I'm not sure I can relate to her stance. It's very possible I'm getting it wrong, but what I understand from what she is saying:
- It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games
-If you aren't an addict then any negative consequences from playing games you experience are your own responsibility
- Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games).
- Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.
It's not really the narrative that I expect when I see someone discussing ethics ;-) It's not so much that I disagree with the points from a practical perspective, I just think that they have completely dodged all of the ethical implications of the behaviour of the game companies.
It's well known that strategies for engaging players can lead to negative consequences. Even if you can't make money unless you let players choose those negative consequences, it doesn't really absolve you of the ethical issue. As described by the person being interviewed, actual "addiction" talks about a compulsion for repeated self-harm. Even if the player is not an addict, it doesn't mean that they don't sometimes engage in self-harm. Giving them that option because there is no other profitable way to create the game, still results in self-harm by your player base.
One could write a lot about these kinds of issues, but I find it disturbing that someone apparently interested in discussing ethics in the gaming industry seems to be saying, "Yeah, there are problems, but they totally aren't my fault".
As a young girl, I was absolutely addicted to playing games. My drug of choice was Final Fantasy, because it allowed me an entirely new world to explore. I could escape the bullies; I could escape my father.
Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry. Take for example the microtransactions that so many gamers lament. What of a beautiful narrative, empathetic characters, and engaging gameplay (since they are games after all)? I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.
From what I recall correctly, Cigarette corporations also argued that only addicts would become addicted to cigarettes.
Casinos and the gambling industry is also trying to argue only addicts will become addicted to their products.
I don't think we should believe the people who make a product or are paid by said people when they say the product isn't addictive or not harmful. We need independent research.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Having recently finished reading Natash Dow Schüll's excellent _Addiction By Design_ it's startling to read this take on where ethical responsibility lies; it's startlingly similar to the attitudes of the machine gambling industry (and the alcohol industry for that matter) customers are pathologized in favour of addressing the toxic choice architecture that the systems confront their users with.
> Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games).
I doubt that current and upcoming generations of parents will be able to easily address the problems because they're already inside players group, because computer gaming is even more integral part of our entertainment than ever before and adults are first to struggle with the issues including addiction. She seems to be ignoring that and overall, still talking more as the industry member than one who gracefully decided to fight it and show the problems that exist.
It's been a long time since I played the Ultima series, but it would be refreshing if they could incorporate character-building (in the moral sense) into a modern game.
My dog couldn't have bit you, I don't even have a dog. Okay well I do have a dog but it never bit anyone. Okay it had bitten other people but it didn't bite you. Okay it did bite you but you must have provoked it.
> - Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.
Excellent summary. This, at least is the excuse capitalism has used since the beginning of time for every unethical practice harming humanity, whether it's privacy invasion, environmental ruination, lazy worker protections, poor compensation for talent, or providing addictive services.
Yet some products are clearly, specifically designed and marketed to addicts. Consider fortified wines (aka “bum wines”). Night train. MD2020. Thunderbird. I think it's possible to do the same with any product, including video games.
>Most of the case, when you have an addiction, it's not coming from the product
Except the products (specifically "live services" and "free to play" games) are specifically designed to cause addiction. They're Skinner boxes. I forget the title of the work but there's a book on designing casino games that's required reading at half of these dev studios.
If it's possible for a company to get an ongoing revenue stream from a game then the game is designed to extract the maximum possible amount of revenue from its players.
She talks exactly like PR people for fast food, soda, opioids, guns and cigarettes talk. “Let’s be rational”, “only a small number”, “responsibility”. They will never admit that they are engineering their products to be as addictive as possible to make more money.
> Research by Przybylski and colleagues in 2016 revealed that less than 1% of gamers might qualify for a potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder.
Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers.
> Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.
Four survey studies (N=18,932) with large international cohorts employed an open-science methodology wherein the analysis plans for confirmatory hypotheses were registered prior to data collection.
Results:
Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. Comparison to gambling disorder revealed that Internet-based games may be significantly less addictive than gambling and similarly dysregulating as electronic games more generally."
I think they mean to say the general population of their study population, not the population at large. I could be wrong, and I'm not overly fond of the wording of the first "results" sentence, but I think that's what they are talking about.
Oh those UX designers, aren't they just gods. So gifted, with their ability to shape the minds of the pesants and turn every product into gold.
Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses.
Games have been addictive since the beginning.
Long before UX came along to claim the credit.
I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software.
Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game.
In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime.
Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.
Ignoring your assertions about UX, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Fortnite, like many modern games and some old ones, has design elements that encourage compulsive play. Elements like random loot drops and leveling are often detrimental to the core game mechanics—why would you want to artificially advantage the more experienced player in a competitive multiplayer game, for instance—and yet an increasing number of games include them.
Not all games do this. Super Mario World contains compulsive elements. Nor does Journey, Monument Valley, Wii Sports, Hellblade, Mario Kart, Sim City, Threes, etc etc etc.
There seems to be a trend of people making a lot of money designing/building stuff that erodes privacy and ethics and then leaving the company where they made that money and talking about privacy and ethics. Take for example Justin Rosenstein who invented the Like button.
He may have created the icon, but the like was invented and released by the team at FriendFeed about 18 months before Facebook copied the feature (in Feb 2009, the article you linked got that wrong).
Reminds me a bit of "get woke, go broke", except this time it looks a bit more like "go broke, get woke"... :)
Except I don't think that's what's happening with Hodent. As far as I can tell, she's pushing towards having a conversation, she's taking a stand against misinformation campaigns that the gaming industry is struggling with just like big pharma - think GMOs, vaccines et al.
I'll encourage all parties to actually have that conversation with Hodent, because otherwise she might just be the next person to be instrumentalised by the trolls and unproductive opinion-shaping forces out there.
interesting.
And they dont even mention that some online influencers are taking sponsorship money to randomly pop into a game and donate thousands of dollars to the winner.
I am not sure where the motivation comes from, but it surely generates some uncertainty and reward for playing.
I haven’t played fortnite so take my comment for what it is worth. Isn’t fortnite not as resource intensive as other games? Which makes it possible that more and more people have it? I remember when I played bf3 and bf4, the three points mentioned in the video still apply. I guess he does mention the scale and amazon web services in the video to allude to the amount of people playing I guess.
Bit OT, but I'm curious about whether the UX team ever discussed the ethics of Fortnite silently installing BattlEye, anti cheat software that's difficult to remove and yet breaks the Windows preview build upgrade process.
I'm fine with anti cheat software in general, but this one felt like malware.
> But that's not addiction! That's just managing time so kids can do a lot of [other] things. The problem with Fortnite and many games is this is where they have their social life. And they meet with friends and they play with friends. They hang out and are creative. It's not like they're mindlessly shooting, they do a lot of other things.
This statement just sounds very wrong. Why are they glorifying virtual platforms as a common social gathering ? Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it - building scientifically impossible structures to jump/hide from enemies to begin with. Alas, it's indeed "mindless shooting" and showing off expensive in-game virtual purchases.
The game is very social. Within a group of 4 you can talk continuously and do custom (non shooting) maps. It's hard to explain, but young teenagers do basically congregate in Fortnite (and not in a bad way).
As a writer, this is a fascinating topic. I admire the gall it takes to make this leap, especially as a UX lead working at a company whose business model is addiction.
If I write a book, and I don't hook you, nobody wins. You wasted some twenty-odd quid for a stack of paper worth nothing to you. The entire task of a novel is to suck you into its narrative, so that you want to be apart of that world - just as children and teenagers, say, want to be in the Harry Potter universe.
It would be working against my own interests to - in public - attack the very position that puts food on my table.
There's a difference between a book or a (ethically) good game (like the ones we used to have a decade ago), that try to suck you into the narrative so that you can experience the fictional story, and the modern games that try to suck you into spending time and money on them to secure recurring revenue for the publishers.
> Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.
Except... they can, and they do. There are plenty of companies out there that don't act like scumbags, its low hanging fruit and almost a meme at this point but CDprojektRed is a classic example. And just about anything published by Devolver is pretty non-predatory, and there a plenty of indie studios making bank without being shifty, like Risk of Rain 2 that just released, or the even more recent Mordhau.
Whatever issues you have with Fortnite probably don't have much to do with her. She left in 2017. Until the tail end of her tenure, Fortnite was a very different game.
[+] [-] mikekchar|6 years ago|reply
- It's not that games are addictive, it's that addicts are playing games
-If you aren't an addict then any negative consequences from playing games you experience are your own responsibility
- Parents need to balance their children's potential for overplaying games with a legitimate need to socialise online (and in games).
- Game companies can't reasonably opt out of offering "engaging" behaviour because if their competition offers it, they will lose money.
It's not really the narrative that I expect when I see someone discussing ethics ;-) It's not so much that I disagree with the points from a practical perspective, I just think that they have completely dodged all of the ethical implications of the behaviour of the game companies.
It's well known that strategies for engaging players can lead to negative consequences. Even if you can't make money unless you let players choose those negative consequences, it doesn't really absolve you of the ethical issue. As described by the person being interviewed, actual "addiction" talks about a compulsion for repeated self-harm. Even if the player is not an addict, it doesn't mean that they don't sometimes engage in self-harm. Giving them that option because there is no other profitable way to create the game, still results in self-harm by your player base.
One could write a lot about these kinds of issues, but I find it disturbing that someone apparently interested in discussing ethics in the gaming industry seems to be saying, "Yeah, there are problems, but they totally aren't my fault".
[+] [-] ydb|6 years ago|reply
Yet, at some point in the past decade an insatiable greed appears to have taken over the industry. Take for example the microtransactions that so many gamers lament. What of a beautiful narrative, empathetic characters, and engaging gameplay (since they are games after all)? I'm not entirely certain of the correct path to take, but I know that appealing to the lowest common denominator will not allow gaming to become the grand artistic medium for the masses that so many hoped it could be.
[+] [-] zaarn|6 years ago|reply
Casinos and the gambling industry is also trying to argue only addicts will become addicted to their products.
I don't think we should believe the people who make a product or are paid by said people when they say the product isn't addictive or not harmful. We need independent research.
[+] [-] tomgp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pndy|6 years ago|reply
I doubt that current and upcoming generations of parents will be able to easily address the problems because they're already inside players group, because computer gaming is even more integral part of our entertainment than ever before and adults are first to struggle with the issues including addiction. She seems to be ignoring that and overall, still talking more as the industry member than one who gracefully decided to fight it and show the problems that exist.
[+] [-] monocasa|6 years ago|reply
Don't companies like Blizzard keep psychologists on staff specifically to make the games more addictive?
[+] [-] tcbawo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fenwick67|6 years ago|reply
My dog couldn't have bit you, I don't even have a dog. Okay well I do have a dog but it never bit anyone. Okay it had bitten other people but it didn't bite you. Okay it did bite you but you must have provoked it.
[+] [-] keerthiko|6 years ago|reply
Excellent summary. This, at least is the excuse capitalism has used since the beginning of time for every unethical practice harming humanity, whether it's privacy invasion, environmental ruination, lazy worker protections, poor compensation for talent, or providing addictive services.
[+] [-] weirdkid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
Except the products (specifically "live services" and "free to play" games) are specifically designed to cause addiction. They're Skinner boxes. I forget the title of the work but there's a book on designing casino games that's required reading at half of these dev studios.
If it's possible for a company to get an ongoing revenue stream from a game then the game is designed to extract the maximum possible amount of revenue from its players.
[+] [-] bladewolf47|6 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13748038-addiction-by-de...
[+] [-] maxxxxx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rainonmoon|6 years ago|reply
Am I reading this wrong? It seems to me that the abstract for the cited research says less than 1% of the population, not 1% of gamers.
> Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder.
[+] [-] sbuttgereit|6 years ago|reply
"Method:
Four survey studies (N=18,932) with large international cohorts employed an open-science methodology wherein the analysis plans for confirmatory hypotheses were registered prior to data collection.
Results:
Among those who played games, more than 2 out of 3 did not report any symptoms of Internet gaming disorder, and findings showed that a very small proportion of the general population (between 0.3% and 1.0%) might qualify for a potential acute diagnosis of Internet gaming disorder. Comparison to gambling disorder revealed that Internet-based games may be significantly less addictive than gambling and similarly dysregulating as electronic games more generally."
I think they mean to say the general population of their study population, not the population at large. I could be wrong, and I'm not overly fond of the wording of the first "results" sentence, but I think that's what they are talking about.
[+] [-] didibus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ninefoxgambit|6 years ago|reply
Games have been great for decades. There have been huge hits and misses.
Games have been addictive since the beginning.
Long before UX came along to claim the credit.
I'd love to see a UX team make StarCraft. You wouldn't even get functional software.
Free to play and loot boxes are a new evolution but they are far from the only type of game.
In fact many people play fortnight and dota2 and never spend a dime.
Fortnight is popular and addictive because it's a good fun game that gets everything right for teens. The game designers and the game team did this, not UX.
[+] [-] Wowfunhappy|6 years ago|reply
Ignoring your assertions about UX, I strongly disagree with this statement.
Fortnite, like many modern games and some old ones, has design elements that encourage compulsive play. Elements like random loot drops and leveling are often detrimental to the core game mechanics—why would you want to artificially advantage the more experienced player in a competitive multiplayer game, for instance—and yet an increasing number of games include them.
Not all games do this. Super Mario World contains compulsive elements. Nor does Journey, Monument Valley, Wii Sports, Hellblade, Mario Kart, Sim City, Threes, etc etc etc.
[+] [-] throwayEngineer|6 years ago|reply
They have the network effect, where friends are playing it.
When friends stop playing and its no longer interesting, people will stop playing.
Updates can be good, but even my favorite games have gotten old.
I'm just glad I got most of my gaming out when I was young. Now, nothing seems to hook me.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/fa...
[+] [-] jimminy|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://blog.friendfeed.com/2007/10/i-like-it-i-like-it.html
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply
Also, a developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods, an environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.
[+] [-] _ooqq|6 years ago|reply
Except I don't think that's what's happening with Hodent. As far as I can tell, she's pushing towards having a conversation, she's taking a stand against misinformation campaigns that the gaming industry is struggling with just like big pharma - think GMOs, vaccines et al.
I'll encourage all parties to actually have that conversation with Hodent, because otherwise she might just be the next person to be instrumentalised by the trolls and unproductive opinion-shaping forces out there.
[+] [-] dleslie|6 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/tqG74aI9t3Q
[+] [-] jbj|6 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=donating+money+to...
[+] [-] iscrewyou|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brownbat|6 years ago|reply
I'm fine with anti cheat software in general, but this one felt like malware.
[+] [-] sus_007|6 years ago|reply
This statement just sounds very wrong. Why are they glorifying virtual platforms as a common social gathering ? Having tried the game myself, I don't see anything creative with it - building scientifically impossible structures to jump/hide from enemies to begin with. Alas, it's indeed "mindless shooting" and showing off expensive in-game virtual purchases.
[+] [-] mhh__|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|6 years ago|reply
There's a fairly recent creative mode where players can create their own levels.
[+] [-] ydb|6 years ago|reply
If I write a book, and I don't hook you, nobody wins. You wasted some twenty-odd quid for a stack of paper worth nothing to you. The entire task of a novel is to suck you into its narrative, so that you want to be apart of that world - just as children and teenagers, say, want to be in the Harry Potter universe.
It would be working against my own interests to - in public - attack the very position that puts food on my table.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
Even those of us who have stayed up all night to finish a huge book aren't going to come back and do the same again tomorrow. Or pay for cosmetic DLC.
[+] [-] 0_gravitas|6 years ago|reply
Except... they can, and they do. There are plenty of companies out there that don't act like scumbags, its low hanging fruit and almost a meme at this point but CDprojektRed is a classic example. And just about anything published by Devolver is pretty non-predatory, and there a plenty of indie studios making bank without being shifty, like Risk of Rain 2 that just released, or the even more recent Mordhau.
[+] [-] empath75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluntfang|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] annews24|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] glasseverything|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hartator|6 years ago|reply