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Comment by wyldfire | Hacker News Reader

> “I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour.

A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me, I'd never heard the term before. Although if I try to take a step back I suppose this term could be used to describe any game and not just one of the lootbox-mania or idle games.

However, the wikipedia article [1] states:

> A core or compulsion loop is any repetitive gameplay cycle that is designed to keep the player engaged with the game. ... A compulsion loop may be distinguished further from a core loop; while many games have a core loop of activities that a player may repeat over and over again, such as combat within a role-playing game, a compulsion loop is particularly designed to guide the player into anticipation for the potential reward from specific activities

For some reason, all I can think of is that game from ST:TNG [2]. I'd like to say that I am somehow above it all but back when I used to play FPS games, it was probably just the same thing. Nonstop dopamine infusion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...

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Compulsion loop does sound rather dystopian and "attention-hacking" but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around. An hour long compulsion loop sounds like it could be an immersive experience.

That said, I'm not hearing nice things about IronSource and it sounds like maybe there's better ways to get user feedback than the particular implementations they're using and are going to use with IronSource.

From what I've seen of mobile games, in practice it means that it starts off fun and well balanced. Then after [x] minutes it starts to get a bit frustrating, and suddenly you're unable to make progress without sitting and waiting or banging your head against the wall. This presents a choice to the player. They can choose to put the game down until they unlock some power up that helps them pass the level. Or, they can pay money to receive the instant dopamine hit of getting back to the beginning of the "compulsion loop".

The real dystopia is that I'm 99% sure these games dynamically adjust durations, prices, and incentives based on the user's past behavior to extract as much money per hour of play as possible. Essentially a machine that identifies and preys on a person's weaknesses.

Yup, and these scummy games will leverage social connections as well. They'll show your friends progress in a way designed to produce FOMO, without showing you that they're buying their way past the pay gates too.

To my way of thinking it's only slightly more reputable than bitcoin slot machine crap like stake.

I've developed to be a terrible gamer: Great games that are finished in 7 hours usually don't feel worth the money, while games that do these compulsion loops quickly feel like a waste of time.

I think I'm not alone in that, and the few games I really enjoyed in the last couple of years were significantly text-based and/or complex simulations for this reason.

Why aren't shorter games worth the money? I really dislike the way modern games inflate their length because it's usually tons of padding.

When a game dev says "vast area and lots of things to do", I hear "lots of walking across empty lands with sporadic fetch quests".

I have no idea why so many games involve walking. I'd have thought it gotten old by now.

TBF if the world is extremely scenic and not a micro-transaction cash grab the walking part could switch from bad to cool for me.

I wouldn't call a 7 hour game short, I'd define that closer to 2 hours. The reason it's bad is that they usually fail to fully explore whatever idea the game is built around or they never really had an idea good enough to carry an entire game.

> but it's interesting that he says "two minutes when it should have been an hour," instead of the other way around.

Didn't sound very nice to me. More like an elder drug lord who knows that too many overdoses are bad for business or a virus that evolves to be less lethal because dead hosts don't spread.

Or in this case: a two minute compulsion loop would probably make it really obvious that the game is trying to hook you and might trigger some kind of counter reaction: Players realizing it's a slot machine and uninstalling it to stop themselves from wasting time. Whereas a hour-long loop might keep a player hooked without them realizing it.

Two minutes would be a holdover from 1980's arcade games. That's about how long you'd play on a quarter. Maybe 3 minutes.

And most of them were tuned for profit too, so it's not like this is a new concept. It does feel like a lot of the mobile and F2P monetization folks are the same ones that enjoyed profiting from arcade games and see them as being similar to slot machines (except better, because they only pay out in neurochemicals, not money!).

There's been a quiet war for decades between people who want to design games as art, and people who want to design them as a predictable recurring revenue stream. I'm not sure what iteration we're up to now.

Comparing arcade machines to gambling is a sore spot, especially for pinball. Ostensibly arcade machines are skill based. They are not random. You may be able to win an award or prize but that will be based on some objective measure of performance with little to no randomization. This is important because arcades operate where gambling is illegal, so suggesting they are anything like gambling threatens the security of those businesses.

Roger Sharpe [1] saved pinball by demonstrating it is a game of skill.

RE: art vs profit I think there is room for both. Games are probably the best example of that. Game designers are very much artists but they are also engineers and business people.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sharpe_(pinball)

You are factually correct, but the intentions are a bit murkier. The explosion of video arcades in the 70s and 80s was due to how lucrative the machines were as an investment, not due to any passion on the part of the owners. The value proposition for arcades at the time was basically like gambling, but not illegal. While arcade games have always been skill-based, that's not the same as "fair," at least in the modern game design sense.

Yes, with repetition, you can eventually learn to beat Ghosts and Goblins on a single quarter, but the game is not going to just let you do that on the first try. Games of that era are designed to lure you in, then kill you with something completely out of nowhere after your 3 minutes are up and it's time for the next person in line to put in their money. This self-reinforced when you saw someone who had put in the reps getting really far on one credit, so you would think you can do that. But no, you can't. You die at the end of the first stage like everyone else.

It's not gambling, but it's still designed to extract money as efficiently as possible.

>> While arcade games have always been skill-based, that's not the same as "fair," at least in the modern game design sense.

Well sure the games tend to be skill based, but arcade machines were also novelties, like the little peep-show movie clips where you turned the crank and looked inside, or the "fortune teller" and some others. Skill games seem better because there is more replay value though.

It's not gambling simply because there is no possible way you can come out ahead, therefore you are just paying for entertainment. Nobody ever got quarter out of a PacMan machine, no matter how well they played.

But games with persistent inventory like World of Warcraft are different than PacMan machines, because you could sell your items for real money.

Not really a counterpoint, but a neat aside: pinball machines used to be actual gambling machines, back when they took nickels. They were common in pool halls my father frequented.

>Ostensibly arcade machines are skill based.

That's also a slippery slope of an argument. Poker players claim that they are not gambling. Early stage addicts claim they are not addicts and can stop any time. Gaming, whether the player is earning money or points, all keys in on the same addictive traits of their players. Some game devs go all in on that because it is fish in a barrel stakes for making money.

Sure. Modern arcades even survive by selling alcohol as a 1-2 punch. But now we are talking about addiction in general, not gambling specifically.

Not sure why that matters to be honest. Gambling is a form of addiction. GaveDevs are tapping into that rush. That's how it breaks down for me. It may not be an illegal/scheduled substance that they are pushing, but they are pushing a product specifically made to trigger addictive behavior. It's no different than social media algorithms in my book either. They all are designing their product to be consumed by an addict to ensure they continue using their product as much as possible. We've just been dealing with drugs/alcohol/etc for much longer and society is much more aware of the addict problem in these cases. Social media/gaming addiction is a much less understood and/or acknowledged.

It matters because gambling specifically is regulated differently than general behaviors that might be addictive. There are more bars in the world than casinos. As I already outlined arcades specifically exist in their current form because they were re-classified as containing games of skill, not chance.

The difference matters a lot to someone who owns a bar or arcade or frequents one.

Further, conflating the meaning of words in general is just not a useful approach to learning or building consensus. Words have meaning. By respecting the meaning of words we can convey complex ideas with simple language.

Saying alcoholics are basically gamblers because "what's the difference" is about as useful (read: not) as arguing that FAANG should be broken up because "monopoly". The words matter and when you use the wrong ones the merit of your argument can be easily dismissed on the semantics. It's just not persuasive.

I don't know where you're trying to take this, but it's not in a direction I'm going.

I never equated alcoholic are gamblers. I said they are forms of addiction. I'm beating the drum that some game devs are targeting addicts. That's the direction I will continue this conversation as. Where ever you're going with I will no longer follow

My pinball machines actually track average ball times in the audits. It’s a KPI for operators. Machine setups will be changed to increase difficulty if necessary.

Have any pinball machines ever been designed to change the difficulty during game play. Some sort of algo to make the bumpers less bumpery, restrict the movement of the flippers, adjust the angles of things, etc?

Not to my knowledge. It would be antithetical to the game. Games do scale difficulty based on progress but this is the same for everyone. Some games do reverse flipper sides or direction but again, it is based on progress, not a more complex playtime targeting algorithm.

An example of this is multiballs. The first one (per player) can start with say three shots. The next one might require six and then the third nine. This is oversimplified but the point is the progress is consistent.

The only dynamically-scaling feature I am aware of is the replay score which (can) set a starting score based on recent plays but will also scale up rapidly when it is reached (say, +50%) until it isn’t reached, at which point it resets to the starting score. But this has no actual in-game effect.

Compulsion loop aka Skinner Box aka Operant Condition Chamber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

I wonder if there is a point that a game or other experience can become "predatory" solely focusing on the time someone spends on it regardless of monetization. To my own mind, there are many games that I can't put down for hours, sometimes missing out on sleep entirely for days. But the capitalistic part doesn't apply to me since I never play games with in-game monetization. Still, a lot of my time is sucked away by those activities (sometimes >18 hours a day), and I sometimes have to stop myself and question my priorities.

As an example, Minecraft is only a $20 one-time purchase, but free and/or open source mods made by people who are motivated by fun instead of profit have created a staggering amount of content that happens to be really addictive to someone like me. For the $20 I got the equivalent of years of content and novelty that I can never hope to fully explore.

I wonder if any given computer program that's given a colossal amount of development resources thrown behind it will ultimately come somewhere close to irresistible, and would suck away various parts of our less interesting hopes and dreams regardless of how much monetary currency the creator is expecting the user to pay. There just happens to be a motive to tack on some extra profit if the game is pseudo-irresistable, where all that time would have been "wasted" on someone's freeloading video game addiction instead. It makes me wonder if what is known as "predatory" is just a pathological explosion of what someone thinks of as a successful accomplishment (my "any given side project could one day addict us all" theory).

I noticed something like this with Nintendo's early Switch games. Both Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey had a design philosophy that something should always be just over the horizon, waiting for you to explore. It sounds romantic in theory, but the problem is that the game never gives you a good place to take a break, and it drives that same kind of addictive behavior you're describing.

It's a set of design habits that served the industry well back when they were trying to get people to pump in money, but which don't really do anyone any good when it's just you at home on a fully paid-up console game. It's not malicious, it's just a habit that got uncritically elevated to a Best Practice.

Having read Wheel of Time recently.. "[The Forsaken] Graendal in the Age of Legends was famous as a great psychologist and a noted ascetic. After her conversion to the Shadow, she became a master manipulator and an extraordinarily skilled user of Compulsion weaves... She is very particular about her servants, often choosing people of great status, power, or renown and reducing their minds to empty husks"

But be carful, she uses compulsion like a hammer to distract from the fact that she is also amazing a light touch compulsion.

Another term for this is grinding. The CEO is saying they should have made the grinding parts of the game longer. Grinding is usually boring and repetitive part of the game that's required to advance. A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

Grinding is just one way to lengthen the loop. Or you can create lots of compelling content, like Elden Ring, which did not feel grindy to me at any point in 130 hours.

ER has a couple loops, with dungeons taking O(hour), and regions taking O(10hour). But there is no hard requirement to grind baked in at any level. (Of course, there is a requirement to Git Gud, which might make it feel grindy to some.)

> A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

A great RPG however, provides you with the tools to advance without ever grinding.

Most Fire Emblem games for example, are carefully tuned (thanks to a pretty interesting experience point formula) to rig your "active members of the party" to a particular level. Fire Emblem effectively asymptotes your character's level to what is expected for a particular map.

In Fire Emblem, 100 experience points is a level up. However, a stronger character gets less experience points, while a weaker character gets more. So weaker characters grow much faster, maybe leveling up after defeating just one foe. While a strong character ("the Jeigen" as Fire Emblem fans call it), may need 20+ wins before they level up.

As such, most Fire Emblem games feel like "there's no grind", because the experience point system is designed to never have a grind to begin with. Weak characters feel weak for their first few combats, but exponentially level up and catch up to the rest of the party in just a few maps. While your strongest characters feel like they're "wasting the precious enemies" (there's only a set number of enemies per map. Killing an enemy for +5 exp on your strongest character is just not good tactics when the same enemy is +100 exp on your weakest character).

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Even Pokemon to a large extent does this well. You can defeat all the gyms without ever "Grinding". It gets harder and harder to advance, but the game has enough tactics (Swords Dance, X Attack, etc. etc.) to allow you to win even with 10-levels or 15-levels behind the computer.

I think "no grind" Pokemon playthroughs are pretty fun. It completely changes the game and kind of provides the player an entry point into the competitive scene (you need to use competitive meta strategies vs the CPU if you expect to win with 10-to-15 level disadvantages against them).

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EDIT: It should be noted that Fire Emblem / Pokemon does offer a grind, but only as a method of last resort. Children who are incapable of ever understanding advanced tactics like Swords Dance or Calm Mind, are given a "grind" which guarantee progress.

Similarly, Fire Emblem has "grind levels" that serve as a way to increase your character's strength. But a lot of "hardcore" Fire Emblem fans try to avoid the grind levels and beat the game "grind free".

From this perspective, "Grind" exists as a way to allow casual players to advance, while trying to stay balanced so that stronger players (on their 5th or 6th playthrough with deep understanding of the mechanics of the game) can play without that "emergency escape hatch" so to speak.

That's the general theme among turn-based RPGs. The games are either too undertuned to warrant grinding for skilled players, or they are tuned so they do require some form of grinding. It's an inherent problem with stat sticks and fairly simplistic strategies. Almost no moderately difficult RPG is tuned to not have some of its player base grind, bar introducing difficulty selection.

Pokemon is absurdly easy because the story appeals to a wide variety of players. Most of which include "just give a single fast Pokemon 4 coverage moves and blast everything to pieces". Only gen 5 had a counter mechanic to this by adjusting experience to level difference.

Fire Emblem doesn't really have a grind because you fight the mobs you need during the campaign, and beyond higher difficulties the games have changed to accommodate lesser skilled players into not having to restart the entire campaign. Because it turns out, few people are looking forward to replaying 20 hours only for your 1-5 super pumped up units to not be able to beat the game (read: leaving almost all your other units underleveled or dead, no skirmishes / arena to catch up, and your remaining party can't clear the map).

Paper Mario, you can beat the entire game skipping every non-required battle and still have room to spare. Strategies are even based around keeping your HP low.

And despite not needing to grind, the former two still suffer from similar issues (beating weaker enemies with no sense of strategy to stall getting to the meat of the game). Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.

> The games are either too undertuned to warrant grinding for skilled players

That's a good thing. Players who figure out the system "properly" shouldn't have to grind.

Ex: Atelier series generally have "alchemy engines" that create absurdly powerful creations, if you spend some time mapping out how alchemy can pass back and forth and mastering the alchemy minigame (main game??). Yeah, you can grind another +10 levels, but the game is about crafting items and rewards you with way more damage from well-crafted items (from +Quality loops) rather than from trying to bash your head against enemies for 10 hours.

The only games that seem to "force a grind" are these crappy phone-RPGs / gatchapon games, where escaping the grind literally costs money.

> Beating required Geodude trainer number 30 with Tackle and Rock Throw may as well be grinding.

A decent speedrun of Pokemon is only a couple of hours long at the most. I don't think any skilled RPG player would call any decent run of Pokemon (of any game) a "Grind".

>A decent speedrun of Pokemon is only a couple of hours long at the most. I don't think any skilled RPG player would call any decent run of Pokemon (of any game) a "Grind".

I'll articulate what I mean, since it hasn't come across. The problem isn't with grinding itself. It's with the things associated with grinding.

Grinding itself can be immensely fun and satisfying. Doing the same repetitive, thoughtless actions to advance the game, not that fun for most. I can sink hours into Monster Hunter grinding because I'm still put on my toes with most endgame monsters. It does get annoying, but it gets annoying way later (and for different reasons, mostly).

Pokemon? Let's set aside speedrunning, since that implies I already have a strategy prior to even booting the game. You'll go through various non-random battles with trainers which have Pokemon with no random moveset whatsoever. They all have the same algorithm-determined moveset or some inferior version of it. Most of the time, they play out the exact same way they do at the current point as they did 10 levels ago. Most of these battles aren't mentally challenging past first occurrence, they just drag the game out. The clear exceptions are trainers with Pokemon you've never seen, and story-relevant trainers (hopefully not for the former reason, but for having unique movesets / themes). Remove all those trainers, and you could probably cut the level curve in half along with the playtime.

You either care enough about that padding to dump the game over it, you bite through it despite the padding, or you like the padding. But it's the same thing as grinding: it's padding. It isn't inherently necessary beyond ensuring players have garnered some experience with the battle system before giving them a larger challenge. And even there, it's entirely up to the designers to ensure previous challenges match the current state.

> You'll go through various non-random battles with trainers which have Pokemon with no random moveset whatsoever.

In my experience though, most of those trainers are easily avoidable if you don't want to deal with them.

I think that's what I'm going for. They're there as "grinds" if your the type of player who wants to capture a whole lot of experience points and/or money throughout the game. But if you're "against the grind", then you simply walk away from those trainers, and they'll never challenge you.

There's exceptions of course. You must fight the gym leaders (each with a specialization on a particular typing. Brock for Rock, Misty for Water, etc. etc., ensuring forced diversity through the game). And the Elite 4 at the end force you to fight against 4 trainers (again with elemental specialties), before facing the champion (who breaks the mold and fights with a well balanced, supported team across multiple elements/typings)

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In Sword/Shield, its an explicit strategy to run away from fights in fact. You're not really expected to fight against the most powerful Pokemon, and Poke-dolls (aka: run away from fights) are plentiful.

> A typical RPG example is defeating the same monster over and over again to get experience to reach the next new area.

That’s ARPGs and JRPGs (and maybe some action RPGs), CRPGs typically don’t have any grinding.

Yet a lot of people love this and there are multiple genres (MMOs and ARPGs) built around it. Heck even Minecraft is just a mindless grind for some

I think a lot of the people don't understand the 'modes' a person can be in when playing a game.

There are some games that you want to play with your full attention, and you want it to be an intense and immersive experience.

But there are also games that you want to play 'in the background' while having a discord conversation about something else. It's fun and simple, and doesn't come with stakes.

Some analogies to this are throwing a ball back and forth in the yard. Or having a show play in the background. It's comforting.

'Grinding' doesn't have to be bad if it's in that context

Thank you for the "The Game" wiki link. It's pretty much a software virus on intelligent beings' minds. Very interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if something like it has been deployed in other intelligent worlds.

Explicit references to a "compulsion loop" make me want to delete all my non-indie video games and take a shower.

> A 'compulsion loop' sounds bad to me

Yes, it is bad. Crack cocaine has a really tight compulsion loop, for example.

It's not a great sounding phrase, but a compulsion loop can be a pretty harmless thing. Think about a cliffhanger in a book or a tv show -- something that gets you to come back to the next episode/chapter. That's really the same thing. Right now I'm playing God of War, and there's a compulsion loop of doing side quests to make my character stronger. There's definitely a compulsiveness to that -- I stayed up too late last night doing that -- but it's not particularly evil.

For more information on the Skinner Box theory and how it is applied to exploit human psychology for monetization purposes:

https://levelskip.com/how-to/Skinners-Box-and-Video-Games

Path of Exile has the most exquisite set of compulsion loops within loops. Even when you’re aware of it they’re so satisfying.

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