Seasons (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 12:25 (2589 days ago) @ Kahzgul

We know, for a fact, that Destiny was intentionally designed to create addictive loops in the gameplay and rewards systems, and was done so scientifically by a professor of behavioral psychology. them.

Just wanted to swing back to this. As a preface, I think you're pretty much on point with regard to micro transaction. Encouraging people to buy loot boxes without any kind of promise that the random stuff inside will be given out fairly seems very much not right.

I do think, however, you should probably stick to that and officially drop the implication that Destiny is worse / less ethical because it was designed with behavioral science in mind. In 2012, John Hopson took a look back at his original article (the one you quoted) and had a bunch of good points, like:

When I wrote that article a decade ago, I was a psychology graduate student and amateur game designer who had never worked in the games industry. Since then, the article has run amok, living an almost completely independent existence in the wilds of the internet.

On the critical side, there have been plenty of claims that reinforcement schedules are too powerful, that they compromise the will of the player. Again, reinforcement schedules are useful and effective, but don't represent the total sum of human psychology or the game experience.

Consider the use of loyalty cards at a coffee-shop. It is a contingency, exactly like the game contingencies covered in the original article. Indeed, it should be more powerful than game contingencies because it provides tangible real world benefits. And yet I don't think anyone would argue that "buy 10 lattes, get 1 free" is manipulative or too powerful for the average person to resist. (The chemical properties of caffeine notwithstanding.)

And specifically on the ethics of it all:

For me, the starting place for this discussion has to be the fact that contingencies always exist and reinforcement learning is always going on. Game designers can be completely ignorant of the psychology involved while still creating mechanics that draw on these principles. People had been making games with random loot drops for years before anyone pointed out that they were creating variable ratio schedules. Contingencies are the essence of games, and those contingencies shape player behavior.

Note that this would be even more true if the critics were correct in thinking that these reward structures are a subversive influence. The more powerful these contingencies are, the more seriously game makers should take our responsibilities to design them well.

In my personal view, contingencies in games are ethical if the designer believes the player will have more fun by fulfilling the contingency than they would otherwise. You have to believe in the fundamental entertainment value of the experience before you can ethically reward players for engaging in that experience.

Now, even this article was written five years ago and micro transactions have exploded since then so this article doesn't really speak to them. But I do think you have been a little too willing to link behavioral science to general gameplay design, to general reward systems, to microtransactions. As John put it in the article:

In a few years, the industry will move on and the topic will be taken for granted, but we will have permanently shifted towards a more empirical approach to game design, and our players will benefit from that.