Former Fortnite UX lead digs into ethical game design
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
- It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games
-If you aren't an addict then any negative consequences from playing games you experience are your own responsibility
- Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games).
- Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.
It's not really the narrative that I expect when I see someone discussing ethics ;-) It's not so much that I disagree with the points from a practical perspective, I just think that they have completely dodged all of the ethical implications of the behaviour of the game companies.
It's well known that strategies for engaging players can lead to negative consequences. Even if you can't make money unless you let players choose those negative consequences, it doesn't really absolve you of the ethical issue. As described by the person being interviewed, actual "addiction" talks about a compulsion for repeated self-harm. Even if the player is not an addict, it doesn't mean that they don't sometimes engage in self-harm. Giving them that option because there is no other profitable way to create the game, still results in self-harm by your player base.
One could write a lot about these kinds of issues, but I find it disturbing that someone apparently interested in discussing ethics in the gaming industry seems to be saying, "Yeah, there are problems, but they totally aren't my fault".
Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry. Take for example the microtransactions that so many gamers lament. What of a beautiful narrative, empathetic characters, and engaging gameplay (since they are games after all)? I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.
While I can understand the motivation, I do think it does indeed have a strong negative effect on games. Best games come from creative people that are willing to take a risk. Others games will end up like you said, on the lowest common denominator, mass appeal being the primary goal.
I can also understand game developers wanting to have at least some form of job security. Although certainly interesting, I really don't envy developers of large game publishers from what we heard in some reports.
Cinemas are more successful than theatres... Maybe games that we remember fondly and think are representative for games will be pushed into a market for connoisseurs.
I don't think the industry changed in that regard. Its goal was always to make as much money as possible. What changed is that there are a lot more tools now to make money.
I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.
There's more to gaming than AAA mainstream titles. Just like film has its summer blockbusters and also art house films and genre pieces, etc. If you're fed up with the current offerings, I'm sure there are a ton of classics you've yet to consume as well.
I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a path to explicitly seek out per se, but if it's one you're already walking, it's a great thing to realize and be empowered by.
The other part was a resentment at constantly having things changed out from under you as a player.
After a certain point, I realized I could probably put a bit more effort into making my mark on the real world, where at least I had the satisfaction of knowing I'd accomplished something that wouldn't disappear just because some 0's and 1's got jumbled.
- Heavy Rain
- Beyond 2 Souls
- Detroit: Become Human
- Witcher 3
- Horizon Zero Dawn
- Mass Effect Series
And then there are classic adventure type games from http://www.WadjetEyeGames.com
Those don't include any micro transaction and you pay once upfront.
I completely disagree with you here. Yes there are games which have micro transactions, many of which did not have them in the past, but that doesn't mean that awesome immersice games that only charge users once are dead. They're even more available now. The Witcher is a usually touted as the prime example, although it's a few years old at this point. PS4 has a few exceptional titles like God of War, Horizon, Days Gone, Uncharted, Spiderman, Ni no Kuno, Shadow of the Colossus RDR 2, in the last year. The switch has games like Captain Toad, Mario Odyssey, breath of the Wild, Mario Kart, Case of Distrust, super smash Bros while PC had Frostpunk, Hitman 2, Battletech, Into the Breach.
All excellent games in their own right, all released in the last 12 months, as standalone experiences. If you want to you can jump into any number of paid for multiplayer (division 2, world of Warcraft, destiny, COD, PUBG) or f2p (Fortnite - disclaimer I work on it, Warframe, League of Legends, path of exile, PlanetSide, Apex Legends). Yes some of those games have micro transactions, but for the most part they don't actually interfere with the game. Yes you can cherry-pick some of my specific examples and tell me in wrong, but you can't even begin to claim that gaming is in a bad state right now.
AAA gaming is in an ATROCIOUS state right now. The rest of the landscape is pretty alright, with the Epic store burgeoning a second wave of indie developers getting off the ground and making waves thanks to the much lower cost to them to publish, and with first-party publishers putting out consistently amazing experiences.
However, behind that you have the larger, multiplatform, absolutely bank-breaking budget weilding AAA developers, putting out your CODs and your FIFAs, one of which happens to hold exclusive rights to Star Wars, all of them making cookie cutter, focus group tested, streamline developed S-H-I-T. The same damn games, over and over, ad nauseum, all of which are now pivoting to chase the Battle Royale fad because everybody wants to now be Fortnite despite the fact that Fortnite already exists and is being played, and the people who have that don't need or want another Fortnite.
From skimming over your references roughly 40 percent of your examples have micro transactions and about 40 percent do not have rich narratives. Yes, I pulled these numbers out of my ass and you can nitpick them all you want, but I work in the gaming industry and know what I am talking about /s
I'm not saying that there aren't greedy game companies, or outright nefarious practices; but speaking as an industry insider I can at least understand why the entire industry has lurched this way.
There's 3 things that you must take on faith are true:
1) Microtransactions bring in money.
2) Games cost more to produce than they ever have.
3) Roughly 90% of gamers are very price sensitive.
So, if you leave out micro transactions, then your budget is slashed and you have to make a lesser game, you might think this is fine, but our competitors will (and do, because we have a very tight policy regarding microtransactions) walk all over us in terms of budget. R&D is expensive and we'll be playing catch-up for years.
You could of course, attempt to keep the budget and not introduce micro-transactions. You could argue that our games make a modest profit even without monetisation but that's certainly not always true, and the closer we move to operating on the breadline the more likely we are to make "safe" choices because risking anything could put hundreds of people out of work (and, we are guilty of this in some cases; see: Assassins Creed)
Finally you could say: well, if the cost of producing games has increased, why not increase the base price instead of chopping it up into add-ons to create special editions and in-game content that needs to be purchased. The answer is of course that if we raise the base price people will be outraged, games can be expensive (if you only play a handful of hours they are more expensive than a movie ticket, but obviously the cost-per-hour of entertainment goes down if you enjoy the game- still, there is personal risk for this) so people aren't willing to risk $100-$120 for a base game, in fact, many people wait for the game to come down in price before buying (as high as 15% of players based on the last time I looked at our market segmentation).
I mean, I understand, it's not enriching your experience to have paywalled content inside the game. But what you don't realise is that a lot of the content that even made it in to the base game, made it in on the fact that there are people who _really_ want to buy a special hat.
• Make newly-released games cost $80+
• Stop the price from dropping so quickly
Everyone seems to think the former will be catastrophic, but consider that after adjusting for inflation, game prices have fallen significantly over the past 15 years or so.
The latter option is easier said than done (since the price is still largely determined by the used resale market), but Nintendo always manages it somehow, so I'm inclined to think it's possible.
fwiw I'm referring to the people who wait for the first price drop (which is roughly 20%), but there are a larger amount of people doing as you say, often waiting a full year. But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.
Regardless, I think your broader point isn't echoed in the sentiment from gamers at large. I say "I think" because I'm a technologist and it's not my business to know, although I sit on the same floor as our Consumer Market Knowledge team, and I pick up some things. -- but I can see clearly what I have described just by taking a cursory look at any discussion gamers have regarding the price of games and monetisation.
It's a hotly discussed topic, especially on reddit where there are good examples that you can find immediately[0][1]
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/blsmca/should_o...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/bbl4cd/how_have_gam...
We're not going to know how consumers actually respond until someone has the guts to try raising prices on a sufficiently large scale.
Mind, I think the better strategy might be to just stop game prices from dropping so quickly. Again, this seems to work extremely well for Nintendo.
> But the picture isn't clear on why they wait- it could easily be that they're waiting for the game to be in a good state and it's hubristic to assume intent like that.
This is its own problem—why are you giving consumers an extra incentive to wait until the game costs less and you will make less money?
Release dates ought to be pushed back by however long is necessary to fix essential problems. This would ultimately benefit both developers and players.
There are, of course, some bugs that will not be discovered until a game has been played by lots of people, so patches will always be desirable. But this is not how post-release game patches are being used today.
Depends what you define as "essential", most problems evolve due to a meta that exists in a game, or is otherwise subjective or only appearing at grand scale.
Others (bugs, mostly) can have a reproduction rate of 1:500,000; We will never find those issues until millions of people have crossed that exact path.
I agree to the principle.
Anyway, when it comes to discounting the game publishers actually don't get much choice, nintendo can do their own thing because they own the platform and the IP; but Sony, Microsoft and especially Valve are absolutely punishing in pushing game costs down shortly after a release. For them, selling more units before the IP is out of the public mind is much more important than having some kind of bigger profit over a longer term.
But this is getting incredibly off-topic.
I'm only familiar with PS4, but it's much, much quicker than that today.
Battlefield V [1] was released Nov 20 2018 for $60, in Dec 6 it was $36 (60% of original in 16 days), and in Dec 18 it was $30 (50% in 28 days) with PS Plus, which you need anyway to play multiplayer.
God of War [2], to take another example not plagued by BFV's troubled release and also being a single-player game, it took at bit longer to go down. It was released in April 20 2018, was down to $50 (83%) in June 8, $34 (58%) with PS+ in Aug 17, and $22 (37%) in Nov 16.
You really pay a premium to play at launch day or a couple of days early by pre-ordering. If you wait a month you usually have the first discount.
There's a nice community at Reddit called Patient Gamers [3]. You don't have to take vow to never buy new games, but people there usually wait at least six months before buying a game. Three super nice benefits of that:
1. Games are cheaper.
2. The game has been patched to fix bugs or add more content.
3. You can read reviews or check the Metacritic page to see if the game is actually as good as claimed or if it's hype based on the trailer. You can watch some real gameplay not carefully produced by the designers.
Still, a lot of people apparently pre-order games or buy mega-deluxe editions for $100, so game companies can get money from that group and then lower the prize a month later for the rest of the gamers.
[1] https://psprices.com/region-us/game/2347184/battlefield-v
Why is this? Where is the increased cost coming from?
It takes roughly 1,000 people 7+ years to make a "new IP" game, or the same number of people 3-5 years for a decent sequel.
Check the number of people credited in a game from 20 years ago and compare it to the latest AAA's, it's an order of magnitude or two different.
GTA1 took 50 people to make[0]
The Division took 1,083 to make[1]
Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time. (although, yes, the sales have increased, but not enough)
[0]: https://www.giantbomb.com/grand-theft-auto/3030-13567/credit...
[1]: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/tom-clancys-the-divis...
Yet the price of games has not increased in real terms in that time.
The "price" of a game isn't a good measurement, as people are paying on top of that via microtransactions.
I'm not sure I can Google this up, but I remember when the PS4 era was just starting up, Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/ ) hypothesized that the gaming industry was going to have an even harder time justifying the expense of a "true" PS4 game because of the yet-again increased expense of the asset pipeline. Assets are technically getting cheaper to generate over time, but they're not getting cheaper faster than they're getting more expensive. The PS5 may yet make this worse again, and the continuous PC market is definitely getting crazy to build for the top end. Eventually, even microtransactions aren't going to be able to cover this, and the only games that can be made are going to be so "safe" that nobody at all will like them. This is a sort of bubble that is going to burst at some point. It's arguable that it's already starting to burst; it seems like we're seeing a slowly increasing number of very high-profile, very expensive failures, and that can't continue forever. Keep an eye on Nintendo's strategy (if they continue making boatloads of money with their Switch on the complexity foothills while the rest of market is climbing so high up the complexity mountain that they are gasping for breath, eventually people with lots of initials in their titles in other companies are going to start asking why they can't do what Nintendo is doing), and the indie market.
I do sometimes wonder if movies will see this as well. Right now, most movies that cost significant fractions of a billion dollars will make it back, but as that number goes up, it takes proportionally less and less to screw up things really quickly, even if you're profitable most of the time. Star Wars, for instance, is quite unexpectedly in a dangerous spot right now, profit-wise. If for instance the Marvel movies had the same problems, we could see a sea change in movie finances in a few years. But it doesn't seem to be happening yet.
I always felt that the grinding in the early games was as frustrating as the looting that came after.
I did that for years and I never batted an eyelid. I enjoyed the levelling and the returns those gave, I enjoyed the mindless attacking sprites all-day and the optimisation that allowed me, I enjoyed sharing that load with friends (new and old, real and digital).
I'm not your OP but I can absolutely say I would love to relive a year of that life given genie-magic.
I remember spending some summer days like that from time to time.
Casinos and the gambling industry is also trying to argue only addicts will become addicted to their products.
I don't think we should believe the people who make a product or are paid by said people when they say the product isn't addictive or not harmful. We need independent research.
I doubt that current and upcoming generations of parents will be able to easily address the problems because they're already inside players group, because computer gaming is even more integral part of our entertainment than ever before and adults are first to struggle with the issues including addiction. She seems to be ignoring that and overall, still talking more as the industry member than one who gracefully decided to fight it and show the problems that exist.
I acknowledge this isn't 100% fair, but I don't know how to put words together to shape the exact point I'm trying to make, but: This sounds perilously close to me to "If you try to regulate the drugs your children do, they risk becoming ostracized in the group of friends they have at school."
Well... yeah. It will.
That's overdoing it, because I don't think these games are quite on par with drugs... although as they continue to be tuned and refined by lots of smart people with effectively unlimited budgets to make more addictive things, combined with the less-developed brains of people in school (human brains aren't really fully grown until 25 years or so), I get less certain in that assessment. Still, I'm going to go with saying it's overdoing it at least a little. Nothing I would consider precisely analogous to gaming leaps to mind.
But, well... maybe that's part of my job as a parent, to exercise and instill the judgment my children don't yet have, even if all the other parents decline to do it themselves?
I don't isolate my kids from everything that didn't exist in my youth by any means, but I do find myself exercising a lot of judgment. I do steer pretty hard away from anything that involves a lot of advertising, which has gotten a lot smarter and more targeted since I was a kid. I steer away from anything involving many microtransactions. And that's not 100% either; they've put their toes in and bought a couple of Minecraft packs, but I'm regulating this so they don't go crazy one day and buy all the things with all their money, but have time to evaluate what they really purchased and how satisfactory the purchase was based on their limited funds. I tend to focus on the still-multitudinous games that are up-front purchases. I don't really see this as any sort of Puritanism, though; the mental image that comes to mind is shielding them from a pack of wolves more than shielding them from evil, morality-rotting pleasures or something.
The advertisers and crafters of addictive experiences have gotten wildly more powerful since my youth, and I think parenting practice has not caught up to that. Not only that, but the gap is opening wider every day, too; the first derivative of this difference is still solidly in the advertiser's favor. I'm not trying to isolate them, but I am trying to guide them down the paths where the bang-for-the-buck is much, much greater.
Don't companies like Blizzard keep psychologists on staff specifically to make the games more addictive?
- I realized that in all three Ultimas [before IV], I had created games in which the best way to min-max the game was to be un-virtuous. [...] I was not going to allow that ever again!
- I have and continue to find that headlines, and especially things that give me a sense of moral outrage happening in the world around me, are the best sources of plot ideas for the games I work on.
- Most game villains, he said, just “wait in the final level for you to come kill them,” sitting patiently on their thrones while you min-max and level up by killing NPCs. “I wanted my new villains to be worthy of your hatred!”
- Far too many perpetual conflicts in the world are sustained generation after generation due to these deeply held beliefs and grudges that prevent any real progress from being made [...] Honestly I don’t know how we are going to solve this in the real world, but I think it’s important to play out in a fictional world, so we think about it.
This is pretty much exactly what motivates me to write a game. I remember someone (probably on HN) saying that they had to kill some insects as a child before they understood what death was. You can't learn without experience, but there are some things that you don't want to learn from experience (as my ex-paratrooper friend likes to say, "like how to pack a parachute"). I really want to create a safe place for people to experiment and learn, but most games actually reward being a jerk ;-)
I also find it interesting that he singles out "outrage" as being the best way to create villains. It's one of the things we are explicitly encouraged to avoid in conversations on HN. The conflict and drama in the game comes from the justified hatred and outrage in the villains. I'm sure there is a lesson in there somewhere...
My dog couldn't have bit you, I don't even have a dog. Okay well I do have a dog but it never bit anyone. Okay it had bitten other people but it didn't bite you. Okay it did bite you but you must have provoked it.
Excellent summary. This, at least is the excuse capitalism has used since the beginning of time for every unethical practice harming humanity, whether it's privacy invasion, environmental ruination, lazy worker protections, poor compensation for talent, or providing addictive services.
Except the products (specifically "live services" and "free to play" games) are specifically designed to cause addiction. They're Skinner boxes. I forget the title of the work but there's a book on designing casino games that's required reading at half of these dev studios.
If it's possible for a company to get an ongoing revenue stream from a game then the game is designed to extract the maximum possible amount of revenue from its players.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...
Wikipedia article.[1]
Author's site.[2]
Princeton University Press PDF of book introduction.[3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction_by_Design [2] https://www.natashadowschull.org/addiction-by-design/ [3] http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf
Interestingly, they show the pop-up only in the US. Accessing from other locations doesn't show it.
Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers.
> Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.
"Method:
Four survey studies (N=18,932) with large international cohorts employed an open-science methodology wherein the analysis plans for confirmatory hypotheses were registered prior to data collection.
Results:
Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. Comparison to gambling disorder revealed that Internet-based games may be significantly less addictive than gambling and similarly dysregulating as electronic games more generally."
I think they mean to say the general population of their study population, not the population at large. I could be wrong, and I'm not overly fond of the wording of the first "results" sentence, but I think that's what they are talking about.
Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses.
Games have been addictive since the beginning.
Long before UX came along to claim the credit.
I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software.
Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game.
In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime.
Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.
Ignoring your assertions about UX, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Fortnite, like many modern games and some old ones, has design elements that encourage compulsive play. Elements like random loot drops and leveling are often detrimental to the core game mechanics—why would you want to artificially advantage the more experienced player in a competitive multiplayer game, for instance—and yet an increasing number of games include them.
Not all games do this. Super Mario World contains compulsive elements. Nor does Journey, Monument Valley, Wii Sports, Hellblade, Mario Kart, Sim City, Threes, etc etc etc.
They have the network effect, where friends are playing it.
When friends stop playing and its no longer interesting, people will stop playing.
Updates can be good, but even my favorite games have gotten old.
I'm just glad I got most of my gaming out when I was young. Now, nothing seems to hook me.
This is healthy. You should get board of particular creations, at which point you'll move on and discover new experiences. There will be exceptions—some people become very engaged with Chess and go on to play in international tournaments and such—but a majority will find other pursuits.
This of course runs counter to the business of "Games as a Service" products—which is why those products are inherently "evil" in a sense.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fa...
[1] http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html
Also, a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods, an environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.
Except I don't think that's what's happening with Hodent. As far as I can tell, she's pushing towards having a conversation, she's taking a stand against misinformation campaigns that the gaming industry is struggling with just like big pharma - think GMOs, vaccines et al.
I'll encourage all parties to actually have that conversation with Hodent, because otherwise she might just be the next person to be instrumentalised by the trolls and unproductive opinion-shaping forces out there.
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to...
I've been playing fortnite fairly regularly over the past year, but that video is making me consider uninstalling. I'm not that good and I do waste way too much time on it...
I'm fine with anti cheat software in general, but this one felt like malware.
This statement just sounds very wrong. Why are they glorifying virtual platforms as a common social gathering ? Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it - building scientifically impossible structures to jump/hide from enemies to begin with. Alas, it's indeed "mindless shooting" and showing off expensive in-game virtual purchases.
There's a fairly recent creative mode where players can create their own levels.
If I write a book, and I don't hook you, nobody wins. You wasted some twenty-odd quid for a stack of paper worth nothing to you. The entire task of a novel is to suck you into its narrative, so that you want to be apart of that world - just as children and teenagers, say, want to be in the Harry Potter universe.
It would be working against my own interests to - in public - attack the very position that puts food on my table.
Even those of us who have stayed up all night to finish a huge book aren't going to come back and do the same again tomorrow. Or pay for cosmetic DLC.
Except... they can, and they do. There are plenty of companies out there that don't act like scumbags, its low hanging fruit and almost a meme at this point but CDprojektRed is a classic example. And just about anything published by Devolver is pretty non-predatory, and there a plenty of indie studios making bank without being shifty, like Risk of Rain 2 that just released, or the even more recent Mordhau.