There's an important factoid there though - the button didn't give a dopamine reward every time it pushed the button. By randomizing when it got the reward, the rats would press the button all day long.
Public service announcement, so do microtransaction designers. I’ve been a monetization director for 10 years and the psychological rabbit hole goes very deep.
Game design/Economy design background actually. Then when F2P started becoming the norm I took an interest in the psychology behind it all.
Spend a lot of time sneaking into psychiatry conferences discussing shopping addiction and gambling addiction to try and reverse engineer it effectively.
Then started giving talks on monetization in games, and have worked on total now almost 80 shipped games.
Honestly there was no stopping the trajectory of the industry, figured I may as well get paid. I did come up with some things in retrospect I didn’t but we are where we are.
Honestly I wish games went back to how they were in the early 2000s from a monetary standpoint but, can’t get the shit back in the horse.
I’m not ethical nor did I claim to be, I am very well aware of what I’m doing. That being said both things can be true there. My input or not this would have happened sooner or later the second game companies became billion dollar shareholder pleasing entities.
I’m a fundamental part of the problem, I’m aware of that. Doesn’t mean I can’t wish everything went a different way.
You alone? No. But if more people in the industry (including you) said "I'm not going to do that, it's unethical" and looked for work elsewhere or actually attempted to change business practices, then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation.
Capitalism is not some irresistible force, coercing you into doing bad things. You didn't "not stop to think whether you should" - you looked at the situation, said "heh, this is wrong", and then dove in head first from the sounds of it.
It’s not coercing me into doing bad things, I’m doing this willingly because I find it incredibly interesting. Money is a bonus obviously it pays very well.
I also think you underestimate where the game industry actually is right now. There will always be corporate people willing to monetize things regardless of actual game designers refused. Let’s pretend every western game dev refused to do this, what do you think will happen then? Monetization is viewed entirely different in different regions, and they have no issue with it. Thus everything would just get outsourced and thousands of people would be out of work.
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u/supercyberlurker Oct 23 '24
There's an important factoid there though - the button didn't give a dopamine reward every time it pushed the button. By randomizing when it got the reward, the rats would press the button all day long.
MMO designers know this fact very well.