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Where Addictive Design Came From - Back to the Arcade
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Andrew reads out a chapter from his in progress book on the history of addictive design, going back to the Arcade and the seaside amusements.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Dopamine Slot Machine'
00:00:11
Andrew Wilmot
Good morning, good day, good evening. Whenever you are, or welcome to the dopamine slot machine. The podcast that discusses what do you need to know about the video games your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked? How do they make money from your children?
00:00:23
Andrew Wilmot
What can you do to make sure that your child's relationship with video games is a positive one?
Addictive Design in Video Games
00:00:27
Andrew Wilmot
My name is Andrew. I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer. And I've been busy. I've been super busy and one of those things I've been busy with is I've actually been putting together a book. So it's on the history and use of addictive design in video games. It is a long-form version of what this podcast is about and I thoroughly... we don't even have a working title for it yet.
00:00:52
Andrew Wilmot
That will come when it's written but I've got a number of chapters that have been completed and so I thought that would be really good to just read one of these out, get some feedback from it.
Debunking Myths About Older Games
00:01:06
Andrew Wilmot
And so this chapter is actually on arcade machines, so sort of prototype addictive design in video games. There's always been this assumption that older games are good, right? Older games don't have any of the nasty addictive design that newer games do.
00:01:22
Andrew Wilmot
But That's actually really not the case, and there's actually some really quite cynical use of addictive design going all the way back to the arcade machine.
00:01:35
Andrew Wilmot
So without further ado, I am just going to read out what I've written. So this is a this is me reading out chapter two, insert coin to continue.
Space Invaders and Addictive Design
00:01:46
Andrew Wilmot
In the summer of 1978, Japanese engineer named Tomohiro Nishikado discovered more or less accidentally the difficulty curve. Mishikado had spent the best part of a year building Space Invaders, almost single-handed, for the Taito Corporation, designing the hardware, programming the game, and drawing the aliens themselves.
00:02:03
Andrew Wilmot
The machine he produced had a flaw that he couldn't afford to fix. The processor was not powerful enough to animate 55 invaders smoothly, so the game began at a crawl, and as the Pellaeus shot the invaders down, and the processor's burden lightened, the survivors marched faster and faster, until the last alien stroked across the screen at a speed no beginner could handle.
00:02:23
Andrew Wilmot
It was a hardware artefact, the electronic equivalent of an engine running away downhill. Nishikado decided to keep it rather than correct it. He had built, without quite meaning to, a machine that automatically calibrated its own hostility to the player's success.
00:02:38
Andrew Wilmot
It was easy enough at the start that anyone could feel the pull, and reliably lethal by the end so that winning felt like a triumph. The standard anecdote at this point in the story is that Space Invaders were so successful in Japan that the country ran short of 100 yen coins and the mint was forced to increase production.
00:02:55
Andrew Wilmot
And I repeat it here mainly for the pleasure of telling you that it appears to be false. Researchers who have gone looking for evidence in mint records and contemporary Japanese sources have come back empty-handed.
Monetization in Arcade Machines
00:03:05
Andrew Wilmot
The tale seems to have grown in the telling, mostly in the Western media.
00:03:09
Andrew Wilmot
What is true is impressive enough. The game earned enormous sums. Coffee shops and vegetable stores converted themselves into space invader houses to hold the machines. Within two years, the business it created was, by some contemporary estimates, taking more money in America than Hollywood took at the box office.
00:03:27
Andrew Wilmot
I learned about coins as a fitting creation myth all the same, though, because the coin was the whole business. The casino wants you in the chair for as long as possible, since the machine earns continuously while you sit there. But an arcade machine earns at one moment only, a moment of insertion.
00:03:41
Andrew Wilmot
and so its commercial logic runs the other way. The arcade machine needs you to die. needs sessions to end, queues to move and coins to drop. And its entire art lies in arranging for your death to arrive on schedule, while feeling every single time like it's your own fault, and very nearly your own triumph.
00:03:58
Andrew Wilmot
The casino engineered the almost win. The arcade engineered the almost survived. They both trigger the same thought in the player, though. One more go. This was of course equal parts art and science, and it was managed as carefully as on the casino floor, albeit with cruder instruments.
00:04:15
Andrew Wilmot
The industry ran on earnings data. American operators read magazines that published weekly takings by machine, route operators rotated cabinets in and out of locations according to what they earned, and a game that could not hold its corner commercially was gone within weeks, regardless of its artistic merits.
00:04:31
Andrew Wilmot
Manufacturers tested prototypes in the field before committing to production, placing unmarked cabinets in selected bars and arcades, and measuring the flow of coins. The design law of the period held that a credit should last a novice somewhere around two or three minutes, long enough to seduce, yet short enough to pay.
00:04:48
Andrew Wilmot
Inside every cabinet, hidden from the player, sat a row of small switches by which the operator, not the designer, could adjust the james game's generosity, the number of lives, the score required for a bonus life, the global difficulty.
00:05:01
Andrew Wilmot
The same machine could be set to be easier in a quiet seaside town and brutal in a busy city centre, tuned to its market like a fruit machine's payout schedule. The player facing it had no way of knowing which version of the game they were paying to fight.
Pay-to-Continue Model in Arcades
00:05:14
Andrew Wilmot
Then, in the early 1980s, somebody had the idea that death itself could be sold back to the customer. 1981 scrolling shooter game Vanguard was one of the first to use it but within a few years it was universal. When you died, you could pay money to continue that very game.
00:05:27
Andrew Wilmot
Keep your score, keep your progress, the level you fought to reach, and the time and money you had previously invested to get to that point. You die, and the clock starts counting. You have ten seconds to decide in public, with your friends watching, your hand already in your pocket, whether everything you've accomplished in the last 20 minutes is worth one more coin.
00:05:46
Andrew Wilmot
The machine has installed a sunk cost grenade and lit the fuse. Gauntlet in 1985 innovated further. In Gauntlet, your character's health drained continuously, whether or not anything was attacking you, simply as a function of time spent.
00:05:59
Andrew Wilmot
You could replenish it in game with food found in the map, but it was never enough. By the time the famous voice boomed from the cabinet, Warrior needs food badly. That is roughly, by the way, how how that voice went. You know, go look up these games. and If any of you played Gauntlet, um then I apologise for my somewhat butchering of the way they did that. But anyway, by the time the famous voice boomed from the Cabinet, you were already weighing up the next coin.
00:06:27
Andrew Wilmot
And even better. Gauntlet could have up to four players working on a team, pouring in coins simultaneously. And so if you did not keep feeding the machine coins, it wasn't just your progress that was being lost.
00:06:39
Andrew Wilmot
And it earned spectacularly. One California arcade operator reported earning $15,000 in 16 weeks. A Canadian operator reported earning $4.5,000 in nine days.
00:06:51
Andrew Wilmot
It's the first game that I've been able to find where the line between playing and paying was fully dissolved, but money was not the price of admission, but a consumable resource inside the game itself.
Gambling Mechanics and Children
00:07:01
Andrew Wilmot
Four decades later, when a children's game on a tablet sells a bundle of gems to refill an energy meter, that the same game drained, is running Gauntlet's business model with better graphics.
00:07:11
Andrew Wilmot
Like much of Britain, I have fond childhood memories of seaside amusements. Mine in particular was the Carousel Amusements at Westwood Ho, a place that, when I visited with my own children this year, still retained the same musk and soundscape that it had done 20 years previously.
00:07:25
Andrew Wilmot
My parents and their friends really gave in to please give me and my sisters and the other children in our extended North the Devon pseudo family scraps of change to spend at the arcade. But when we did, we save at every moment. Ours is a massive gamer at this age already.
00:07:38
Andrew Wilmot
It was not the video games that drew our attention. The cabinets shared their floor with an older population of machines. The Tuppany pushers with their trembling shells of copper and silver. The cranes with their soft toys and their slack-jawed claws.
00:07:51
Andrew Wilmot
The lowest stakes fruit machines. And here is the peculiarity. Those machines are gambling in the plain legal sense and children are allowed to play them. British law sorts gaming machines into categories and the bottom category, category D, has no minimum age at all, which makes Britain a rare case amongst comparable countries, a place where a seven-year-old can legally put money into a machine of chance and where this is considered not a scandal but a holiday.
00:08:17
Andrew Wilmot
I'm not ashamed to say that my own children did exactly that in the same plays I had done decades before, and quite probably with the same machines. Let's take a closer look at these machines. The crane game presents itself as a test of skill, and skill is real here, but it's not the variable that matters.
00:08:33
Andrew Wilmot
Because on many machines, the claw's grip strength is a setting configured by the operator against a target payout rate, so that the claw holds firmly on the plays the machine can afford. Investigations into operator manuals have found exactly the language you would expect.
00:08:47
Andrew Wilmot
Instructions for programming the claw to pay out roughly once in so many attempts. That is to say, a variable ratio schedule wearing a fairground costume. The pusher, mine and my five-year-old son's favourite if I suppose it was anything to go by, works on near misses the way a slot machine does.
00:09:02
Andrew Wilmot
The coin ledge perpetually one nudge from collapse, the pile engineered to look more precarious than it is. A British child's first encounter with engineered chance does not happen at 18 in a bookmaker's.
00:09:14
Andrew Wilmot
It happens at 7 on a pier at the seaside with a paper cup of two penny pieces supplied by a parent. In Britain, at least, the importing of gambling mechanics into childhood happened a very long time ago.
1980s Arcade Game Panic
00:09:26
Andrew Wilmot
The arcades did eventually frighten the adult world. The adult world managed to be frightened of almost everything except the addictive design. It was a very American panic. The arcade inherited the cultural position of the pool hall, a dim room where the young gathered unsupervised.
00:09:41
Andrew Wilmot
Towns restricted how close arcades could sit to schools, required adult accompaniment and capped machine numbers. One Massachusetts town band coin-operated video games outright in 1982 and did not get around to repealing the ban for more than 30 years.
00:09:54
Andrew Wilmot
In the Philippines, Ferdinand Marco simply banned the machines altogether, giving the country two weeks to surrender them. The episode that everyone remembers came in November 1982. The United States Surgeon General, Everett Koop, told an audience that video games might be hazardous to the young, who were, he suggested, pouring themselves into the machines, body and soul.
00:10:15
Andrew Wilmot
And the next day was obliged to clarify that this was personal opinion, that no scientific evidence supported it. In this, we have the founding anecdote that backs every argument that concerns about video games are just hysteria.
00:10:29
Andrew Wilmot
Nobody asked to see the difficulty settings. Nobody held hearings on the continue screens countdown. on field testing children's play sessions against coin drop rates, or a machine in which health was drained by design and was refilled for money.
00:10:42
Andrew Wilmot
The adults in 1982 worried about where children were, who they were with, and what the games depicted, which were the questions the pool hall had taught them to ask. The actual operating logic of the machines, the part that was genuinely new in the world, walked through the whole affair without being looked at once.
00:10:59
Andrew Wilmot
Across town, as the last chapter to described, and just for context, the previous chapter on this talks about the development of gambling machines and how data was used to make them more and more addictive across the same sort of time.
00:11:13
Andrew Wilmot
Across town, as the last chapter described, gambling regulators were apparent to rule on whether slot machines reels were allowed to exaggerate a near miss. The arcade machines equivalent never met a regulator at all. The moral panic was aimed at the wrong element.
00:11:27
Andrew Wilmot
I caught up with arcade gaming expert Steve Trezor, best known for his gaming YouTube channel, Mass Replay.
Game Addiction and Design Tricks
00:11:33
Andrew Wilmot
Thinking about game addiction, this is me speaking quoting Steve here, I definitely think that it can be traced back to the arcade.
00:11:40
Andrew Wilmot
People complain about microtransactions, but that's what we were doing in the 80s and 90s. There was a failsafe. Games had to be fun. There were tons of arcade games that were bad and no one played. But even then, there were some surprisingly predatory practices.
00:11:54
Andrew Wilmot
The worst were the games that made you think you can beat the game, but then would cheat using something called input reading, where the game instantly reacts to player inputs. You might spend $10 to get to the final boss, then the game cheats and you have to go again.
00:12:05
Andrew Wilmot
But even before you got to the final boss, arcade game designers had some tricks up their sleeve. Something maybe eighty to ninety percent of arcade games did was to make the first level in boss really easy to hook you in.
00:12:17
Andrew Wilmot
Mortal Kombat in the arcade was known to do something called rubber banding. The first fight is easy, the second is harder, but from then it would adapt to the user's ability to try and keep the player in the game as long as possible.
00:12:29
Andrew Wilmot
And then for about two decades, the problem largely solved itself. For the most unprincipled reason imaginable, the business model changed.
Transition to Home Consoles
00:12:37
Andrew Wilmot
The consoles that conquered living rooms through the late 1980s and 1990s were sold in a different financial model.
00:12:42
Andrew Wilmot
A cartridge cost a serious sum of money, paid once in advance. from the moment of purchase, the publisher had no further claim on the player's wallet. This transformed the design brief from the bottom up.
00:12:54
Andrew Wilmot
The arcade machine needed you to fail quickly and pay again. The cartridge needed you to feel weeks later that your money had been well spent, and to say so to your friends. Save systems and passwords existed so that progress could be kept well and ransomed.
00:13:07
Andrew Wilmot
Difficulty settings moved out of the operator's locked cabinet and into the player's options menu. Games acquired endings, and the ending mattered, because a game you could finish was a game you could recommend. and BoxCopy began boasting about how many hours of play the purchase contained, hours now being a measure of value delivered rather than revenue extracted.
00:13:26
Andrew Wilmot
This transition was gradual, and design elements from arcade games lingered for a while. Now that Nintendo has become the de facto family console, be difficult to imagine, but there was a time that Nintendo Hard was used to describe games with absurd difficulty, games with DNA direct from the arcade.
00:13:42
Andrew Wilmot
The direction of travel was real, and by the turn of the millennium, the canonical video game was an authored experience with a beginning, a middle, and an end, made by people whose commercial interest pointed the same direction as the player's enjoyment.
00:13:55
Andrew Wilmot
It is the only period in this entire history in which that has been straightforwardly true, and I think it is why people of roughly my age remember the games of that era with something close to love. The machine was finally, properly, on our side.
00:14:09
Andrew Wilmot
I don't think any game encapsulates this change better than Gauntlet Dark Legacy. Gauntlet Dark Legacy debuted on the then cutting edge PlayStation 2 on the 2nd of May, 2001. It featured the same four player dungeon traversal that the original arcade games were famous for, but without the health drain and without the continuous supply of coins needed to complete the game.
00:14:30
Andrew Wilmot
This version of Gauntlet was an absolute staple of my childhood, with many late nights spent with my childhood best friend, Alex, in front of a TV, cable stretching out in front of us, We beat it, just about, although it took us an immense amount of time at our young age.
00:14:44
Andrew Wilmot
Saving progress, levelling up, and being able to try, fail, and try again meant that this game was, with persistence, within our grasp. Except I've actually told a lie. Dawn of Dark Legacy did not debut on the PlayStation 2 in 2001. It debuted year earlier, with an arcade version, in June 2000.
00:15:04
Andrew Wilmot
By this point, the arcade model had become a hobbyist niche. Steve Trezor and I had polar opposite experiences with Gauntlet Dark Legacy. I played it first on the home console, only discovering the arcade port the differences between the two through Steve's YouTube channel, whereas he knows the arcade game best.
00:15:22
Andrew Wilmot
Through his series, Arcade Economy, where he goes through arcade games and works out how much it would have cost somebody to beat at the time, he found Gauntlet Dark Legacy cost nearly $60 to finish. A figure would now have to double to account for inflation.
Console vs. Arcade Game Mechanics
00:15:35
Andrew Wilmot
and one that is probably an underestimate compared to the contemporary average arcade goer. That simple change monetisation and the corresponding small change in game mechanics influences everything.
00:15:49
Andrew Wilmot
Gauntlet Dark Legacy stops being a delightfully colourful, thematically diverse adventure romp that two six-year-olds can beat given enough time and instead becomes a race against the clock. In the arcade version, your health ticked down, just like the Gauntlet games of old did.
00:16:07
Andrew Wilmot
there was another thing that surprised us comparing the two. To get to the final boss in Gauntlet Dark Legacy, you have to collect various runes hidden throughout the levels. This can be a bit frustrating. The levels have frequent point-of-no returns, meaning you have to replay the whole level to get another chance of finding the rune.
00:16:22
Andrew Wilmot
Except in the arcade version, when you select a realm, you have to play all the levels in it sequentially. Miss a rune? You don't just have to replay the level, you have to beat the realm and the realm boss and then replay the entire realm.
00:16:35
Andrew Wilmot
There's one last change I want to highlight in the shift to the home console. In the console version, all of the realms bar the first one are locked. To unlock these, you need to collect crystals scattered the levels, with later realms requiring more crystals. This meant that to progress through the game, you had to repeat levels just to collect these crystals.
00:16:54
Andrew Wilmot
This pads out the game for, from a development perspective, more or less free.
00:16:59
Andrew Wilmot
Difficulty itself, interestingly, survived the realignment. Hard games went on being made, went on being loved, but hardness now answered to craft rather than to coin drop. Difficulty is a designed experience with fairness as its discipline, and the lineage runs from those cartridges directly to the punishing modern games that I would defend as art.
00:17:18
Andrew Wilmot
The Dial-marked difficulty was never the problem. The question, here and everywhere else in this book, is who that dial serves. For 20 odd years in the home, it served the player.
00:17:30
Andrew Wilmot
The interlude lasted exactly as long as the till stayed disconnected. The arcade model had not been refuted, only stranded, cut off from the player, but it was waiting for a connection.
Microtransactions in Digital Games
00:17:40
Andrew Wilmot
Broadband arrived, then app stores, then a social network with the games platform bolted to its side, and the per-coin economy came back as the microtransaction.
00:17:49
Andrew Wilmot
The continue countdown came back as the extra lives offer, and the operators' hidden difficulty switches came back in software, no longer set once per cabinet but adjustable continuously, per player from a distance.
00:18:00
Andrew Wilmot
The machines of the next chapter do not need you to walk to the pier. They came to the living room. You're carrying them in your pocket. And that was chapter two of my in-progress book. A lot will change, a lot will be edited as this continues, of course, but it would be great if I could get any feedback on this. um The book itself goes all the way from the you know origins of addictive design,
00:18:25
Andrew Wilmot
through how it developed in the to the state of it now and presenting an optimistic case for games of the future as well as what risks there are if game continues to go down the direction it has done.
Challenges in Publishing Andrew's Book
00:18:40
Andrew Wilmot
It's very early still, I would say at this point about 75% of the content has been written, but the last 25% key interviews, etc, e etc. And that's going to take a while to say nothing about choices, about going out to agents or self-publishing. At this point, I'll just be happy to finish it.
00:18:59
Andrew Wilmot
Future chapters may be read out in future episodes. I'm also incredibly busy with the Brain Safe Standard, incredibly busy with talks, and the fact that it's summer. And, you know, I've got two kids at home, and even with the best will in the world, and juggling leave, and summer clubs, and we're very lucky to have very involved grandparents.
00:19:21
Andrew Wilmot
Summer's still a struggle. It's going to be a struggle for all parents, and it it's a struggle for me as well. This has been the Dopamine Slot Machine. Thank you, and see you soon.