Video Games make you gamble…
…with a resource more valuable than money
Whether you’re in the desert of Nevada at Las Vegas, or the Jersey Shore at Atlantic city, casinos always have one goal in mind.
Make you spend as much of your money as possible, as fast as possible.
Science is on their side. Casinos apply tried-and-true behavioral techniques to accomplish this goal. How? By creating a setting that fosters the behaviors they desire.
Any gambler knows this game, and only a few end up with an addiction problem. When behavioral science meets video game design, however things get interesting.
Consider that video games are now played by all ages from the comfort of your own home. They don’t require you to insert a coin or swipe a card every time you’d like to play, so their goal can’t be the same as a casino’s can it?
There’s a Slot Machine in Your Pocket
When start to examine interactive design, the similarities between video games and casinos’ biggest money makers, slot machines, are frighteningly abundant. I’d like to point out and really analyze how certain video game developers are having their players gamble away their priceless time, but also in turn making lots of money, through methods of addiction. I’ll do so with the help of a contemporary anthropologist who specializes in addiction.
Meet Natasha Dow Schüll and Her Ideas about Addiction
To truly understand addiction and how casinos make use of it our class at TCNJ studied the work of Natasha Dow Schüll.
Dow Schüll is an academic with her main focus on cultural anthropology and teaches at NYU.
She’s written ADDICTION BY DESIGN: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas which dives into how gamblers get addicted to slot machines in particular and the intentional design techniques that lead to that.
She’s also got another book in the works KEEPING TRACK: Sensor Technology, Self-Regulation, and the Data-Driven Life which is concerning using digital tracking software to evaluate our own health, and a movie displaying the eating habits in Las Vegas. Dow Schüll is a UC Berkeley graduate with a PhD in Anthropology. Before moving to NYU Dow Schüll was at MIT and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University.
But enough about how smart she is. The work that interests us most is her research on gamblers and the design of slot machines in Las Vegas. We learn that slot machine designers want to maximize the time behind a machine a gambler spends, and to increase the number of times that they would actually take a turn. This elimination of dead time and decrease of overall game time ultimately results in gamblers being required to enter more money to continue playing.
In fact gamblers who are addicted to slot machines enter into a loop with little dead time. The immediate command of being able to start up another game again without having to wait is one of the biggest factors in becoming addicted.
This is referred to as continuity. There’s also the fact that a slot machine is a game that you play alone. A gambler has their own head space when they play slots. There’s no one else that you have to wait for to play, and you can enter into this world of the slot machine by yourself for as long as you want.
The game events are short and they repeat, with such little dead time in between them that an experienced gambler can play 12,000 games an hour.
Dow Schüll points out that these three key points, being able to play by yourself, speed of games, and the elimination of wait time are some of the things that make slot machines so addictive.
There are also plenty of small details designers of slot machines add and pay attention to in order to increase revenue as much as possible. They introduce variable rewards to gamblers as winnings, drawing from B.F. Skinner’s reinforcement theories.
Gamblers never know how much or what they will get next time they play a game, so they’re always ready to play the next one, eager to see what they’ll get. This helps lull gamblers into what Dow Schüll describes as a “machine zone.”
People who are really addicted to slot machines don’t necessarily play to win, often times they know statistically they won’t win. They instead are playing to enter the “machine zone” where the sense of other people and the world around them disappears, sense of time is altered, and even sometimes sense of self is also altered. It just becomes the gambler and the machine in front of them.
Ludic Loops & Comfy Chairs
Even those who aren’t extreme addicts that have spent time behind a slot machine can probably attest to being in smaller repetitive behaviors, aka “ludic loops” and being surprised by how much time has passed.
Slot machines make use of some other tactics that hook in players which are a little easier to see. They provide absurd amounts of visual stimulation and reinforcement with bright, flashing, and colorful lights and spinning symbols. In fact the fact that the player’s touch, their press of a button, their pull of the lever, has activated all of these different and exciting effects is very important. It makes the person behind the machine feel powerful and playing a game very satisfying.
The reinforcement a slot machine provides isn’t just visual, in fact audio plays a huge part in player engagement. We can see this through the extensive effort designers have put into their sounds.
A company Dow Schüll references (International Game Technology) includes an average of 400 “sound events” in each of their games.
Lastly, I’d like to talk about how casinos have even paid attention to the chairs that gamblers sit in while playing slot machines. They use extremely comfortable and ergonomic chairs at slot machines so that players can sit down and play for extended periods of time without cutting off their blood circulation or feeling like they want to get up.
Thanks to Dow Schüll’s research we can see that in slot machine designers’ efforts to make as much money as possible, they need gamblers to spend more time behind machines and play within short time intervals. It just so happens that this often creates games that are very addictive for players. We also get to see some of the more intricate techniques slot machine designers use to increase player engagement and time spent playing, like their attention to reinforcement, continuity, solitude and speed of games for example.
If you start to think about many video games that we play casually, you can start to realize they share a lot of the same qualities as gambling games.
League of Legends and it’s addictive systems
The first game that I’d like to go a little more in depth into to spot some similarities is League of Legends, also known as LoL or even just League. LoL is a Massive Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game or MOBA, and is one of the most popular games in the world. The overall genre and concept of this game is that there are two teams of five real players who battle each other to defeat the other’s base in strategic and reaction based combat over around 30–45 minute games. There are moments where there is less fighting between the five players on each team and more leveling up, and moments where it’s extremely exciting with all kinds of special abilities and characters dashing around the screen.
I personally don’t think there are that many aspects of League’s actual gameplay that are extremely addicting and others I know who have played extensive amounts of the game agree. However I can pick out a few things that show some connection to slot machine tactics.
In LoL the abilities that you can use are often very flashy and have a large impact on the screen with just one press of a button. Just like slot machines a simple press of a button is coupled with tons of visual and sound effects. Not only does this give the player a sense of control and power, but there is also a system in which the player can get stronger by buying items, so that they are extremely powerful at the end of the 45 minute match. Perhaps this cycle of starting from scratch and slowly becoming stronger is an addicting loop to players, as it’s seen in many other games that I’ll discuss below as well.
LoL also lets you run a farm, perhaps the most addicting aspect of LoL’s gameplay. Farming is the way in which players get gold to buy items which make them stronger.
The farming process consists of killing lots of small and non-dangerous enemies called minions. These minions periodically run into your territory and it’s your job to get the perfect last hit to kill them. Usually, to get this last hit players will simply right click on the minion with the correct timing and a graphic with a gold symbol will pop up with a small gold sound effect, which can be hard to notice as it gets ingrained into your mind.
You’ll see your gold count go up in the UI and be able to spend it at the shop, then do it all over again. I even have a close friend who would go into the practice mode by himself and practice farming, just for fun and in order to improve. To me this is something mind-numbingly boring, but to an addict I suppose it feels relaxing or like an escape.
After talking to many people I know who play League of Legends and from my own personal experience, it seems that the most addicting part about the game is what is built around that. What I mainly mean about this is LoL’s ranked system. Basically by playing games you can be ranked in skill among all of the players in your region and see your ranking based on tier and ranked points called LP.
After each game players are awarded or taken away LP which at values 100 and 0 can either demote them or put them in a series. In the series players must win 2 out of their next 3 games to promote to the next tier. There are a few reasons why this system is extremely addicting. One of them being that it’s very satisfying to see progress towards getting placed higher among everyone in your region. Players also tend to care about this ranking and even play the game in order to improve their rank, rather than actually play the game. In fact, most people that I know who have played League for over 5 years don’t even find the game fun anymore and play the game only to reach a certain rank or pass time because it is so comfortable to them. When players sit down to play a couple ranked games, if they happen to lose those 2 games then they feel an inclination to play 2 more to get their rank where it was before. If they happen to lose one of those games the cycle continues and you can start to realize you’ve spent more hours than you anticipated playing League of Legends. This seemingly random element of winning and losing games, and trying to balance your LP is essentially a gamble with your own time. It’s the same principle gamblers face when they lose money, they feel like they should buy back in or put some more money down so they can win it back. From LoL players I’ve talked to they’ve even said they don’t even feel that happy when they win a match, but more like it was something they expected or even relief. However, when they keep winning, players often feel like they’re on a roll and want to keep going so they can continue to climb. Obviously this isn’t completely random and can actually be due to skill improvement, but there are a few theories in the community that the matchmaking system places you in either “winners queue” or “losers queue”. Not to mention that this matchmaking system is incredibly fast in comparison to other games. When a game finishes, you are met with the screen below:
Notice how the play again button is big and blue, and the stop playing button is a little x off to the side greyed out next to it. League of Legends isn’t a huge offender when it comes to continuity, as it isn’t instant but their queue times are usually around 1–2 minutes, extremely quick for an online game. In fact this is just enough time to give players a bathroom or snack break. At least they do give this small break after a game though, to evaluate if you’d really like to play again.
I’d also just like to mention that there is a very interesting parallel between slot machines’ ergonomic seating and gaming chairs. Gaming chairs are also designed to be comfortable for sitting in long periods of time, in fact they usually recline and people fall asleep in them. They offer back support, head rests, and extendable leg rests. There’s also a huge culture that promotes gaming chairs and you’ll find them in most PC gamer’s setups. Not to say that these chairs are inherently bad, but it’s interesting to think that these chairs enable you to do exactly what both regular video game and gambling game developers want you to do, and that’s spend more time behind their screen.
World of Warcraft and its altered state of gameplay
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a game which also falls under the Massively Multiplayer category, however this game is also classified as a Role Playing Game, or MMORPG for short. My experience with WoW is much more limited than League of Legends, but I can say I am pretty familiar with the strategies it uses to get players in their game for frequent and long periods of time. I have a few friends who have recently been playing a lot of WoW Classic, a version of the game more like when it was originally released. The main addictive gameplay element I’d like to talk about in World of Warcraft is the concept of grinding. In the game, players are required to complete many shallow and meaningless quests, tediously kill large amounts of enemies, or simply travel across the map to deliver something in order to level up. Sometimes players will even just fight certain enemies which give good experience over and over again to level up more quickly. There isn’t anything enriching about this gameplay, however hitting the correct buttons in the correct sequence on the keyboard and seeing the animations and sounds play out on the screen is just enough reinforcement to start to lull players into a state similar to gamblers behind slot machines. Grinding isn’t challenging or enriching, but it is something easy to repeat, like a ritual for your fingers. If you don’t believe me, go to any part in the video below to find exactly nothing exciting happening:
Watching your experience bar go up, upgrading your gear, and finding new loot is a gameplay loop that has players sink huge chunks of time into. For a lot of gamers, especially ones who aren’t addicted to an RPG game like this, grinding is something that isn’t desirable to do. Game developers continue to add this to their games though because it adds to play time and they know that players will sit through it. Players will go through grinding because one, some of them actually find the process relaxing and enjoyable, and 2, all of the interesting content of the game is after you’ve grinded and leveled up. If the end game content is compelling enough, there will always be players who will sit through any amount of boring content before it.
Genshin Impact and Gacha Games: Pure slot machines for games
The last game that I’d like to mention is Genshin Impact. This is a relatively new and trending game at the time, and it falls under the dreaded title of a Gacha Game. These games are categorized by the fact that in order to progress you will “roll” for new items, teammates/characters, or abilities, that are randomly selected and with very low odds of winning something good. Most of these games allow the player to spend real money in order to “roll” more. This aspect of gacha games is almost identical to slot machines and similar “loot box” systems have been continuously called out in both gacha and other games. In fact, League of Legends somewhat recently started to include their own loot box system. Gacha games however, are usually almost entirely built around their rolling system. Many gacha games have taken a page out of World of Warcraft’s book and included grinding. This grinding doesn’t put you into any type of altered state though, and most gacha games even have an “auto” feature which will go through the grinding for you. The gameplay in gacha games is usually not very interesting, and the grinding required is often just meant to frustrate you to buy more rolls.
Genshin Impact does actually have compelling gameplay, in a similar way to World of Warcraft, and a world to explore with characters to get invested in. Beneath all of this though, it’s important to remember that the game is still gacha, and wants you to roll as many times as possible. It simply takes a different approach to this by giving the player positive feelings associated with rolling, rather than negative ones. Genshin’s roll system actually has very low chances of the player winning, and is meant to try rolling countless times to hopefully get a character you want. Check out this video clip of a youtuber explaining this drop rate system and a “mercy rule”:
Here’s some footage below, from the same video that displays just how similar the flashiness, continuity and speed of the drops, which is extremely similar to slot machines. In fact, the player even has the ability to see what they’ve won at their own rate, by clicking to see the next item. This is somewhat like the dynamic pacing of certain slot machines that Dow Shull has researched.
There are undeniable similarities between strategies conventional video games employ to what slot machines in Vegas use to keep players engaged and behind their screen. My goal is to simply draw attention to this issue and hopefully point out some things people may not have noticed before. In fact, I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing to get lost in some WoW grinding or trying to rank up in League of Legends. It is important to understand what we are subjecting ourselves to when we play these games and that many developers don’t respect our time as much as they should. In these uncertain times of the pandemic and ever-evolving digital age, it’s important for us to remember to respect our own time and to be on the lookout for who may be trying to make us gamble it away.
