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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Has someone written a treatise on in-app game purchases? It's a huge aspect of human behavior that I cannot understand intuitively and I guess I ought to. I have no desire to do it. I'll pay under $10 for an old Grand Theft Auto game that I can play start to finish, but the in-app stuff I don't get. It's like some sort of exploit for human psychologically that is phenomenally lucrative that somehow I got a patch for.

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It works like this:

  1. Make the game require resources to play

This has many names: food, energy, stamina, etc. The fundamental concept is virtually identical in all cases though. It represents how much fun players can have. Once they run out, they can't play anymore.

  2. Use timers to rate-limit the player's progression

Distribute resources periodically. These timers place an upper limit to how quickly players can progress in the game. There's only so much players can do with the resources it periodically gives them.

Distribute resources at predictable intervals and only if the player has used the previous items. This will create a powerful habit in players: they will feel the need to log into the game frequently in order to use up resources and keep the timer running at all times.

  3. Allow players to pay money to reset the timers

Paying customers get to buy resources directly instead of waiting for the timer to run out. They essentially pay to reset the timers and can therefore progress at unlimited rates.

  4. Make players outspend each other

Once players can pay to advance, the game is reduced to a spending competition. The player who spends the most money on the game wins.

I've tried to play a few games that do that. As soon as I see that dynamic, I think to myself... What idiot thinks this is fun? What am I a mouse in a Skinner box pushing a f*king lever? Then I stop playing and delete the game. It amazes me that people keep going with the game like they can't see the little mouse maze they're in. Is there a name in the psychological literature for this type of lack of awareness?

> What am I a mouse in a Skinner box pushing a f*king lever?

That's exactly how the game companies view the people who play their Skinner's box simulato-- their games. They deliberately design their games like this. They use the same psychological terminology. They design "reward schedules". They wire the reward button to the player's credit card and make players compete to see who can press it more.

> It amazes me that people keep going with the game like they can't see the little mouse maze they're in.

Yeah, addiction sucks. The games are designed to form habits in players via the almighty timers. I've been down that rabbit hole before, there were people in my gaming groups who literally set up alarms at 3 AM in order to do little bullshit daily game tasks. They exist precisely to get players addicted to the rewards. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a mobile game before you realize the truths I described above.

A sufficiently addicted player is indistinguishable from a bot. It's not that hard to write one and they can't detect it statistically because of their own progression rate limits. Bots are an excellent treatment for addiction to these exploitative games.

I liked one of the answers in another thread, “did you go to the arcade as a kid?”. I think as children we enjoy fantasy and are more able to suspend belief to take part in it. Games almost all have some fantasy wrapped around the mechanics. A part of the fun is maintaining that fantasy. For many people, the exploitation loop costs little enough that they don’t mind paying it to maintain the fantasy and enjoy the game. If it’s below some threshold of acceptable spending for them, they still take pleasure in playing.

You could take money out of the equation, for an example like amateur chess. To get good you have to practice. Practice takes time. Time is finite. Why does some crazy good amateur haches player bother to I c’est so much time to get that good? For some arbitrary score on chess.com, but why? Because they enjoy it, even if it’s another hamster wheel.

So you're saying they view the game world as actually real, or they want to believe it's real, and thus when stuff costs money, they view it as legitimate, just like you have to pay for food and shelter in the real world and pay up?

I don't think the chess example really works because playing chess can be fun all by itself. Paying money for avoiding waiting in a game can't reasonably be considered to be an end in itself.

Yes.

"who killed videogames? (a ghost story)" by Tim Rogers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120128084303/https://insertcre...

I mean what exactly is hard to understand? You presumably went to arcades as a kid?

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