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The Addictive Design Red Flags That I Look For
84 Plays18 days ago
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-dopamine-slot-machine-reviews-your-christmas-list-games-tickets-1969404096668
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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 you need to know about the video games your children are playing. How are they designed to get your kids hooked?
00:00:23
Andrew Wilmot
How do they make money from your children? And what can you do to make sure that your child's relationship with video games is a positive one?
Evaluating Games for Children
00:00:30
Andrew Wilmot
My name is Andrew, I'm a dad of two and a lifelong gamer. And today we're going a little bit abstract as I'm going to talk about the framework by which I evaluate games and their app appropriateness for children.
00:00:42
Andrew Wilmot
I will explicitly not be talking about content as that's something that's deeply personal. For instance, I am fine with cartoon violence, cartoon shooting games. My partner is not.
00:00:55
Andrew Wilmot
Therefore, we do not let our children play them. And I don't think there can be an objective framework for that. Instead, I'll be talking about addictive design elements and flags that I look for, as I was far easier to quantify. We know the impact of them, whereas with content, that's going to be a deeply personal question for you and other adults in your child's life and your child.
Understanding Microtransactions
00:01:18
Andrew Wilmot
So firstly, the main thing, the first thing that I look for is microtransactions and in-game currencies. This is the most obvious warning sign, and you really don't need to have any expertise in game design to understand it.
00:01:33
Andrew Wilmot
So firstly, microtransaction is just a word for any sort of small purchase you can make in-game. Well, we say small. You can actually have huge microtransactions. But that's generally the term that's used to describe in-game purchases.
00:01:50
Andrew Wilmot
And when i talk about in-game currencies, what a lot of games do is... Before you can pay for anything in game, pay for any of for the additional content they've got, you have to first buy like some some virtual coins, and then you spend those virtual coins in a similar way to how you might pay for casino chips.
00:02:09
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway. so If a game is promoting a marketplace of in-game items, then that means that the game designers are incentivized to include predatory mechanics and addictive design, as the more time and personal value the players, and when I say the players, I'm talking about your children, invest in that game, the more likely they are to pester their parents into letting them spend more money in-game, the more likely they are to try and get their peers to play it.
00:02:38
Andrew Wilmot
This is in stark contrast to sort of standard single player game which is all have a story you buy it once you play it it's not trying to constantly pull you back in it's not engaging in that sort of addictive design elements that these types of typically free though you do get paid games with uh with micro transactions and in-game currencies it's not engaging with the practices that these games do um Now, that doesn't mean that every game without microtransactions will be high quality, nor does it mean that every game with them will be harmful to your child. So Minecraft has them, for instance.
00:03:21
Andrew Wilmot
If you aren't able to do if you're able to spend hours investigating every game, you could do a lot worse than simply saying no to any game within app in-game purchases.
00:03:33
Andrew Wilmot
That said, Even within microtransactions, there's a huge variety of practices, some more harmful than others. At one end, you have loot boxes, which are paid for with in-game currency, that give in-game items that impact gameplay.
00:03:50
Andrew Wilmot
Or to de-jargon, the game pushes gambling to get an advantage over other players, and thus a disadvantage to players who don't engage in that gambling mechanic. And I'm being very literal here when I say gambling. Loot boxes being you you pay money to open a box, you don't know what's in it. It is gambling. The EU recognises it as gambling.
00:04:11
Andrew Wilmot
There's increasing regulatory recognition of the fact that it is, for all intents and purposes, very not not particularly different to casino-style games.
00:04:22
Andrew Wilmot
EA Sports FC and their ultimate team cards, EA Sports FC, previously known as FIFA, by the way, are a great example of this, where if you want to keep up with the the the meta, as in the best team and the best players for that current season, you need to be engaging with this mechanic, or you need to be putting in huge amounts of time to keep up, which, as we established, then makes you more likely to actually just spend money anyway.
00:04:49
Andrew Wilmot
On the other end, you do have microtransactions that genuinely expand on gameplay and are more like traditional expansion packs.
Cosmetic Items and Social Proofing
00:04:57
Andrew Wilmot
To take one example of a game which is probably not on many of your children's radar, Lies of Pea, which is a Pinocchio-themed ah Dark Souls-esque game. So, yeah, definitely not going to be on most of your children's Christmas lists. um It's got a DLC called Overture, and what that actually is is a...
00:05:18
Andrew Wilmot
that It's a sort prequel set of levels to the main story. And although, you know, that's, although that is then framed as DLC and you'll look like DLC in the in-game stores the same way, sort within like the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Store, the same way that um in-game purchases will look like in other games, it's perfectly fine. It's just like a traditional expansion pack.
00:05:46
Andrew Wilmot
Now, sort of between these two extremes, one aspect that I don't think parents consider enough is cosmetic items. So it can sound kind of ridiculous, right? Wanting to spend real money on clothes for your character.
00:06:02
Andrew Wilmot
Like, just saying that out loud sounds kind of weird, but it only really sounds weird to to parents who aren't actively engaged in these digital spaces. So for children for whom video games or a specific video game is their primary third space.
00:06:19
Andrew Wilmot
By that I mean it's the the main space that they are socializing outside of school and outside of the home. um This can take the the role of fashion pieces. It becomes a way of self-expression. Now, I would say a very maladaptive form of self-expression.
Addiction Mechanics in Games
00:06:35
Andrew Wilmot
I'm giving some major side-eye to To some of the academics that praise this type of gaming as a positive form of self-expression, I really don't think it is, but it does take that take that role of self-expression for children who don't get to socialise in person, don't go get to have unstructured socialisation in person with their friends.
00:06:57
Andrew Wilmot
Instead of getting an expensive pair of trainers or branded clothing, you'll find children using in-game cosmetics as their social proofing. Now, I've never been somebody who likes to have branded clothes.
00:07:13
Andrew Wilmot
You know, you're never going to catch me in, was it Nike Airs? ma I don't know.
00:07:21
Andrew Wilmot
But I think it's fair to say that there are some some issues, some some things to be aware of with the sort of traditional way of using branded clothing to signify wealth, class, et cetera, et cetera, the way that, you know, I wanted to be cool because I've got the latest trainers. Now, that's just amplified when you put it in a digital environment.
00:07:45
Andrew Wilmot
So moving on from that and onto something that's very related to microtransactions and DLC is the streak mechanic and daily login rewards. So I sort of touched on this briefly when I was talking about um EA Sports FC and I said to get sort of player packs for that you could just play endlessly and get those same packs for free and paying ends up being a shortcut. A lot of players will opt to do that.
00:08:13
Andrew Wilmot
Now, games rewarding daily logins is something I look at with a lot of suspicion. It's a mechanic that's basically been lifted wholesale from Snapchat, Duolingo, and TikTok.
00:08:24
Andrew Wilmot
We know that it's extremely habit-forming. We know the impact that has on its users. We know how breaking that streak causes emotional pain. We know that it encourages people to start checking in daily. And pushes them into valuing these digital spaces more than real world spaces.
00:08:44
Andrew Wilmot
Now, these would then typically be tied with an extensive in-game marketplace because it's it is hard to take this away from that sort of DLC in-game marketplace because ultimately what it's trying to do here is get you to spend as much time as possible in the game while simultaneously making you attach a value to items in the game.
00:09:06
Andrew Wilmot
So instead of paying £5 for a weapon skin, or even just a weapon to get an advantage over other players, you can spend 100 hours of gameplay.
00:09:18
Andrew Wilmot
Very quickly, starts to seem like the rational, quote-unquote, thing to do is to just spend the £5, right? Of course, the rational thing isn't to spend 100 or into one of these games.
00:09:33
Andrew Wilmot
The rational thing to do is have in-person socialization and unstructured socialization time that isn't just on a games console, your phone, the computer.
00:09:44
Andrew Wilmot
But if you are already having put a lot of your own personal value into these digital spaces, then you can see how the going from spending logging in every day, spending all this time to get these items, then leads in into spending money to get these items.
00:10:05
Andrew Wilmot
So that's all very easy to understand. I'm going to go a little bit more abstract now and talk about gameplay reward loops. and This is much harder to evaluate just at a glance, particularly if you're not a gamer yourself. does You really need to understand how a game mechanically rewards players.
00:10:24
Andrew Wilmot
All games work on gameplay reward loops. You complete an action or series of actions and receive feedback on those actions that encourages you to complete the next series or sets of actions.
00:10:34
Andrew Wilmot
And within a game there will be multiple reward loops. To take an example, and I will admit I am going all the way back to Pokemon Fire Red, I think is the latest Pokemon game I played, so that's about 20 years ago.
00:10:48
Andrew Wilmot
You have the reward loops of catching Pokemon, beating other Pokemon and trainers in battles, leveling up your Pokemon, exploring new areas, beating gym leaders, and ultimately this culminates in completing the game, story, and Pokedex. You can catch one of every Pokemon.
00:11:05
Andrew Wilmot
Now, Within these gameplay loops as well, you will have degrees of randomness. If you are searching for a rare Pokémon, for instance, looking for Pikachu in Viridian Forest, which I remember off the top of my head has a 5% encounter rate in a Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen, you might run into Pikachu on your first go.
00:11:25
Andrew Wilmot
It may take 20 or 30 encounters. We might prefer to this variable reward loops as a Skinner box after a set of experiments showing induced compulsivity in rats and pigeons done in the fifty s In contrast, training Pokémon and completing the story has quite a fixed water loop without a huge amount of randomness.
00:11:47
Andrew Wilmot
So shorter gameplay loops with high degrees of randomness will be more compulsion-forming than longer gameplay loops with low degrees of randomness. We see this in again in slot machine designs.
00:12:02
Andrew Wilmot
A game like Fortnite will have relatively short gameplay loops. An engagement, as in two players fighting each other in a game, may last seconds, whilst a full game, and keep in mind most players are eliminated long before the end of the game, lasts around 20 minutes.
00:12:17
Andrew Wilmot
With a huge degree of randomness, there's 100 players, only one of them can win. And once you include random rewards from gameplay as well, it's really easy to see how Fortnite was the inspiration of this
Online Interactions and Parental Controls
00:12:28
Andrew Wilmot
podcast's name. It is the eponymous dopamine slot machine, as it were.
00:12:33
Andrew Wilmot
The aspect that I hear parents talk about the most though, in terms of things that they've got concerns about, is online interactions. And I'm going to bundle in to this conversation user-generated content as is the same fundamental problem of giving your child access to the internet, being in some way giving the internet access to your child.
00:12:53
Andrew Wilmot
So multiplayer games with in-game chat and social features such as Roblox, Fortnite, these are something I'm very careful about with my children. There's normally some degree of parental controls around these, but I'd be reticent to rely on them, particularly if you're not also playing these same games.
00:13:12
Andrew Wilmot
These parental controls vary massively in terms of their fidelity, coverage, ease of implementation, and if you aren't actively engaged in that game as well, and your child is looking for ways around it, they will beat you.
00:13:26
Andrew Wilmot
They will. It doesn't matter how much you think you've got something locked down. They've got much more time and energy and motivation to get around this than you do. As a rule of thumb, if they are too young for Facebook, they're too young to use social features in-game.
00:13:43
Andrew Wilmot
You might not even realise that they're social features in-game as well. So even if it doesn't look like there is a social game at a glance, even if you're not hearing voice chat whilst they're playing, spend some time digging into it.
00:13:58
Andrew Wilmot
That said, I want to briefly touch on local multiplayer. So
00:14:04
Andrew Wilmot
local multiplayer really was the standard light 20 years ago. And I've got very fond memories of what gaming with my mates used to look like.
00:14:14
Andrew Wilmot
So that would be, say, renting a game from ah the local blockbuster, picking up some pizzas, and playing split-screen Halo on my mate's Xbox around his house in his living room.
00:14:29
Andrew Wilmot
That sort of thing. And I think that local multiplayer is fantastic. And when it's contextualized in that sense, some of the things like short gameplay loops stop being a problem as much.
00:14:45
Andrew Wilmot
One game that I played a lot of as a kid was TimeSplitters, which was a multiplayer focused game on the PlayStation. I never had access to that to the internet, just because being an early PlayStation game, that wasn't possible.
00:15:00
Andrew Wilmot
and Whilst I'll definitely say there were times that I was addicted to it, I think the comparing that to the extremes of addiction that you see with modern round-based shooting games and the ubiquity of addiction, like when I talk about how much I played as a child, that actually is probably... i would have been an outlier for my generation for how much I played video games.
00:15:28
Andrew Wilmot
I don't think I'd be an outlier anymore, and I don't think that my behaviour and relationship with video games would have been noticeably unhealthy compared to the children of today. And I think a big part of that is the shift away from multiplayer games, which typically are going to be much shorter in the gameplay loops than single-player story-based games, shifting that multiplayer out of the sort of local co-op vibe onto the internet. So it's it's not four kids playing together having a sleepover, it's four kids playing in their bedrooms when the parents think that they're asleep, not talking to each other, not seeing anybody
Risks of User-Generated Content
00:16:08
Andrew Wilmot
else. It stops being a social activity even if it's done with other people.
00:16:13
Andrew Wilmot
Something a lot of parents will miss though is user generated content. Roblox is the best example of this. We sometimes talk about playing Roblox but the truth is Roblox is a platform of thousands, hundreds of thousands of games, and every single game on there is created by a user.
00:16:32
Andrew Wilmot
Sure, some of those users are effectively game studios in and of themselves, but what it what it means is that content is uploaded without being vetted Roblox. They've got so for some guidance, but ultimately they shift the burden of making sure that the game is appropriate for the audience they're pitching it to to, the developers who are also incentivized to get as many people on there as possible.
00:16:57
Andrew Wilmot
So there's a conflict of interest there, which is how module it should be massively successful for Roblox and is thus being replicated elsewhere. Fortnite, notably, is increasing its focus on user-generated content, letting users create their own game modes. These aren't the only two examples of the games that do this.
00:17:14
Andrew Wilmot
but definitely the two most prominent ones. But this is how you get things like the suicide fetishization chat rooms in Roblox being advertised as appropriate for five-year-olds. I'm not being hyperbolic here.
00:17:26
Andrew Wilmot
you knows it These are what I've been calling sad rooms based off of common naming themes. But last I checked, the one that was still up and had 70 million plays last time I checked. Hang on, i'm just going to pause this and and go check Here we go. So the game Relapse, Are You Lonely?
00:17:46
Andrew Wilmot
Oh, they've shifted it to the maturity to a moderate. So age is 13 plus. Yeah, that's a huge improvement. Oh, I was going to say it had 70 million visits. That's what it had, or what I've been saying it had when I checked in September.
00:17:59
Andrew Wilmot
As of recording, we're at the end of November. It's now got 91.6 million visits. So this is a a well-played experience, game, chat room, whatever you call it.
00:18:13
Andrew Wilmot
this content isn't moderated by Roblox. The Roblox relies on users to report this content when they're seeing it and they're not going to do that because they want it to stay up because they're playing it.
Andrew's Gaming Evaluation Approach
00:18:27
Andrew Wilmot
So yeah, I try and avoid all sorts of user generated content. i would rather be buying the game and then that's it rather than there being endless opportunity for my children to engage with content that is available through the game but not vetted by the game developers so what do i look for in a game for my child so to summarize and the things that i'm looking to avoid Check for microtransactions and see how they've been integrated into the game. How commonly are they displayed in the game? Are they necessary to continue gameplay, which is common in a lot of free and mobile games?
00:19:06
Andrew Wilmot
Then I'll be looking at the reward loops for gameplay. How variable are they? How lengthy are these reward loops? And finally, what sort of unmoderated online experience or user-generated content would put a game on my naughty list, particularly for young children?
00:19:21
Andrew Wilmot
And speaking of naughty lists, I am running another webinar. Saturday the 6th of December, I will be reviewing the games you submit. Maybe you've got a game your child has asked for for Christmas.
00:19:31
Andrew Wilmot
Maybe a well-meaning but um difficult family member has brought your child to the latest Call of Duty. Maybe there's just a game you've heard of that you want to know more about.
00:19:44
Andrew Wilmot
Tickets are free for those who just want to come and watch, and £5 if you want to submit a game for review. i will be playing all games ahead of time, doing my best to get a couple hours in. The only exception, by the way, will be the Switch 2. I've got pretty much every other console and platform but a Switch 2. I do have a Switch.
00:20:02
Andrew Wilmot
ah For Switch 2 games, if any of those come up, looking at you, Mario Kart World, Donkey Kong Bonanza, I will be having to watch gameplay footage and studying remotely, in a way.
00:20:13
Andrew Wilmot
so umm I'm only accepting 10 game submissions and all proceeds will be donated to Smartphone Free Childhood. I will not be taking a penny off of it. If I end up buying any games, it's going to cost me more than I'll be donating.
Webinar Announcement
00:20:27
Andrew Wilmot
But ultimately, this is about helping people make informed choices, particularly around Christmas when, you know, there's there's nothing worse than, you know, giving your child a game for Christmas, having them loaded up and then saying that, oh, actually, I'm not sure this was a good idea.
00:20:45
Andrew Wilmot
Anyway, link will be in the dis distribute description and I look forward to hearing from you. Did I mention that they'll be free to come and watch as well? So if you don't have a game that you want to submit, feel free to come along, drop in and just just see what we're talking about. um Have a look at some, perhaps some of these games will be ones that are on your list as well.
00:21:07
Andrew Wilmot
That's all we have time for today. Thank you so much for joining me. I'd love to chat with as many of you as possible at my Christmas list review, but for those who can't make it, watch this space. You should have some more Christmas content coming your way.
00:21:19
Andrew Wilmot
This has been the dopamine slot machine. Thank you and see you soon.