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You alluded to this in your last paragraph, but I want to stress that Gacha games have penetrated the Western market and are here to stay barring legislative changes. If you aren't familiar with the term, it refers to a type of game that requires players to roll some kind of slot machine to unlock items or characters that they use to play the game. The games are almost always free and allow progression with ingame currency that can be unlocked with time, but the credit card allows for much faster progression and the games are designed to get you to pay. This is often done by throttling progression once a player has invested time but not money. Some games are "better" than others with regards to this, but playing them is on some level adversarial as the developers wage psychological warfare against you in an attempt to get more of your money.
The main incentive to spend money is to unlock new characters. Many Gachas are built off existing IPs with lots of characters and a built-in fanbase, like Fire Emblem or Fate. Newer characters are typically mechanically better to encourage a treadmill of spending and unlocking, but I would say power is probably only half the reason people will try to whale (Gacha term for spending a lot of money) for a character. A large part of the draw is feeding on the emotional attachment a player has to a specific character, whether through waifuism or some other draw. This is also the reason so much Gacha art is highly sexualized.
If you haven't heard of Genshin Impact, it is a Chinese Gacha game with stunningly gorgeous visuals, music, and character designs. To say it is huge is an understatement. It has generated almost 4 billion in revenue on mobile platforms alone since its release in late 2020 — keep in mind this is not including numbers for Playstation or PC. Beyond the money, it's hard to overstate how big this game is right now. It boasts about 60 million+ active monthly players, and the player demographics are also not what one might immediately assume for the genre. In the West, 45% of the players are women, and many of them are young.
Anecdotally, at the last few conventions I've attended, I would say about half the teens and 20-somethings were dressed up as characters from the game, with the next-most popular IP being Demon Slayer. Trends come and go obviously; 10 years ago those same people would be painting their skin gray and wearing orange horns. But it's worth mentioning to illustrate the game's relevance. It's probably China's first true cultural export in the modern age. It also puts to shame the deliberate ugliness in many of our local cultural products.
It's worth talking about Genshin because the game is both an outlier and a portent of things to come. The Gacha genre has a (deserved) reputation for being cheap, tacky cash-ins of existing IPs with little artistic vision or compelling gameplay. Genshin Impact is none of those things. It is clearly a labor of love and has inspired huge swaths of people to get into its story and world, create art and fanworks, and dress up as the characters. In terms of artistic vision, it really puts most of the Western AAA scene to shame. And other companies will be taking notes.
The format is here to stay, and you will see more of the design principles exported to more Western games, whose developers are hungry for new ways to monetize. The Western AAA market has been aggressively pushing monetization for years in the form of money-based upgrades, cosmetic lootboxes,and season passes (the current dominant scheme). Why let your customer pay $60 once if you're going to go through the trouble of developing a game? Why do that when you can make so much more money? The troubled release of Cyberpunk 2077 was likely the last gasp of the old ways for AAA. Games as a live service and money-based progression are here to stay.
So it goes. It's a shame that a game like Genshin Impact can seemingly only be made nowadays using these monetization practices. I have a disposition towards addiction, and my way of managing it is to not allow predatory temptations to enter my environment. Having to treat an increasing number of video games the way I treat alcohol is certainly interesting. There's an argument that modern development costs are so high that you need to fund games this way, but I don't see how that sausage is made so I can only speculate whether this is true or not. For games with ultramodern graphics, this may be the case, but if you're willing to look past that, the AA and Indie game scene is much less myopic. Our local Rimworld dev-turned fearless leader can attest to this.
I dunno if I'd say that (wouldn't The Three-Body Problem count?); even within just the realm of Chinese gacha games specifically, Girls' Frontline and Arknights came first. Definitely the biggest, though.
Azur Lane was Chinese too, right? Not the most prestigious cultural export, but they conquered the USS Iowa when the Japanese couldn't.
Huh, I thought Kantai Collection (the Japanese ship-girl game) had the biggest claim (or at least the first) to ship-girl-ing the Iowa, but I guess Azur Lane went a step further. But yes, AL also came before.
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45% of Genshin players are women? It's a very pretty game but that's a lot!
Is that why all the men are so feminine? Take Venti, Kaeya or Aether - not exactly pillars of masculinity. Their names don't even sound too manly. Venti is something you'd buy at Starbucks. Most look like they could pass as women. I know China has an artistic preference towards feminine-looking males with long hair in their fantasy scenarios but it's still a bit suspicious. A big part of the male fanbase is enticed by the pretty women - see Genshin's prevalence on danbooru. Maybe the women like the pretty boys?
https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Character/List
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Zorba at least had some involvement in Rimworld, no idea to what extent. But he did have an excellent story about the psychology of game design from his work on the game. I wish I had the link, but alas I don't.
This?
Not what I was thinking of, though that is interesting (I don't think I read it before). Basically the story I remember Zorba telling was this:
At one point in the development of Rimworld, sun lamps were on 24h a day despite the fact that plants can't actually grow at night. That annoyed players, who felt it was silly for the game to charge them power around the clock for sun lamps that weren't even having an effect for half the day. But what the players didn't know, is that was a deliberate design decision - sun lamps were intended to suck down power as a cost for how useful it is to be able to grow plants inside a mountain or whatever. So, in the end, they wound up making sun lamps shut off at night but doubled the power cost during the day. Same game result (arguably even more punishing for the player since they needed to have higher peak power), and the players were much happier with it.
Ah, yeah, that was pretty good. Link is at here.
Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for the link!
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Reminds me of the WoW example. In the beginning of world of warcraft there was a system to penalize people who played too often and incentivize logging off. After gaining a certain amount of experience in a session you'd get a 50% experience penalty. Players hated it and rebelled. Blizzard's response was to half player experience but give a "rested" bonus doubling player experience for the a certain amount of a experience. Essentially the same system. Players loved it.
Yeah, that's another great example of the same phenomenon. If memory serves that came up in whatever thread Zorba shared the Rimworld story, as well.
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This is where these things actually start to scare me, as they're combining multiple pleasurable stimuli into a reward and using intermittent reinforcement to leverage whatever particular addictive tendency the user has to get them to keep playing and spending money. You like cute girls? You like huge breasts? You like emotional vulnerability? Or just like to see number go up? We guarantee there's a superstimulus tailored for YOU in here!
If they were able to occasionally dispense a sweet, tasty snack as a reward then they'd be about one step shy of just having a button that directly releases dopamine in the subject's brain.
Now...
Add in the capability to use AI to generate infinite lewd/sexualized images specified to the individual user's tastes.
Yep. That's why the only winning move is to not play, IMO. Willpower is a finite resource, while entire industries of highly-paid optimizers are working full-time to break it with their products. Limiting your vectors of exposure is the best way to live a life free of negative drains, but this is becoming increasingly difficult as more and more things become gamified services. This involves more than just Gacha, but that industry is where it's really easy to see the psychological tricks laid bare.
This is the solution I'm adopting, to be sure. There's a huge 'Camels Nose in the Tent' element, however.
This really slammed home for me approximately 1 year ago when I went and played Blackjack at a casino for the first time.
I was 'smart' in that I placed a hard limit on the amount of money I was willing to bet, total, and when I won that amount I immediately 'banked' it so I couldn't actually lose money anymore. Of course, they have ATMs INSIDE the Casino so you don't have to be limited to merely the cash on hand.
At one point I was up, I think, by like $5,000. I ended the session up by about $400.
And for weeks afterwards I couldn't completely shake the desire to go back and keep playing. Thankfully it would have been a couple hours drive and so it wasn't something I could just easily do on a whim.
But holy cow just a couple hours of play gave me such a rush that I was still thinking about it weeks after the fact. Something I had never actually done for the vast majority of my life. I don't even think losing my virginity had that kind of mental staying power.
Yeah, we live in a world where everything is attempting to exploit your psychology and the proliferation of convenient ways to spend money means there's virtually no friction to slow your descent into any particular hole of addiction.
I could wax/rant on the topic of how easy it is to put money INTO various systems but the said systems are very reluctant to send money back, but on the topic of gambling in particular I think we're going down a very, very dangerous path if we don't erect more serious barriers to entry. I don't know how to achieve that, however.
The phenomenon you're describing is basically just Beginner's Luck. As ridiculous as it sounds, Beginners Luck is real. Think about it—say you've never gambled before but go to the casino when one of your friends suggests it would make a fun night out. And say you spend the entire evening slowly losing $400. You're probably going to think that gambling is the stupidest thing on earth and the next time your friends want to hang out you'll probably suggest going bowling instead. This isn't to say you're never going to gamble again, but since your first experience with it was a hard slap in the face you're probably going to be more circumspect about the whole enterprise. Now suppose on the other hand that your first experience is similar to the one you described. Now gambling seems like an easy, thrilling way to make money. Sure, you eventually lost a ton, but you know what it's like to be up 5 grand and that it's possible, in a non-theoretical way, to earn a month's salary in a matter of hours. Now you've got a dragon to chase.
I think a good first step would be limiting gambling to actual casinos or other physical places. I know that for actual degenerate gamblers this probably won't make much of a difference, but there's something particularly scummy about being able to play slot machines any time, anywhere. The closest casino to me is 20–25 minutes away from my house, and if I wanted to gamble I'd at least have to find time to make the drive down there. It seems fundamentally different than being able to just lie in bed and play slots.
Bingo.
There was a point at which I realized that I was placing bets on individual hands that was larger than the whole amount I had budgeted for playing. And it was fun. Feeling like a relative high roller, fantasizing about winning enough to, well if not quit my job take a really long, fancy vacation. All while knowing on a fundamental level that I'm playing a game where the odds are deliberately stacked against me so that it isn't rational to expect it to happen. On the other hand, there's probably a few versions of me in different timeline branches who got extremely lucky and were quite happy with the outcome.
I should also point out that I took a brief break between sessions, and when I came back to the table, that's when I lost most of my position, just a string of "bad luck" that contrasted strongly to the winning streak I had been on. So yeah, 'beginners luck' would be the right way to categorize that. And everything about the process is designed to make you feel like you're special and the winning will never end.
I agree... but this sounds impossible to enforce without levels of draconian control of the internet that I am far less comfortable with.
The point I've alluded to is how easy/frictionless it is to transfer money into basically any entity these days.
Perhaps a comparable law could be that in order to play any kind of games that get categorized as 'gambling' you have to physically deposit money with the entity running the game. That is, you must withdraw the amount from your account as cash, physically hold it and carry it to a location, and physically hand it over, vs. simply entering an account number or swiping a card.
This would be almost as good as strictly limiting it to physical locations. And then enforcement can take place at the payment processor level, which STILL has concerns over draconian control, but doesn't require direct surveillance of all users.
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