A lot of people really love these timesink activities or are addicts who can't not do it. It's been a part of open-world action-adventure design for over a decade.
A lot of people really love mongoloid romances in cRPGs. It’s been a part of cRPGs more than a decade now, since BG2. A lot of people also love mindless streamlined combat. In fact, a lot of people really love many inane and stupid things for many thousands of years now, since the beginning of the humankind, because a lot of people are stupid and have no taste. This counting of causal heads and years has nothing to do with the real value of genuine gameplay.
Yeah, but there's something about those MMO mechanics that goes beyond that. It took me a while to click to it, but once you see it, it's there staring you right in the face.
Pokie machines. They're fucking pokie machines.
There is no area of gambling that have seen more research focused on swindling people out of their money, that makes more profit and does so from the most vulnerable members of the community than electronic slot machines. There's an incredible amount of science behind it - you could almost say that casinos have driven psychology research for the past 20 years in the same way that porn accidentally created the modern internet. They're meticulously crafted to create addiction - the lights that flash when someone wins a token amount calibrated at just the right level to stimulate mood, the timing of the small payouts given just the right amount of unpredictability to create a rush instead of feeling like a slog, rigged odds buried under tons of visual and aural cues that suggest a completely different system to that which controls the odds beneath the hood (showing graphics of cards as though you're actually playing poker instead of feeding coins to a fixed algorithm that guarantees overwhelming losses), just enough selection and button pushing to make the psychological reinforcement mechanisms tick over while remaining repetitive enough to be hypnotic, the timing between the button push and the animated response - nothing is left to chance.
Okay, so some people are weak, lots of us play cards with friends, few of us develop a gambling problem - it's not like it's a physical addiction like booze or drugs, hey? Well, there's truth to that - gamblers only have to beat the addiction itself, they don't have to take on the double whammy of addiction and withdrawal sickness simultaneously. But pokies addiction isn't just gambling addiction. These machines are designed to create a chemical response, manipulating the body's own production of opiates (the natural function of opiates in the body is to make you crave food, so you don't ignore that hungry feeling and starve - even the body's natural opiate output is designed to override your decision making and reinforce necessary behaviours) and dopamine (ie the stuff that cocaine simulates). Unless you're naturally inclined towards gambling addiction, or you just lack willpower, you can play cards every week and never become an addict. Pokies might not create withdrawal symptoms, but they still function more like drugs than card games - it doesn't matter who you are, or how much willpower you have, if you play them long enough or often enough, the chemical mechanisms will kick in and you'll become addicted.
Look at the design of electronic poker machines, then look at what has become the standard MMO mechanics. Hidden drop rates with just the right level of unpredictability and false audio visual feedback, the timing, the use of lighting and animation, the big 'you're a winner' symbols at constant but not quite predictable intervals, the timing between button press and effect, fuck even the actual gameplay. I wouldn't be surprised if they even have the same algorithms running under the hood!
That's why, in computer games of all places - one of the most innocent hobbies around, one so innocuous that parents trust their kids to play them unsupervised - you've started to get people talking, completely unprompted, about feeling like they're addicted. It's why people play MMOs for such absurd hours that they damage their jobs and social lives until they only associate with other addicts...even though they recognise all the while that they aren't having fun for over 95% of their play time. It's why they wait in queues for battlegrounds and instances that they're grinding for the 100th time instead of going 'fuck it, I'll do something else and play when it's less busy'.
Sure, people have always liked crap computer games (fuck you too 'Ghosts and Goblins', the 8 year old in me still wants his quarters back), but this shit, no this is entirely new. Even during the arcade era, with the flashing lights and rigged time limits, there was nothing that resembled this kind of behaviour - there were people who spent way too much time on it, but never this widespread feeling of not having fun yet feeling compelled to play them anyway. Now, designers boast about how good they are at creating 'just one more click, click click' gameplay, not even realising that they've dropped 'fun' from their design goals, or that they've been relegated to making fake animated poker cards.
They crossed the fucking line when they introduced real money auction houses. Once they did that, gambling addiction wasn't just their game design anymore, it became their business model.
I'm not saying we should be playing the world's smallest violins for the poor MMO addicts. There is always a point where you can feel an addiction kicking in, before it takes hold, and people dig their own graves. But fuck, man, this is an industry that makes entertainment for kids. There are 10 yr olds all over the world playing this stuff, and I don't blame their parents because whilst there's a place for games aimed at adults, gaming's soul has always been that you can make money by bringing fun and joy to children. Developers forgetting that is one of the biggest drivers if the decline, and it's why AAA developers with their gritty sexy game plots had their asses kicked by minecraft. The same way that comics went to shit when they decided that their market was pathetic man-childs instead of actual kids and adults who aren't ashamed of indulging their inner child.
Parents expect their kids to be at risk when they're crossing the road, playing football or sneaking down to the park to smoke pot, but for all the media scares, if there's one time parents expect to be able to take their eye off the kids so they can do the vacuuming, it's when they're playing a computer game.
Oh, and the screenshots were great and well-signed, so good job to whoever did that.
