Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

[baud]

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17, 2019

The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

Spoiler

Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers!

I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter from BioWare and Electronic Arts. Apparently, it doesn't give out enough loot for the monsters you kill. For a game like Anthem, this is BAD FORM.

Apparently, when you spend three hours killing a boss, the increase in your character's numbers isn't generating a sufficiently pleasurable dopamine hit to justify the time invested.

So Bioware releases a patch, and good loot suddenly drops like crazy. Our characters numbers shoot up and up, causing a pleasurable, sustained dopamine high. Ahhhhh. That's the stuff. But oops. The rebalancing was bugged! The loot rate drops, and again we are strung out, demanding that when we kill the level 99 Glip-Glop we get a properly satisfying purple (or legendary or epic) item.

They never enabled Anthem to give the players the sweet hits of neurotransmitter they desired. Anthem is therefore not serving the main purpose it exists for, so now the game appears to be slowly dying.

So what have we learned?

Time To Actually Look At What We Are Seeing

I can't be the first person to notice that complaining about these games' loot drop rates is like being mad that the bartender is watering down the drinks. Complaining your character's numbers aren't going up fast enough is the "My weed dealer sold me a bag of oregano!" for the new millennium.

While artsy indiepants developers debated whether video games are Great Art or a great storytelling medium, the big shot developers wearing the money pants became the most profitable drug dealers the world has ever seen.


Fifty of us spend 12 hours being this jerk so that I could get an imaginary sword. What force is powerful enough to inspire such madness?


A Brief Disclaimer to Get the Neuroscientists Off My Butt

When I say video games give you a pleasurable "dopamine hit" that’s shorthand for whatever pleasant chemical process is going on in the brain while you play. Is it actually dopamine? Or some other more complicated reaction of chemicals in the brain?

Beats me. Answering this question is way above my pay grade. I'm just using "Dopamine Hit" as a placeholder/shortcut term. But whatever is happening, it IS chemicals, and they are generated by the brain on gaming.

So, here are a few thoughts about the ways video games provide pleasure and manipulate our brains. Just observations. I don't have any answers. Nobody does. We can, however, look across the landscape and see what we see.

1. The Video Game Industry Sells Engines That Release Pleasure Chemicals In To Your Brain

Hey, I love artsy video games like Papers, Please! or whatever. I really do. But don't kid yourself. That is not and never will be where the real money is.

Popular video games sell so well because they cause the release of sweet, sweet dopamine in the brain. When you fill up an experience bar. When a stat number goes up. When you find a vein of diamonds and can make a sweet pickaxe. When you get the BEST sword. When you solve a puzzle or clear away a row in Tetris.

When you die fifty times to a boss in Bloodborne, you are holding off the fix, which makes the huge surge of dopamine when you finally win all the more satisfying. Aaaaahhhhhh.

I'm Not Judging

I know I'm expected to say how bad this state of affairs is, but I'm not going to. I don't think it's bad. I play these games. I like the dopamine.

This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.


How many children are, right this moment, grinding at the computer to get the thrill of seeing a fresh vein of diamonds.

2. The Effect Is Very Real and Very Powerful.

Back in the day, before game designers got really good at parceling out the dopamine hits, I raided in Everquest and World of Warcraft. Hardcore. Hours a day for weeks to get my shot at one of the really high-end artifacts. When I got one, the good feeling, a really substantive warm illusion of accomplishment, could last for days.

These days, I struggle to remember what any of those clumps of data stored on a distant server actually were. (An "epic weapon"? Was that a thing?) However, the memory of the FEELING of satisfaction I got is still very strong.

Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops.

This effect is so powerful that you don't even need to make the player DO anything. Look at clicker games. Cookie clicker is particularly good.

In clicker games, a few simple clicks jump starts the process of earning cookies/points/gold, and then it runs on its own. You can walk away from the computer, return later, and see your progress! In some games, not only do you not need to do anything, you CAN'T do anything, and you still advance. It really, truly feels like you did something! It's amazing how our brains work.

3. Writing An Addictive Video Game Is HARD

Making a truly addictive video game is an art. Like, it's really, super hard. If it wasn't, there would be far fewer failed video games. Artsy types don't appreciate how difficult it is.

When I am trying to design a game that pulls people in and gets them stuck there, I don't have rules. There's no algorithm. When designing a system, I sort through the 10000000 different ways I can do something, and I pick the one that feels right in my gut. The design that makes me go, "Yeah, this compels me. This would tickle my brain and keep me playing."

There’s no rules for it. It’s intuition. Feelings. Art.

I mean, think about it! When I write a game, I am trying to manipulate another human being's brain, at a distance, using nothing but these abstract mental constructs I build. Do I get to give the user cocaine or meth? No! I don't get a tool as easy or clumsy as actual chemicals. I'm trying to shape their minds with nothing but pure thoughts! That's awesome!

I like writing and visuals and all that good stuff, but don't undervalue addictiveness. Making a game addictive requires true craft, and this quality enables video games to provide something unique in entertainment. If controlling the player's brain was easy, Anthem wouldn't have burned up hundreds of millions of dollars and exploded.


Even artsy games are smart enough to provide a score to increase. Nothing is more fun than bigger numbers.

4. DLC and Micropayments Are a Side Topic, Not the Main Argument

Our industry has discovered that the pleasure jolt from advancing in these games is so great some people will spend lots of money to keep the drip coming. “Five minutes of gameplay and your fancy tower is completed right away? That will be a dollar, thank you.” Bottomless fortunes are being made off of dopamine.

Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right.

BUT.

Parental controls are deeply flawed. The companies who give them to you don’t want them too work well, because they want the money your children will spend.

Suppose a tired distracted parent (as all parents are) makes a mistake (as all humans do) and lets their kid play the wrong game unsupervised for an hour. That game will happily suck your bank account dry and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

For decades, the world has been trying to portray our industry as malevolent and harmful and evil. They’re always been wrong so far. PLEASE do not allow your greed to make them correct.

Anyway.

Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time.

What is the creepy part? Is it evil to charge a dribble of money for a game so addictive it devours hundreds of hours of your time? Or is the problem making the game so addictive it consumes hundreds of hours of your time in the first place?

Again, I am asking this as a person who writes games as addictive as I can make them in order to buy food.

This turned into a huge post, so this is just part one. The second half is to come.

###

I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter.


POSTED BY JEFF VOGEL AT 3:29 PM

Edit: was originally posted in the wrong thread and got moved by a mod

 

[Dayyālu]

so does this mean Vogel is going to turn his shitty remakes into even shittier free to play games with micro transactions?

That would require far too much effort.

He's very old, and very tired, you see.

Very old.

 

[thesecret1]

I just hope he's not too old to make Queen's Wish into a good game

 

[Modron]

I just hope he's not too old to make Queen's Wish into a good game

Granted Vogel isn't even that old he has just been doing his old man routine online since he was in his early 20s.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

so has the declined vogel decided to adopt sinister jewery of microtransactions and loot-boxes?

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

Jeff needs to seek spiritual replenishment. Someone should tell this guy to do Billy Crystal in City Slickers, or Gavin Belson visiting the desert, whatever it takes.

 

[thesecret1]

spiritual replenishment

An interview with Codex should do the job

 

[vonAchdorf]

But he does't come to the Codex.

 

[thesecret1]

But he does't come to the Codex.

He'll get better once he starts coming.

 

[Dayyālu]

He'll get better once he starts coming.

He has written extensively how the Codex isn't his audience, everything we stand for is outdated and unviable, and discussion with fans (even worse, discussion with fans with a solid knowledge of the subject) is completely poisonous. And he didn't say "some site", he specifically told the Codex to fuck off, cherry picking posts.

Have I also said that this has to be understood, because he's a very old and frail man? Very old and tired, you see.

 

[Infinitron]

Jeff must not be too busy right now: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/07/make-them-want-delay-fulfill-repeat.html

Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat.


Players can get a deep feeling of satisfaction from games that literally play themselves. How cool is that?

Last week, I began my discourse on how video games can warp your brain chemistry to bring you pleasure in order to make lots of money and how difficult, delicate, and awesome that process is.

I have eight observations about how video games cause your brain to secrete delicious dopamine. Here are the last four. If you can master this dark art, endless success awaits.

5. Different Genres of Games Provide Different Dopamine Delivery Systems

Role-playing games let your characters earn small improvements, providing a constant flow of drug. Tough puzzle games and Dark Souls-type games hold back your dose for a while as you master a challenge and then reward you in one big flood when you finally succeed.

Open-ended games like Destiny are for the serious addict, who wants a lot of hits over a period of time. Short, self-contained games are for someone who wants a limited supply or likes getting the hits in a variety of ways.

This is why there will always be a market for finite-length single-player story games. They are safe to play. However intensely they consume your time for a while, they end. I'm fine with dumping all this time into Subnautica because I know I will eventually kill the Final Fish and be free.

By the way, part of the genius of Achievements systems is that they create a whole new layer of fulfillment and addiction on top of what the games already provide, and they do it with very little effort. Whatever mad genius in Microsoft came up with the idea of the Gamer Score deserves the Nobel Prize For Awesomeness.


My next game, Queen's Wish. Beating dungeons gets resources. Use resources to buy shops. The shops give you better equipment. Each step provides dopamine.

6. Like All Drugs, You Will Eventually Develop Tolerance

You will always develop tolerance for a drug. You will eventually get tired of walking on the hedonic treadmill.

Most people, as they age, stop playing video games. They sometimes ask me, confused, why they don't want to play anymore. Games used to seem so important.

Part of this is the increasing obligations of adulthood, taking away your ability to spend hundreds of hours in an MMO. I think it's more than that. After all, if you care about something, REALLY care, you'll make time for it. If you were that desperate to play video games, you'd play video games.

No, I think it is that video game-induced dopamine hits are a fleeting and hollow pleasure. Every hit you get makes you less fulfilled than the one before. The sense of accomplishment is an illusion, after all. Eventually, the fun you get just doesn't justify the time expended, and you put down the controller and leave your house.


When the rewards are provides by machines you make yourself, that magnifies the fulfillment. Have this game running on three computers simultaneously to triple your pleasure!

7. Don't Be So Judgmental About This.

Seriously. Dopamine addiction is a problem, but it isn't that huge a problem. Why get so mad about it? You're not trying to cure cancer. You're not freeing an oppressed people. You're writing about video games.

Look. I love video games. I have my whole life. I've dedicated my career to them. I let me kids play them. I think they're terrific, in moderation.

Yet, if you spend a hundred hours playing a video game, I think you should ask yourself if it's the best use of your time. If you spend a thousand hours playing a game, I think that you are making a mistake. If my kids try to get into speedrunning, I will, in a friendly and gentle way, strongly encourage them to not do that.

Look, I don't want to make any big fancy declarations about morality or what other developers should do. Video game writing already has wayyy too much of that. I just try to run my business in a way I can feel good about.

These days, I write games that you can be pretty much done with after 50 hours. That's a lot of distraction and dopamine for your 20 bucks, and then I free you so you at least have the chance to go to the park or take swing dancing lessons. This is how I make my peace morally with what I sell.

All I know is this: Writing video games that provide pleasure without dopamine hits can be done. It's just hard. Storytelling is hard. Generating emotions is hard. Dopamine is the cheat code for compelling game design.

Which brings us back to Anthem.


Now you can carry your addictions on your walks with you! You never need to have a moment of tranquility again!

8. If You Want To Sell a Drug, You Have To Provide the Drug!

This is the final point, and the one that will protect you from ruin.

Almost every game, even the most artsy one, uses dopamine hits to keep the player going. For example, Papers, Please! is unquestionably artsy, but it provides happy-making rewards for each challenge you complete correctly, and there is even a nice score sheet at the end of every day. (Return of the Obra Dinn does exactly the same thing, but it is subtler.)

I think a major skill of a successful game designer is a feel for how to give a player dopamine. How to generate those hits. How to pace them. How to introduce enough variety in other parts of the game to create the illusion of a fulfilling activity.

If people are saying about your looter shooter, "We aren't getting good enough loot," that's not a whine. It shows you are fundamentally failing at your main task. It's like someone at your restaurant complaining that their meal doesn't contain food.

You have to respond by giving them more food. Not too much. Not enough to gorge them. Just enough to make them feel rewarded enough to stay on your hamster wheel.

Make the player want. Hold back what they want. Give them what they want. Repeat forever. This is the art.

This is a touch cynical, I know, but it's how I built a career and a life in this business. Game colleges should have classes called "Addiction For Fun and Profit, Mainly Profit." If you want to sell video games, you ignore this topic at your peril.

###

I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Jeff must not be too busy right now: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/07/make-them-want-delay-fulfill-repeat.html

Or it's time from his allotted marketing budget:

I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

This here is a broken man, and how he consolidates his failure - by writing this garbage.

 

[thesecret1]

Video games are bad. They're addictive drugs that sap away your time and ruin households. But I don't have issues with drug dealing, so buy my upcoming game.

Did Jeff turn into a bipolar soccer mom?

 

[Mustawd]

Vogel is 100% right though. Say what you will, but he’s making correct and accurate observations in his last article.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I think Jeff's observations are well wide of the mark. In his opinion piece he doesn't even discuss any downsides of how this "commercial" approach alienates a large number of the RPG community.
Granted there must be some elements that are somewhat accurate - as AAA studios are lately engaging in this seedy practice, but I'm not sure it has actually paid off long term.
The opinion piece has no actual measurements, studies or science, just opinion. Which is fine, but it devalues the article. i.e. its garbage. How about some studies that show correlation between pay to play and revenue instead of just speculating because it gives him a hard on.

There's one thing I do know about sales, and its that you cannot piss off repeat customers continually and expect to keep doing business with them.

 

[Mustawd]

In his opinion piece he doesn't even discuss any downsides of how this "commercial" approach alienates a large number of the RPG community.

He doesn’t have to. That isn’t the point he’s trying to make.

The opinion piece has no actual measurements, studies or science, just opinion

Which is why it is an opinion piece. His blog has always been an editorial based purely on his experience and observations as a game dev. It’s never pretended to be anything other than that.

Which is fine, but it devalues the article. i.e. its garbage. How about some studies that show correlation between pay to play and revenue instead of just speculating because it gives him a hard on.

Are there even studies on that? Also, I think the format is perfectly valid. I, for one, am interested in his ramblings. I might not always agree with his conclusions, but he’s a moderately entertaining column writer (because this is basically what the format is).

There's one thing I do know about sales, and its that you cannot piss off repeat customers continually and expect to keep doing business with them.

Ehhhh, there’s a lot of ways to think about this, especially with retarded gamers. But I generally agree with you. Although, it kind of seems like a non sequitur.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

It just rubs me up the wrong way, how he revels in how crap gaming and monetization has become.
Theres a place for bejewelled and all that, but RPGs and monetization don't mix well. Its not the future.

 

[Yosharian]

He describes it as a dribble of money but these games have ecosystems worth tens if thousands of dollars, if not more. I'm not sure I'd describe that as a dribble.

 

[Yosharian]

But he does't come to the Codex.

He'll get better once he starts coming.

The story of every man's life

 

[Yosharian]

I think there's more to videogames than just purely dopamine hits from getting loot. At least, potentially. Videogames can be so much more than that.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I think there's more to videogames than just purely dopamine hits from getting loot. At least, potentially. Videogames can be so much more than that.

Like all art and craftsmenship theres an awful lot of soul that can go into a piece. It can go as far as becoming a timeless icon of achievement (Mona Lisa or Witcher 3, etc). Its a whole topic that could be discussed for days.
What we get out of a game, *is* as much as is what is put into a game. Stories, inspiration, fun, amazement, and so much more. And now the craft is being devalued by some cynical old has-been wanting to celebrate his failure.
Even cynicism has its limits.

 

[Bad Sector]

I couldn't find any thread specifically for the Exile games in this subforum, but in any case, i wanted to try running free releases of Exile 1, 2 and 3 under modern 64bit Windows 10 - turns out it is mostly easy:

...assuming you do not mind that the game runs in a small area at the center of the monitor anyway. I have a low DPI monitor (23" 1366x768) so it is ok for me, but for anything approaching 1920x1080 (or beyond) you'd want to use a lower resolution (AFAIK with an Intel GPU you can use nearest neighbor scaling if you create a custom resolution at exactly half the native one and i remember reading that AMD is also planning to add this option to their drivers... though who knows when that will happen).

To do that use otvdm which adds 16bit Windows support on 64bit Windows. It is based on Wine, meaning there might be a few glitches here and there (though Exile seems to work like it would work on a 32bit version of Windows), but for most games it seems to work fine. Also it uses an emulated CPU, meaning it will be slow, but again it shouldn't matter for these old programs and games (it is mainly noticeable on the Exile installers that take a bit longer than the usual "instant" you'd see on something this old running natively :-P). You can either drag-and-drop the exile installer and later the exile.exe file to the otvdm.exe or, preferably, double click on the "install.reg" registry file (note below!) to install it system-wide so that 16bit applications can run (mostly) seamlessly by double clicking them.

Note that for exile, for some reason the installer fails to create the shortcut to the game itself (the shortcuts to the editor is created though). You can do it manually or just run the game from its folder.

Otvdm has a help file viewer which should display the manuals fine (Windows 10 has removed winhelp), though i prefer the real winhelp and i have copied it from an older version of Windows (it is a bit tricky to make it work system-wide as you need to fiddle with file ownership, otherwise windows will not allow you to replace the stub that shows an error message with the real program - if anyone cares i can post instructions, but TBH there are everywhere online). If you decide to use Otvdm's version (which comes from Wine) note that it may not launch from within the game and you may need to run winhlp32.exe from the Otvdm's folder directly and open the manual from there.

EDIT: i forgot to mention that you need to edit the install.reg file before double clicking it to replace the C:\PATH\TO\otvdm.exe with the path where you extracted the files, otherwise you'll get an error whenever you try to run the program. Also otvdm.exe will always show a console window, you can instead replace it with otvdmw.exe which will not show the console window (but on the other hand if something goes wrong you wont see it as errors from the emulation are displayed there).

 

[Deuce Traveler]

Very nice! I got Exile to run using DOSBox to start Win 3.1, but always nice to see other ways.

 

[baud]

Even Vogel realize this:

Why All Of Our Games Look Like Crap