This is why game designers must remove all repetitive, boring, yet effective strategies in order to make good games.
If there's something the player can do to gain advantage, no matter how boring or tedious it is, they will do it and they will ruin their fun and they will assign all blame for it on you, the designer.
MMOs and games in general have you experience content in roughly 5 different ways: authored (expensive), procedural (complex and generic), emergent (problems explode with size), repeated (the grind), or user generated. Each game, and each system and region inside a game, is a balance between those.
I'll give you an example. Inarguably one of the most successful games of all time, World of Warcraft has multiple different paths and styles of leveling, gold farming, and most other tasks. The least effective paths are absolutely the most boring and involve hundreds of hours of grinding for very little gain, and yet, that's the consciously chosen path for a majority of players. Not because they can't figure out more proficient methods, but because they enjoy the grind (for any numbers of reasons).
The lesson learned from game designs like WoW, is that the implemented paths shouldn't be either-or propositions, because singular or linear paths alienate far more gamers than optional paths. Whereas what you're insisting, is that that the developer has done something "wrong" simply by presenting multiple paths, and they need to "improve" upon it by removing the ones which don't produce some arbitrary amount of dopamine and adrenaline per button press.
The original statement was to make sure repetitive and boring paths weren't highly effective.
Your own characterization of grinding in WoW fits that description. It may be repetitive and boring, but it's not highly rewarding so those who engage with it do so because they are enjoying it for it's own sake. This is fine, the players can do it if they enjoy it and won't make themselves suffer through it if they don't.
(My own experience with WoW and the term 'grinding' in general does not make me inclined to use it as an example of an unrewarding activity that players don't force themselves to engage in entirely for the sake of the in-game results, but maybe things have changed... it has been awhile.)
So, as I've established several times now, if many (possibly even most) gamers find repetitive and boring enjoyable, then it's rather silly to insist that the developer "must" do something to "fix" it, otherwise the user "will definitely not have fun" and the game "can't be good."
Of course people exist who know what makes games better. For whatever reason, you can't entertain the possibility that it's me specifically?
I never said a game couldn't be made better. All I did was point out that there is no singular "best" set of game mechanics, as you have repeatedly suggested. You're obsessed with using absolutes to describe behaviors the vary wildly, and insisting that's "how it has to be" and any other approach is somehow lesser than yours. But the only actual argument you've made so far is that you, personally, have discovered the absolute truths of the gaming universe, and anyone who doesn't agree with you simply doesn't understand game design.
So, it has nothing to do with your expertise, and everything to do with your insistence that you are THE expert of EVERYTHING gaming, and there is no room for any other opinion or development path.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're not the only person with experience in the gaming industry, and I don't actually know ANY developers who share your mentality toward game design.
Every single one of your comments explicitly discredits a game designer's opinion from having any merit on what makes games good. That's your entire argument against my statements.
> I never said a game couldn't be made better. All I did was point out that there is no singular "best" set of game mechanics, as you have repeatedly suggested.
I would love to read this argument of yours, presumably from years of research into the subject, for why it's literally impossible for a set of mechanics to be better than all others. If you haven't found it, that's fine; but others are looking for it.
> the only actual argument you've made so far is that you, personally, have discovered the absolute truths of the gaming universe, and anyone who doesn't agree with you simply doesn't understand game design.
Yeah that's how expertise works. I could record a series of lectures explaining everything, or maybe try write a book on the subject, but that'd take years I'd rather spend applying what I know and making better games. You can ask me specific questions to challenge my self declared expertise, if you want. That's discussion.
> I don't actually know ANY developers who share your mentality toward game design.
You literally know lots of game developers, all of whom think that Bejeweled and Candy Crush are good games? And you think I'm living in a bubble??
Nowhere in any of my comments will you find any mention dopamine nor adrenaline. I said "good", which is a point along the dimension of quality. You know, that thing we all strive for because it's literally better?
I'm exactly arguing *AGAINST* exploiting brain chemistry for profit in the video game industry. You are defending that practice as a valid form of art and entertainment.
So I guess the lesson is more like: Game designers need to remove all effective strategies which short-circuit the core gameplay that your audience expects.
Much like the parent commenter, you appear to be insisting that there can only be one type of gamer per game type, and that a developer is making a "mistake" of some kind by allowing people to play the game in their preferred manor. But outside of FPSs, that just isn't the case.
The point is very rarely repetition itself, and even when it is, it's not actually performing the task but rather figuring out how to automate it.
Nobody enjoys clicking on a unit then clicking on where we want it to go. Our brains reward us for successfully moving units to where they need to be, whatever the action necessary to get there.
The same reason family abuse is so effective - your infantile survival depends on your parents. If your parents are abusing you, you develop a liking for it, because your survival odds improve by doing so (abusive parent is better than no parent at all). You seek partners to repeat that behavior even if it makes you miserable, because brain chemistry.
A good game is one where such mechanisms aren't exploited for profit.
You're effectively saying that a baseball player can't enjoy the act of swinging their bat or throwing the ball, just because it's not the end goal. This is obviously untrue for so many reasons, and I'm struggling to understand why you're so caught up on there only being one way to enjoy something -- and that way has to be your way.
> The same reason family abuse is so effective - your infantile survival depends on your parents. If your parents are abusing you, you develop a liking for it, because your survival odds improve by doing so (abusive parent is better than no parent at all). You seek partners to repeat that behavior even if it makes you miserable, because brain chemistry.
This is both disturbing and another attempt at using absolutes to compress the behavioral spectrum into a singular idea, and unsurprisingly, that idea matches your own personal views. Unfortunately, none of what you said in that paragraph is representative of any psychology book I've ever read, or of my own experiences, or of the experiences of anyone I know.
So, if you'd like to link to some research backing up your claim, I'd love to read it. Otherwise, please avoid making outlandish assertions such as "if your parents abuse you, you will like it, and you will like it forever, and seek it out, and there is no other possible avenue for you." That's a movie you saw one time, not real life.
Yeah, I do. I've researched video games for decades on a scale and detail comparable to the cutting edge of any field. I'm a professional designer. My opinion is not a matter of preference, but expertise.
> You're effectively saying that a baseball player can't enjoy the act of swinging their bat or throwing the ball, just because it's not the end goal. This is obviously untrue for so many reasons, and I'm struggling to understand why you're so caught up on there only being one way to enjoy something -- and that way has to be your way.
Video games about baseball do not come with bat controllers to swing - you press buttons to play. So clearly swinging the bat is not the point of baseball, or baseball video games would include that aspect.
> if your parents abuse you, you will like it, [...] and there is no other possible avenue for you.
Your words, not mine. I didn't rule out other possible avenues, that's your mind betraying you with the very absolutes you accuse me of. I said it makes abuse more effective, and a simple thought exercise will lead you to the same conclusion.
It's called Stockholm Syndrome, look it up. Widely recognized in psychology.
This is all we need to know about you. Everything you've said comes from a place of extreme arrogance, while also possessing an immense ignorance on so many subjects. I'm done engaging with your psychopathy.
You seem to think that capitalism has reached some kind of total control over humans, and that every single human running a business on this Earth is obsessed with making money.
Do you also know a lot of businesspeople, all of whom think money is the end goal of all ventures?
What you're saying is that there is a line somewhere that, once crossed, becomes reckless or harmful, and that's certainly true in a way. But where is that line, and who decides it? Is it you? Is it the OP? Is it some committee somewhere? The answer is rather simple. It's everyone, individually. The right decision for you is not necessarily the right decision for me, and our life experiences will always differ in significant ways, which means my line is not in the same location as yours.
Ultimately, the OP's mentality asserts that every business on the planet is acting maliciously and exploitatively, simply because they're trying to make money by retaining customers. And hey, I'm willing to admit that might actually be true -- but it's almost certainly not. Intent matters. It always has and always will.
And you're still missing the point. You say that you draw the line at "exploiting users through addictive design." And yet, if your designs had absolutely zero addictive qualities, very few people would play the game a second time. So that brings us right back to figuring out where that arbitrary line is. Is one addictive mechanism the right amount? Two? Ten? Given that we've already established people have different thresholds, how do you even quantify addiction at the design level? You could implement something completely innocuous by your own standards, but somebody out there gets addicted to it and you make money from them. Does that make you exploitative?
The whole point is that you can draw your own personal line, but you don't get to dictate that line to others, nor publicly declare that any developer on the other side of your personal line is automatically a malicious asshole trying to harm people. Because I guarantee there are developers whose maliciousness threshold is even lower than yours, which makes you the exploitative one in their eyes.
Also, I was careful to not blame addictive design itself, it's not evil inherently, because like you said, many games have some degree of addictiveness. I said exploiting addiction is the bad part. You can use it to incentivize healthy behaviors that make for a better game, one that respects the player's time and ideally even enriches them in some way, by telling the narrative in a stronger way, or teaching competition or hand-eye coordination in a better way, or just being more fun in a better way. You can also use it to extract more money from players, or more ad views, or more social anxiety, or shallowly pad the experience to feel like you're getting more "value" out of the game. Again, all of this is fuzzy, not black and white evil, it's just that responsible creators should take the time to consider their own values and be conscious of the decisions they make, understanding that what they do have repercussions on others. We should create things in reference to our values - it's easy to just blindly autopilot to the default rubric of "maximize revenue".
Now I see our problem. You've only played shit games.
Procedural content and random generation are a wave of the future of gaming, happening right now; new techniques that makes games fun without exploitation of brain chemistry. By actually being good, by actually being replayable.
This statement is false. There exist significant subcultures of video game development, particularly in the independent sphere, where games are designed with no consideration for addictiveness, including myself. You are beginning to offend entire professions.
> Ultimately, the OP's mentality asserts that every business on the planet is acting maliciously and exploitatively, simply because they're trying to make money by retaining customers.
This statement is also false. It is you who are making that assertion right here, right now. I only ever addressed the video games industry, and the specific practice of designing games that emphasize boring, repetitive, tedious tasks, exploiting brain chemistry to profit from lack of understanding of game design.
The OP is likely talking about what those games _exploit_: It's the few that will play the game to an extreme degree and likely pay tons of money to do so (often called "whales" but not all of them are).
The mechanism behind this is grounded in how our brain rewards us if we find seemingly rare patterns of success. And some percentage of people are susceptible to that kind of manipulation.
Whether you put the blame on the game or the players is another question, maybe a philosophical or ideological one. But to dismiss the mechanism as simply "enjoying something" implies that you don't recognize the problem as an addiction that may or may not be willingly exploited here.
For comparison: Walk into a casino or similar which has one-armed bandits. Tell me that the people hanging out there are truly enjoying it.
My grandmother and aunt, for example, visit a local casino once in a while and exclusively play slots. They each bring $20 and play until they've either doubled it or lost it. I've gone with them on a few occasions, and can personally attest that they genuinely enjoy the experience of playing the game -- my grandmother even says "wheeeee" out loud while pulling the lever. I, on the other hand, do not enjoy casinos at all, and easily get caught up in the addictive aspects. Is the casino malicious because I, personally, am more susceptible to addictive behavior? Should my grandmother not be allowed to have her fun because of someone else's addiction?
At the end of the day, my experience is not my grandmother's experience. And your experience is not my experience. And the OP's experience isn't a universal truth, no matter how much they want to insist it is.
In my opinion when there is an asymmetric power relation like that, then there is a question of responsibility. Especially if the incentive is to exploit the relation - which is almost undeniable in this case.
So I'm not making a statement about the general case and I don't think things can be boiled down to "this type of game is evil". It's the specific connection between these two extremes that I find worrying, or saddening really. But I'm 100% not the type of person who would deny your grandmother her fun. I think these types of problems start with things like education and attempting to heal the human connection between the powerful and the weak (sorry for the pathos).
In my grandmother's case, those trips to the casino actually greatly benefit her. At 94 years old, the casino provides a level of sociability and exercise that she doesn't get otherwise. That said, even the particular casino she visits most likely does more harm than good to the local community. Not by a lot, but by enough. Unfortunately, the perception of whether that crosses the line is going to vary wildly between individuals. Some will think it's not greedy enough, and some will think it's the equivalent of murder, and there's no legitimate way to decide where the exact appropriate middle ground is. That's something we all have to decide for ourselves, and it can't be forced upon others.
This statement is false. Governments and judicial systems around the world routinely decide where the exact appropriate middle ground is, and make binding judgements forced upon people by threat of fines and imprisonment, ultimately acts of violence.
Some of it is even democratic (deciding together, not each for ourselves).
This statement is false. I can see in my immediate vicinity many human-made objects that were not designed with addiction in mind at all. For example, there is a rubber band on my desk. It effortlessly and immediately disproves your statement.
> And the OP's experience isn't a universal truth, no matter how much they want to insist it is.
Accounting for how many basic statements of yours I've now refuted, I'm inclined to think that my universal truths are better than yours.
I isolated this argument because it's also used by the tobacco industry. Consider that correlation. Should we ban smoking because it's addictive and harmful? Yes, we should - and already have. In my country you can only buy the stuff by specifically asking for it - a good compromise in societal responsibility and personal freedom.
None of the games or categories I listed are any more clear or deceptive about their mechanisms than any other game. I listed incrementals, but those often don't turn out the way you expect, because most of the mechanisms are hidden until you unlock them, so no, they are not "clear" about what they are upfront. I did not list FPSs, which definitely come with a mechanics expectation, and yet there are a mountain of different FPS mechanisms across many game styles.
If you make an assumption about a game, and that assumption turns out to be false -- or you just plain didn't enjoy the game -- it's a hell of a leap to automatically assume that the developer intentionally deceived you with malicious intent. Sometimes you just don't like a game, and that's okay.
> There are huge swaths of the gaming industry which are based ENTIRELY on repetitive and boring tasks, including some of the most popular games in history, such as Bejeweled and all of its Candy Crush offspring. Or idle, incremental and clicker games. Or slot machines, for that matter. ALL of those gamers are perfectly happy to spend money on boring repetition -- sometimes for years on end.
I have highlighted the absolutes and sweeping generalizations for clarification, since you seem to be having a go at people for doing this. It is quite hard to not write in generalisations, because otherwise you have to caveat EVERYTHING.
I also did not write anything about intent, I said that the upset was finding a game becoming, for whatever reason, not what you thought it was or previously enjoyed.
> I listed incrementals, but those often don't turn out the way you expect, because most of the mechanisms are hidden until you unlock them
It is usually clear that a game is an incremental. I would be rather surprised if a new version of DOOM was released as a $60 boxed game that turned out to be an incremental.
(To a great extent genre is just this, the categorising of things by similar elements in the hope that people who like one will like another)
There ARE MANY categories of games where the mechanics are PURELY REPETITIVE TASKS, such as Bejeweled. So when I say there are "huge swaths of the gaming industry which are based ENTIRELY on repetitive tasks," I'm not making a generalization, I'm talking about a specific subset of the gaming industry which is literally defined by repetitive tasks.
And when I say "all of those gamers" are happy playing games they enjoy, it's because they're literally enjoying the games, otherwise they wouldn't be playing them. That's not an "absolute" being applied to the entire population, it's a comment on how people like things that they like and will spend money on those things, as evidenced by the billions of dollars spent on those particular game categories.
Neither of my original comments were difficult to comprehend, and your trolling is unwelcome.
Once again, your statement is false and easily provable by simple thought exercise. Imagine I am threatening you at gunpoint to play my game. There, you are now playing it for some other reason than because you're literally enjoying it.