettes are “toasted”. The Virginia slims, aimed at female smokers, has the slogan “Slimmer than the fat cigarettes men smoke”. The aim here is to make women form an unconscious association between Virginia Slims cigarettes and the desire to be thin. They don’t actually say that it will make you thin, but they say the cigarettes are thin. All in the hope that the consumer will purchase based off of this unconscious association.
So is this unethical? According to Dr Bennet, yes. Taking advantage of psychological mechanisms that people aren’t aware of and can’t resist falls into the unethical category. The smell of fresh bread apparently makes people more likely to purchase, so what do some supermarkets do? They pump the bakery smell in to the supermarket, even though there is no bakery or “Fresh” bread available. Is smelling fresh bread a reason to go ahead and buy something? The answer is of course no, but they are trying to modify behaviour unconsciously. So the question then arises, can you make the same criticism about games?
He explains that the original model of gaming in the arcades where you had to insert coins in order to continue playing is fine. This is because in games such as space invaders, if you die you insert more coins and continue playing, not because there is sub conscious messaging, but because you enjoy playing video games and you have made that conscious decision to continue.
When you think of addicted gamers, you should think of them as vulnerable people similar to drug addicts, obese people or gambling addicts. These are all considered as the vulnerable people within the general population as you can see the sorts of things that their addictions result in. For example drug pushers and pimps pay their workers with drugs taking advantage of their addiction. He compares this idea to the Freemium model, where they ask their addicted users to pay more than they really should for their video game reward. Making you an offer that you that you literally can’t refuse… Which of course is unethical.
Dr. Bennet doesn’t have a prescription as to what makes a game unethical, but there are ways to avoid them. He wants us to think more about it and ask specific questions such as:
- What are the rewards that are in the game?
- What are the rewards that they are charging money for?
- What kind of people are they charging?- Do the rewards make it a better game or just a more addictive one?
- Are they given you are reason to keep playing or are they causing you to keep playing?
Depending on the answers given to the questions, you yourself will be able determine whether that game is unethical or not.
If you would like more information about the Develop Conference check out the “Develop Conference” site. Whether you are a budding indy developer or you take your gaming seriously enough to attend, it is definitely well worth the visit.
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