4 ms·

Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called

by tomash 6y ago

Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called "cracktorio" by its fans.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
It's a different kind of addiction. Factorio is the ultimate nerd-snipe[0] for a large class of people who enjoy flexing their brains. The addictiveness is a side effect the developers maximizing having fun (for the aforementioned subset of the population). When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities. Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible. (Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.) -- [0] - https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
- Netcob 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents. The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said, none of that is making puzzle bobble a "better game". It's saying "Wow, you won/earned something! It's almost yours now, you just have to pay this tiny fee to actually have it...". I don't feel like I'm on the same side as the developer, and this is worlds apart from how Factorio treats players. Since "addictive" still has positive connotations in gaming, I'll just call it "manipulative" from now on.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    I think a tell-tale feature of manipulative games is Farmville-style time-gating. They structure their progress around meaningless actions like clicking upgrade buttons, but you can only press that button every couple hours. So playing optimally isn't so much about strategy or skill, but more about incorporating the game into your daily routine. The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play the game no matter if it is still fun. Combine that with a good reward system that gives you positive reinforcement at random intervals, and you get something that is designed to addict you to the game.
    - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
      Why is this kind of manipulation bad but RNG-gated content, such as in most roguelikes, which are loved by lots of people, not bad? These value judgements are always arbitrary and hiding the biases of the speaker. You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time. Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. That's an interesting point I've never heard of before, thanks for bringing it up. Still, I think there's more to tease apart about time-gating. As a high-schooler, I spent plenty of time on time-gated games (AstroWars and OGame). From that experience I know this mechanic alone is very addictive, and I make a conscious decision to avoid these types of games now. I had my fun (particularly social type, my fiends were hooked in just as much as I was). And, I don't consider this mechanic to be a problem alone. What matters is why it's there. Is it to make the game fun, in its particular way? Or is it to maximize the players' exposure to monetization opportunities? The root of my point is this: particular mechanics a game employs don't matter; what matters is why those particular mechanics were chosen. Intent, not engineering.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned. There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence, the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over, are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    Is there a better word to use than "addictive" to describe the brainy one over the unethical one?
    - vharuck 6y ago
      Enthralling Engrossing Captivating
    - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
      If there is one it shouldn't be used. Both types of games are addicting in fundamentally the same way. The only thing that differs is the main trait which each game is using as its primary host. The "unethical" type of game is as unethical as the other, which means they're either both very unethical or both very not unethical, depending on how you want to look at it.
      - seanwilson 6y ago
        Addictive for games can just be shorthand for "you want to play it again and again". I don't see anything wrong with it when there isn't a more appropriate shorthand to use, except when used with games that are designed to make you pay more and more to play.
  - 6y ago

by tomash 6y ago

Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called "cracktorio" by its fans.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

It's a different kind of addiction. Factorio is the ultimate nerd-snipe[0] for a large class of people who enjoy flexing their brains. The addictiveness is a side effect the developers maximizing having fun (for the aforementioned subset of the population). When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities. Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible. (Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.) -- [0] - https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/

Netcob 6y ago
Yes, exactly. I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents. The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said, none of that is making puzzle bobble a "better game". It's saying "Wow, you won/earned something! It's almost yours now, you just have to pay this tiny fee to actually have it...". I don't feel like I'm on the same side as the developer, and this is worlds apart from how Factorio treats players. Since "addictive" still has positive connotations in gaming, I'll just call it "manipulative" from now on.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  I think a tell-tale feature of manipulative games is Farmville-style time-gating. They structure their progress around meaningless actions like clicking upgrade buttons, but you can only press that button every couple hours. So playing optimally isn't so much about strategy or skill, but more about incorporating the game into your daily routine. The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play the game no matter if it is still fun. Combine that with a good reward system that gives you positive reinforcement at random intervals, and you get something that is designed to addict you to the game.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    Why is this kind of manipulation bad but RNG-gated content, such as in most roguelikes, which are loved by lots of people, not bad? These value judgements are always arbitrary and hiding the biases of the speaker. You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time. Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. That's an interesting point I've never heard of before, thanks for bringing it up. Still, I think there's more to tease apart about time-gating. As a high-schooler, I spent plenty of time on time-gated games (AstroWars and OGame). From that experience I know this mechanic alone is very addictive, and I make a conscious decision to avoid these types of games now. I had my fun (particularly social type, my fiends were hooked in just as much as I was). And, I don't consider this mechanic to be a problem alone. What matters is why it's there. Is it to make the game fun, in its particular way? Or is it to maximize the players' exposure to monetization opportunities? The root of my point is this: particular mechanics a game employs don't matter; what matters is why those particular mechanics were chosen. Intent, not engineering.
adnzzzzZ 6y ago
I disagree with this notion. The primary reason why Factorio doesn't feel unethical or exploitative is because the kind of addictiveness it exploits is one that uses your brain, whereas the kind of addictiveness these "unethical" games exploit is one that feels more dumb and low brow. It has nothing to do with it being win-win like you mentioned. There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence, the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over, are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  Is there a better word to use than "addictive" to describe the brainy one over the unethical one?
  - vharuck 6y ago
    Enthralling Engrossing Captivating
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    If there is one it shouldn't be used. Both types of games are addicting in fundamentally the same way. The only thing that differs is the main trait which each game is using as its primary host. The "unethical" type of game is as unethical as the other, which means they're either both very unethical or both very not unethical, depending on how you want to look at it.
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      Addictive for games can just be shorthand for "you want to play it again and again". I don't see anything wrong with it when there isn't a more appropriate shorthand to use, except when used with games that are designed to make you pay more and more to play.
- 6y ago