It's been a week so you know what the deal is. Was kind of busy this week so the post is shorter than usual but hopefully no less thought-provoking. It has to do with a trend in game design that has become quite prominent lately.
Check it out.
Since the rise to cultural prominence
of video gaming as a hobby among the so-called masses there has been
talk in elite circles of how the psychological risk/reward
conditioning that many games use to provide feedback loops for their
players can be engineered towards some more socially useful goal than
just mere entertainment. This process of readjusting people's
behavior via game derived feedback loops is known as “gamification”.
It started well before video games, of
course, when B.F. Skinner trained rats to push a particular button
for a food pellet and Pavlov was able to make dogs salivate at the
ring of a bell. These were part of breakthrough research in the 19th
and early 20th century in that psychological school of
thought known as Behaviorism. Slot machine manufacturers and
designers used Behaviorist research to tweak the risk-reward loops
for their slot machines to keep people in their seats in front of the
machines longer.
MMOs picked up on this in the late '90s
and early 00s with their daily quests and activities that reward the
player with craftable or tradeable items for logging in every day.
It's to the point now where an entire class of so-called “Freemium”
games are essentially just daily busywork for the player to do
endlessly until they get tired and decide to cough up real money to
do it faster.
Eventually someone got the bright idea
that maybe instead of conditioning people to keep putting money in
that slot machine, reupping their WoW sub or pay to win the latest
mobile city-builder game we could condition people to do something
that was actually good for them, like exercise regularly or eat
healthier. And so the word “gamification” entered the lexicon,
otherwise known as using cynical psychological conditioning in the
form of game-like reward structures to prod people's behavior toward
certain, more socially desirable activities by making said activities
more “game-like”.
I'm making it out to sound more
sinister than it really is. It's basically just a thing a bunch of
academics decided to try out to make learning easier because that's
one of the things academics try to do, is expand on the ways people
can learn and teach and such. Gamification was a big buzzword a few
years ago but not so much anymore. It's basically led to all those
apps on your phone that help you track your latest diet or give you a
star every time you hit a milestone in your daily run or whatever.
Thankfully everyone realized that just
adding game-like reward structures to rote activities like exercise
or repetitive schoolwork did not actually improve those activities or
make them anymore fun or interesting than they already were. The key
to putting the fun into learning is to find the learning in the fun,
or something.
All I remember of the hellish
meat-grinder experience that was my American K-12 public education
was that I enjoyed learning about the subjects I already cared about
and especially when the instructor did more than just lecture and
assign homework. The instructors who engaged with the students as
actual human beings and not the submissive part of a master/slave
relationship, who got us out of the class more and tried to get us to
think about the world around us in ways we might not have thought
before were all few and far between but just as memorable. Trying to
“gamify” that process would have only exacerbated how broken or
dysfunctional the current system is: Good for churning out obedient,
domesticated laborers and little else. Woodrow Wilson would be proud.
Even though gamification may be a fad
that's run its course we are now in the post-gamification world where
most video games are now effectively themselves “gamified”. This
is especially noticeable in the Triple A and Mobile sectors. Many
games now feature some form of trackable progress, usually in the
form of a collectible pick-up item or items, but increasingly all of
the game activities themselves are broken down into digestible chunks
for the player to consume.
It's that MMO form of game design where
the game breaks itself down into dozens of smaller, easily managed
tasks that are set up to tickle any latent obsessive-compulsive
tendencies the player may have. All to keep them coming back for
more, to keep that subscription from lapsing or to keep that disc in
the tray.
It used to be you would play Super
Mario Bros. just to make Mario run and jump through the level and
reach the end. If that game were made today there would be three sub
goals in addition to simply reaching the end. Collect so many coins,
stomp so many goombas and find the hidden shortcut. Each task would
reward you with a gold star or some such. These days it seems a
player isn't encouraged to replay a level “just for the fun of it”
but because there are uncompleted tasks. Boxes that haven't been
ticked yet on the checklist.
Of course, such “checklist game
design” is not the actual norm but rather the perceived norm due to
its prominence in high profile mainstream games. You don't see much
checklisting happening in game made by indies. This is because
mainstream publishers like Ubisoft are reaching for the widest swath
of people to purchase their product, the “masses” of people who
purchase video games.
But the thing is the “masses” are
not actually a single mass. They are actually many different diverse
groups who have a love of video games in common. Someone like Ubisoft
can't appeal directly to each group because they would risk
alienating the others. So instead they rely on the psychological
trickery of checklist game design. They “gamify” their games to
make them more broadly appealing.
If film studio executives follow a
money-making formula that produces bland, “safe” movies then game
studio executives probably also have a similar money-making formula
that they follow which produces bland, “safe” games.
It something of a miracle that a game
like Dark Souls is able to exist in the mainstream environment that
produces the yearly Call of Duties and Assassin's Creeds. Dark Souls
is very much the opposite of a checklist game. It is simply there for
you to poke and prod at as you please. It doesn't track your progress
down to the nth degree and it doesn't have a wholly separate
multiplayer mode that's been tacked on because everything has to be
online now (though it does have an online element). It just is, and
that's a rare thing in mainstream gaming at the moment.
Video games that aren't afraid to just
be what they used to be, rather than what they've become.
Thanks for reading.
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