‘If people didn’t want it, they wouldn’t spend
money on it’
Criticising
our current economy is like criticising your house. A big house with subsidence
and mould and that’s dependent on external support might not be as appealing as
a smaller home which has less risk of collapse, but too many people only care about size.
Economic criticisms can be a bit abstract. We need examples, and the video game
industry is a perfect example of the modern economy. We all understand what video
games are. Games are things you play for fun. There’s no need behind it: no nutritional
value to analyse, as with food, or structural integrity, as with buildings. People
don’t need games but they do like them. If the games are bad people just won’t
play. In these ways it’s a good example, not distorted by special factors.
If
you’re not familiar with modern video games, you might be in for a surprise. But
before we describe how, we’ve already got our first point. Some people prefer
to enjoy themselves without being hooked into someone else’s creation: they
chat with friends , go for a walk etc. Games companies regard your preferred
activities as rivals.
-
If you prefer not to play games, your
preferences are a problem to be overcome.
That’s
our first similarity: if you’re not actively involved in their game, the gaming
industry wants to disrupt your life. Those companies would prefer that you were
playing their games, generating revenue for them. The modern economy also only
cares about you if you’re participating (i.e. spending). Things that aren’t
expenditure not only have no value; they have negative value, because of the
opportunity cost. You could have been spending money instead. That’s a very
basic point, which makes it a good place to start. Neither the economy, nor the
modern games industry, actually wants what’s best for you.
A discussion of games and what makes them
special
In
decades past, video games were a bit like the most famous board games. You bought
a one-off product which worked, you played it, and you moved on when you got
bored, but had it stashed away ready to play again when the whim took you.
When
we play Monopoly for the first time it’s novel and exciting. It’s probably the
most well-known board game, so everyone will remember the race to land on
properties, hoping to amass a set. And most people will now also know the grim
slog once one person has got a few sets as everyone else goes bankrupt
painfully slowly; and many of us know little rules of thumb: go for orange and
brown sets, expensive isn’t necessarily better. We have solved the game as far
as it can be solved, and playing it through has become a game of chance as we
watch the dice rolls unfold.
Video
games also went through these phases, and the industry knows it. There’s
excitement, problem-solving and then nostalgia. But there’s more; games are not
just puzzles, but also stories. And like stories, they draw people in in an
entirely different way as well: with atmosphere. The joy of the story, the
appeal of the aesthetic and the ability to make it your own make games a wonderful
combination of puzzle-solving decisions, non-puzzle ‘style’ decisions and
immersion in a fun, characterful world. I’m not a literary critic, but I’m
pretty sure that humans like stories because they either like the characters, treat
the plot as a puzzle that they try to solve, or like the overall message of the
story. So there’s puzzle-solving even in films and books. Games just force you
to wait until you’ve solved the puzzle before the plot progresses.
The
ability to make your own choices is hugely rewarding. Not just in an abstract
way. Every time you make a decision that seems to have been right, your brain
rewards itself with a little bit of dopamine. Good outcomes give pleasure; brain
pathways that lead to bad outcomes weaken and fade. This is the essence of
learning; we not only learn, but get pleasure from learning. If we didn’t have
any biological incentive to learn and improve, we’d probably all be mindless
apes still.
This
is where modern games have evolved. They no longer present us with a puzzle and
trust us to get fun from it. They try to tap into our brain processes directly,
bypassing our conscious or semi-conscious minds.
2.
Games appeal directly to our primitive reward
centres
And if the
mention of dopamine hits reminds you of addiction, you’re right. That’s exactly
the same process people describe when explaining how drug-taking becomes
addictive. Games are made to be addictive, not fun: fun is bypassed, because
addiction is a more powerful way to ensure that you keep on doing something.
3.
Games are made to be addictive
A few
examples: rewards come soon after actions and are more obvious, in the form of
loot drops from enemies. The requirement for good tactics (which requires clever
developers who are good at tactics themselves) is superseded by ‘grindy’ reliance
on chance. In Candy Crush, levels are either easy enough that you don’t need to
think too carefully, or too hard because there is so little room for planning
moves that there still isn’t much strategy, with only a few candies on the
screen at all.
4.
Removing strategic planning helps to disengage
our rational minds
Time limits
are also great for creating addiction. Sure, we all understand that time limits
add an extra challenge to something that we can master in as much time as we
need. That’s why exams are timed and why chess tournaments have timers. But
when you’re slobbing with friends and you play poker, or Monopoly; or if you go
very old-fashioned and play solitaire (once called patience before Microsoft
told us all a new name) on your own, do you always add a timer for extra fun?
Games use timers to force quick decisions; to create a restriction that
otherwise the game lacks. Quick decisions take us much closer to gambling; we’re
much closer to just pulling a lever on a one-armed bandit, or dumping a chip on
a roulette bet. Happily, it also helps us disengage the slow, rational part of
our brain which might question exactly why we’re doing this at all.
5.
Quicker thinking is less thinking
The
complex decision-making, which is the essence of strategy and tactics, is
replaced with mere reward/penalty based on chance. Gaming is replaced by the
far easier to create gambling (not by coincidence, it seems, is the gambling
industry called the gaming industry, which is why I’ve tried to write about
games rather than gaming so far. Now we know that in the modern world they’re
the same, I won’t bother).
6.
Tension of not knowing an outcome is easier to
manufacture than fun or interest, but at least as compulsive.
The
‘excitement’ or tension of not knowing what you’re going to get from a loot box
or from a rapid decision made without
thought is not quite the same as fun, but easily mistakable for it. And, for many
people, essential for all the most fun things. But it’s not sufficient to make
something fun. You’re in a state of nervous anticipation when your boss announces
who’s going to be made redundant, but it’s not fun. You’d far rather that your
job was safe, and if you’re going to gamble for good stuff, why not just play a
lottery?
How
else do games get you? Well, when you lose, you might suffer a gameplay penalty.
Maybe you’ll need to prepare for that attempt all over again. Maybe you have to
pay directly with in-game resources in some way. But if it feels close, you’re
likely to want to nudge that loss into a win. And that’s when the game tries to
sell you a bit of help. Couldn’t defeat that boss? Buy an extra life and carry
on. You might have decided that you want to spend no money on the game; you
might have chosen a specific package and paid for that, but your preferences change
in the moment. For a brief moment, you want that extra life a lot more, so that’s
when the pop-up box arrives. You don’t need to plan by buying enough lives
(itself a pretty dodgy proposition) at some other time.
7.
They will reach you when your resistance is
weakest.
8.
They will make sure you feel most of the way
there even when you’re not
There’s
free-to-play, which got me a few times. Start them off free and let them see
what they could be getting. Innocent enough if it’s a pack of nails. Not so
innocent if it’s cocaine. And once people start a ftp game, many never intend
to spend. How to break that resolution? Offer an amazing deal: a massive
discount for first purchases.
9.
They break you in with ‘no-brainer’ offers
Of
course, what is a discount on a price you made up in the first place? Advertise
in-game purchases at silly prices and even something ridiculously expensive
still looks relatively good. Anchoring bias is a known fallacy in people’s
reasoning, in which they struggle to ignore the first number they’ve seen in a
context, even when they know it’s irrelevant. How much does it cost a games
company to let you have a few different bits of information associated with
your game? Nothing at all.
10.
They use universal human cognitive biases to
escape rational evaluation
And once
games have these money-making schemes established, it makes sense to design
games to provide more such opportunities. Games need points which are
near-impossible to overcome without in-game consumables (which can be topped up
with purchases) or perhaps help that can only be purchases. Games need to be
slow and grindy; the option to speed them up can be bought. They need to be
only just good enough to get people interested, but mostly addictive. And then
you can sell the fun once people are hooked. Or sell the dopamine hit once you’ve
created the need for it.
11.
They create downs; to create moments when your
resistance is weakest (see number 7)
How else
do games get you? People tend to enjoy getting better. Of course, a game
requiring skill is too inaccessible for the unskilled, and too beatable for the
skilled. Don’t make a person get better, but simulate it by allowing them to
accumulate bonuses. This, like most of these tactics, emerged naturally out of
reasonable uses. Role-playing games naturally involve building characters and having
those characters improve over time. That aspect of gaming is in itself
addictive: people have targets to work towards even if you haven’t got more
levels or different gameplay to offer. But instead of making the game ‘completable’,
just create a massive skill tree that will take forever to progress through. Or
have ‘unlockable’ sections that depend on scarce in-game resources… which can
be bought.
12.
They create arbitrary targets for you to achieve
13.
They restrict the achievability of targets so
that only purchases can help
One
of the most toxic ways of getting users to come back is real-time gameplay.
This isn’t the same ‘real-time’ as in ‘real-time strategy’ games, which are
continuous rather than turn-based. Modern real-time games run even when you’re
not playing them. You miss out on the chance to get better; you miss out on
possible attacks aimed at you. Everything takes time. Maybe you want to upgrade
your base camp (they’re often some parody of a strategy game): you accumulate
enough resources and then it’ll take 6 hours. If you keep on checking the game,
you can set that going during the day and then your base camp will be ready for
you to use that evening after work. Or you can wait until the evening, and it’ll
run overnight and you’ll only have it the next evening.
And,
of course, you can speed anything up by spending real money.
14.
They abuse FOMO (‘fear of missing out’)
15.
They abuse loss aversion: the anxiety about
being taken advantage of while not playing
16.
They build habits of continuing usage
17.
They artificially spread out rewards to make
them more effective at training you.
In-game currencies exist,
of course. But they are often meaningless. You are awarded enough of these to
make you feel invested in the game, perhaps with a rewarding message
congratulating you on winning them. Most modern games, especially free-to-play
mobile games, have two currencies. And, as with the real world, only one
currency can be the real restriction on trade. Card points on store cards do
buy you real things, but you need to have spent a massive amount already before
you get freebies.
18.
They give you something to make you feel rich
and valued.
19.
Gifts always encourage expenditure; maybe they
are incomplete in some way or easily achievable without being given them; or unusable
without extra things.
There are usually easy ways to
get in-game currency (gold pieces, say); you play the game as normal and
rewards just happen. It might be a bit of a grind, but within the bounds of
normality, given that doing anything, fun or not, takes time. The special
currency (gems, or jewels, or crystals, because game designers now have very
little imagination) is won from gameplay very rarely. You might get a tiny
trickle, just so that you can occasionally make a purchase with it and
experience the massive benefits, but not enough that you can meet all your
gameplay needs. You have to buy this currency.
20.
Real expenditure is what matters, even though
they’ll hide this with other achievements, congratulations and rewards
Many
games now advertise their multiplayer status as if this is a good thing. It
does seem that many people like to challenge themselves against other humans.
This is because games developers are bad at writing AI. AI is hard to do; writing
a strategic genius without giving it a headstart in the game is hard. Most ‘hard’
AI is hard because the game gives the AI unfair bonuses, not because the AI
behaves much more intelligently. In real-time strategy games, each AI unit
escapes trouble or takes obvious opportunities while player units sit there
idly waiting for orders because the player can only scroll and click so fast.
The player isn’t adding strategy, but trying to replace a computer’s
processing power.
When
people tire of that Sisyphean challenge, they turn to other humans. It’s more
challenging: more exciting. And games have gleefully leapt on this bandwagon.
It’s easier to be a platform than a content-provider. Why bother writing AI when
you just have to connect two humans? Why bother providing background characters
when you can have a massively multiplayer game and have real people be the
background?
21.
They make you do the work for them
But let’s
not forget that, where games allow, people play the single-player game first.
They explore the game as a game before resorting to other people. Multiplayer
is an attempt to get more value out of a game that hasn’t provided enough; it’s
because AI isn’t good enough.
22.
Your solutions to their failures are turned into
selling points.
Multiplayer
is, across a population, necessarily worse for players. People get the most joy
from overcoming challenges. They need to be challenged, but also enjoy winning.
AI needs to get harder while always being a step below the player. Open-world
environments with hard sections (and auto-levelling is incredibly frustrating,
as it makes getting better not better) provide other places where players can
practice or collect in-game abilities before returning to the hard section.
Multiplayer necessarily means that people are not being challenged but mostly
winning: there will be as many human wins as human losses. In games between
more than two players, there will be far more losses than wins. If players are
matched by ability, each player should win only half his games; if they’re not
matched, then many interactions will be complete walkovers, with the loser
getting nothing out of it except whatever penalty comes with losing.
23.
Creating competition spares them the burden of
rewarding everyone
Many
people enjoy winning even walkovers, so there’ll be enough high-level players
scouring the game for many low-level players that the game will turn into a
meta-game of avoiding those bad match-ups. Some people enjoy the grief they
imagine others feeling; they like the feeling of power and utter dominance.
Fair enough, against an AI. Not so cool with other people. Most games will
avoid that as it will scare new players away. But it can also act as an
incentive for them to spend to catch up, and as an incentive for players to
spend to be so dominant, so even though it destroys fun, a bit of it can
increase revenue.
24.
They indulge people’s baser, antisocial
tendencies.
Since number 24 is so
broadly phrased, it’s worth considering social pressure. Children especially
feel the need to fit in, but few people like letting others down. Games get you
to form connections with other players online, offering rewards for joining
teams, sending a few messages and forming social bonds. You’ll want to carry on
playing to support your new friends.
Even when you can’t purchase
gameplay, social pressure can help make people buy aesthetic adjustments. There
are plenty of reports of children being bullied for having the default ‘skin’
for their animation in Fortnite - how I loathe deliberate mis-spellings that
intend to be cool – and ‘vanilla’, which is the unaltered, basic version of
something, is now a playground insult.
I know of no evidence of
games encouraging outright bullying, but precious little action that might
truly fight it. PR statements do no good. Of course, any reasonable designer
would have anticipated the possibility, and a worthy one would have prevented
it to begin with without needing PR statements or later adjustments. The need
for further action is itself a failure.
25.
PR statements are an alternative to action, not
an accompaniment
Returning
to AI, this itself is a big topic. Adaptive AI, which gets harder if the player
is doing better, might at a low level be a helpful way of balancing a game. But
as games rely on it more and more, they reward achievement less and less. You’ve
become skilled? Harder enemies, same challenge. You’ve found a good tactic?
Harder enemies, back to same challenge again (but forced to use that tactics
every time). You had a lucky run? Harder enemies. The player’s achievements
become less meaningful and the player becomes locked into doing whatever worked
best that first time. There is no room to explore or try new things. And if the
player’s achievements are less meaningful, the game turns into a gambling game
once more. Gamble and gamble, building in-game abilities in the hope that
things will become easier again, without realizing that the challenges will
always scale so that the fun times will always be just out of reach.
26.
The experience is as controlled and prescribed
as possible – to prevent you getting too much out of it.
Allowing
players to pick their challenge gives them a chance to find fun without paying
for it. If they hate the daily grind they must pay to avoid it. If they do the
grind just to achieve one target, make sure the target moves. If they find the
grind enjoyable, make it less fun until they’re willing to pay.
Company operating model (rather than game design)
All
my examples are of games-as-a-service. Why sell a game once and then forget it
when you can turn it into ongoing revenue? This emerged, I think, from the
accountancy practice of spreading the costs and revenues relating to a product
over its lifetime. If I pay £100 to rent something for 2 years, my first year
should only really show an expense of £50, because the other half is for the
second year’s worth of use.
When
you’re already spreading things out like this, it’s not much of a leap to
change payment patterns to match the prudent and sensible profit and loss
accounting. Why sell a jet engine for a massive up-front fee when you’re going
to recognise that income over the 10 years that you’ve guaranteed its
operation? Just charge a yearly fee for use of an operational engine.
But
what could be a like-for-like swap becomes a money-making scam when it comes to
consumers rather than big corporations. Individual customers do not have the
time, nor the ability, often, to judge what’s a reasonable ongoing fee. The
anchoring bias mentioned earlier, for example, will make a low monthly fee seem
cheaper than a big one-off payment, because the number is smaller.
27.
Ongoing services rarely offer much service
People
stay because there’s a cost associated with cancelling a subscription. It takes
time and effort (and ‘good’ companies ensure that it’s as hard as possible in order to
enhance customer retention).
28.
Barriers to ending the ‘relationship’ help make
money
Changing
to a subscription model is a bit like the free-to-play or low introductory
offer ploys. Get them in first, and then they’re exposed to all the addictive
forces encouraging them to spend more. What extra do they get for the money?
What extra programming will a developer have done by the time the second
payment is taken? If there is anything new, it’s usually paywalled and has to
be bought separately. If you’ve spent some money, you’ll follow that sunk cost
with more expenditure to try to make good on that first expenditure. If the
servers for playing other gamers are the service, then the game lacks content
to begin with. Surely you should be paying the random stranger who’s going to
let you beat him? Running servers is a lot cheaper than developing software.
I
think the reasoning goes like this: if people tend to play a game for 60-80
hours and will pay the purchase cost for that, then presumably they’ll be
willing to pay that again for another 60-80 hours. That’s true so far, but only
if we assume that every game is worth it. Part of what makes customers willing
to pay so much is that although they risk buying a dud, that’s balanced by the
chance of buying something they enjoy more than average and therefore get a lot of time from. If you make them pay
for those extra hours of fun, nothing is balancing the chance of a dud.
Companies are implying that every game will be above average for every person’s
tastes, which is impossible.
Each
company might not want to subsidise the industry as a whole by having their
super games encourage players to branch out and buy games in general. But the
race to monetise all value means that they all share the burden of falling
interest as gamers become hesitant about taking the risk on any of them.
29.
Companies create a tragedy of the commons through
short-term revenue-maximisation
Finally,
games as service gives companies that ‘touchpoint’ with the customer; ongoing
bank details and the knowledge that they’re paying, as well as data on usage
and temptation. If I play on my own PC, away from the internet, how can I ever
be persuaded to pay them more? It’d have to be through having provided me such
a good game that I simply choose to come back. But providing good games
up-front is a terrible idea; it’s expensive and risky and people might not even
care about your idea of ‘good’.
If
there’s a one-off sale, there’s a promise that the product alone is worth what
is paid. Services, on the other hand, can offer to make it good if people
complain: “You’ve spent with us, now let’s go on a journey together in which we
pretend to spend the money you’ve already given us to make something we should
have given you in the first place”. Marketing talk of journeys is a bit odd: if
someone has to go on a journey, they have to be in the wrong place to begin
with.
30.
The finished product rarely is: launch hype is
cheaper than quality
31.
Early-adopters are cash-cows, not valued
partners
I tend to avoid buying
games on release. For many years new releases have been expensive, charging
buyers money for ‘newness’ and feeling ‘with it’ or up-to-date. The same with
films, phones and cars: if you live your life a year behind, you will be
materially almost no worse off, but financially much better off.
At
first, early-adopters paid for innovation, speeding it up. But nowadays
companies know that their demand is so inelastic that they don’t bother
providing anything new: they just take the money and run, sometimes providing
more value, in time, for the later buyers, and sometimes not even that.
Those
are all examples of how the game itself is designed for addiction, and how
revenue and fun are in conflict in a big way, and revenue wins. Outside of gameplay
itself, the gaming industry also serves as a nice example of the modern world.
Games
companies justify their unfun games by saying that people get a feeling of
satisfaction when something is very hard; without constant failure, success is
less sweet. There’s a grain of truth to it, but this can be turned into
emotional blackmail. People who wisely give up are ‘quitters’ or just couldn’t
hack it; some games market themselves as extremely difficult and create a cult
of difficulty that looks down on easy games that n00bs can play. Games that
should be about personal enjoyment turn into tribal cults deliberately building
rivalry with other people, and hence loyalty. Loyalty means money for nothing;
the market transaction is replaced by membership of a tribe.
32.
‘Having to work hard for it is what makes it
valuable’ – even though you could work hard for anything, which would
presumably therefore be as valuable.
33.
Loyalty (‘consumer engagement’) is an
alternative to value
Games
companies know they’re dealing in addiction and gambling. Yet many of their
games are for children. The answer? PR/lobbying campaigns to persuade anyone
who matters not to classify gambling mechanics, such as loot boxes, as
gambling. Then it’s ok to target children.
34.
Serious problems are addressed through political
acquiescence, not helping people.
They
promise things for PR purposes, perhaps around launch time, but backtrack when
everything is quiet. ‘No in-game purchases’ might turn into ‘purchases that don’t
affect gameplay’ which might morph into purchasable ‘skins’ with some gameplay
effects, or ammunition (so you need to have the gun already), and finally
purchasing the win.
35.
They give in to campaigns (and make PR triumphs
of listening to the ‘community’) but change back when they can.
‘Not for
children’ comes with no controls to exclude children, safe in the knowledge
that children love things that claim to be more adult. Childish graphics and
text is still ‘not for children’. The words are not consistent with the
actions.
36.
Words are cheaper than action
Platforms
try to host platforms and take a cut of others’ revenue. Steam is a platform
from which you can buy games and is close to a monopoly. There aren’t lots of online
shops. Platforms maintain monopolies with things like noncompete clauses
insisting that games are exclusively available on the platform. Developers who
want access to a platform’s large reach cannot sell it from their own website.
Those that can try to get subscribers to build their own database of customers
and form ‘customer relationships’. There is no free market in which people buy
and sell and transactions are free. There is a web of exclusivity and sign-ups.
Apparently Epic Games has set up a rival platform, and is buying its way into
competition by buying exclusivity agreements with known brands. Because a new
platform stands no chance; the only way to compete with an established platform/network
is to buy your way in. If you starve the wider environment of ‘top’ games, people
will come your way.
37.
Platforms that take a cut of others’ revenue
make money off others’ work.
And then
there’s tax dodging via offshore structures and government subsidy for creative
industries. Not that they create much of value any more; they create need, or negative
value, and sell the solution. Why not just subsidise drug gangs, who also pay
no tax? It’s easy to dodge tax with intangible assets (rights and software, for
example). These can be transferred abroad, or owned abroad, without having to transport
anything except an idea.
38.
Taxpayer support is required, but the taxpayer
gets no support (unlike political parties)
The
games industry even has the work ethic of the modern world nailed. Games are
(supposedly) big, finishable projects. Most games now have ‘crunch’ periods, in
which developers are expected to work very hard to meet the upcoming deadlines.
There seems to be little reward afterwards; no time off in lieu or extra annual
leave. Just another game to be worked on, with crunch periods expanding and the
working hours getting worse. ‘“We worked, typically, 50- or 60-hour weeks and
upwards of 70-hour weeks on occasion,” one source who worked as a contractor in
QA said. “If I got to the end of an eight-hour workday and I turned to my
supervisor to ask if I needed to stay on, they’d often look at me as if I was
actively stupid. Officially, you don’t have to keep working, but in reality:
‘sit back down, we’ll be here for a while.’ If you did not do overtime, that
was a mark against your character.”’
Developers
are hired on temporary contracts and abandoned if they won’t donate their time
to the company while CEOs take all that money saved as compensation for running
the company so well.
39.
Cultural pressure to work substitutes for
financial incentives to work (i.e. being paid adequately)
Finally, it
seems that the games industry has its share of scandals. People have been
mistreated in various ways, but offenders are called bad apples, the company
says lessons have been learned, and staff are reshuffled. CEOs try to build a
cult of personality; as with loyalty earlier, replacing a rational market
transaction with emotional, unreasoned willingness to pay.
40.
Company structures and career paths are a way of
avoiding accountability, not defining it.
That was a long
run-through of modern gaming. Every point is relevant for the wider economy
too. Games can be wonderful ways to spend our time and therefore money,
bringing value to our lives. We do all the bad things in life so that we can enjoy
leisure time, and games have for thousands of years been one of the most
popular leisure activities. They are what we aspire to do. Human happiness is
the point of all human striving.
Our
capitalist economy also has noble ideals. If we’re all free to pursue what we
want, and exchange what we have freely, we will lose what we value less and
gain what we value more, and so will everyone else. All our exchanges will add
up to increased happiness for everyone.
But
those ideals are not matched by reality. We can see how all forty of the above
problems could have emerged gradually from slightly sharp practice, or well-meaning
attempts to provide something good. But as they become more extreme, and blend
with each other, we get an entirely different environment.
It’s
this gradual environmental shift that’s worth emphasizing. At what point does
night become day? Even on the equator where dusks and dawns are shorter there is
no firm boundary. The light is dimmer as the sun goes down, and it’s still
light even when the sun is fully below the horizon. Yet night is definitely
different from day. The same applies here.
Our
ideal economy might be a wonderful mechanism for making everyone happier; and
any one of these issues wouldn’t change that much. But as we add them all up
and let them multiply each other we end up somewhere entirely different.
Modern
games are unfun, time-consuming grinds designed to siphon your money away,
dangling an unachievable carrot in front of your nose as the game rides you to
exhaustion. The dream of a joyful way to relax has been whittled away. The
difference, I hope you now see, is stark.
And
it’s that stark difference that most people fail to see in the modern economy,
instead choosing to forgive individual problems as not that big a deal…
assuming that everything else is running in an ideal way.
The
modern world wants to sell you customer engagement and consumer journeys. Loyalty,
PR and branding substitutes for quality. Marketing and products create needs
rather than satisfying pre-existing ones. Platforms take a cut of transactions
they didn’t contribute to just because they have the biggest social network and
now can never be displaced. The biggest companies pay too little tax, rewarding
tax consultants, CEOs and CFOs instead of the country buying their products.
Social pressure drives expenditure, even at the cost of happiness. And behind
it all there’s a culture that hard work is its own reward… so you should do it
just because, and if you don’t you’re a unworthy outcast.
I
don’t think we should abandon markets. Markets are powerful tools. But a vast
amount of the modern economy is aimed at removing those ideal conditions for a
good market, or taking advantage of imperfections: perfect information,
rational consumers with consistent, unvarying preferences. We are addicts, with
companies cynically trying to manipulate us to extract our wealth and make us
want to work for more. I wrote this entire article to emphasize this one
important point: games demonstrably turn gamers into addicts; and the rest of the economy knows
and uses all the same techniques. Just compare a modern mobile game like the mass-advertised 'clash of clans' to the older-style SimCity or Civilization series. You might think you’re immune to advertising,
but even if you’re not directly swayed, the morass of misinformation and the
cultural background it creates will still affect you.
We
need drastic changes to free our markets and ourselves. Regulation shouldn’t be
a dirty word. Where there isn’t perfect information, which is a prerequisite of
the ideal market, we should encourage transparency. Where there is no
competition because of natural barriers to entry we should regulate to break
those barriers. Where companies complain we should recognise that we’re doing
good. In a theoretical market people will take opportunities and innovate in
response to challenges. If companies complain about regulatory change, they are
admitting that they cannot innovate or adapt – so they don’t want free markets,
they want stasis.
Optional extras
If you want me to feed
you a few of my favourite links between these points about video games and
other areas of our lives, read on. If you’ve spotted your favourites already,
well done.
In 6 I said that
tension is easier to make than fun. We see this in a lot of television (both
game shows and other shows). Tension is everywhere. Yes, games shows have
longer and longer pauses for results, with teasers in between: who dropped the
cake we saw splat on the floor? Tension is a necessary part of the format: of
course we watch a competition in part to find out who wins. But the longer and
longer pauses, dramatic commentary, often directly asking us ‘who will win?’
and suspenseful editing have become more of a focus than simply reporting
events.
In
screenplays still, we have become more and more dependent on drama: exaggerated
displays of emotion. Emotion and conflict appeal directly to our emotional,
empathetic brains. Engaging plots or more believable characterisation are less
effective. Watching the original Star Trek is relaxing for me not because of
the amazing special effects, or even the uninventive plots (‘supernatural,
incomprehensible entity takes control’ half the time) but because characters
deal with conflict in a human way. Spock and Bones bicker, making snarky asides
at each other. They don’t have flaming rows like modern characters do. When
Kirk has a few temper tantrums it’s a sign that he’s out of his mind and unfit
to command, an episode that explores the nature of absolute command. Modern
characters are relatively infantile, despite being written in a more socially
progressed society. Our rational minds are constantly being ignored.
Points
7 and 8 are also very important. We have moods: ups and downs that for most of us
come and go reasonably naturally. Sometimes we feel like ice cream and then 30
minutes later we realise it was just a passing whim and we want a hotdog… or to
go for a run. Our friends help us; they advise patience, offer sympathy and
help us wait until we feel better. The modern world can track us constantly,
identifying weak moments and reaching us in those moments, and this ability is
getting better very fast. It is now a virtue to succumb to temptation: a demonstration
that you deserve it, a happy indulgence. Yet most people feel just as happy
having resisted temptation: when the whim has faded, you feel as happy as if
you had satisfied it, if not more so.
The
ability to catch us at our weakest doesn’t offer value: satisfying transient
whims can never offer more than equally transient happiness, unless we develop
a culture that values whimsy and indulgence as goods in themselves. We all know
the sorts of advertising that encourage that, but we all rationally know, when
I write it out here, that the more Stoic approach of not bothering to indulge
and having a little patience is better for us.
Those
gains realised by modern advertising are taking value from us, not
providing it.
