Every Game Is A Loot Box
You have just embarrassingly lost third time in a row, and you press “find game” once again. You feel emptiness and hatred towards the matchmaking system that seems to get you a team of toxic monsters every time without fault while forming a team of telepathic hive-mind super soldiers to oppose. As you see the game search indicator spin, only one question spins in your brain: “Why am I doing this?..”
The players are used to feel distrust and contempt towards loot boxes. Very few think about the fact that their favorite game is actually a loot box of sorts, too.
Let’s talk about a Skinner-box. Without retyping the contents of Wikipedia and with egregiously oversimplifying everything, the idea goes something like this:
- the box is used to study training processes in rodents, birds and other simple creatures
- it is a contraption with means to take the creature’s input and means to deliver rewards
- it provided a ton of useful insights, but we will talk about a specific experiment — the one that usually interests game developers the most
The experiment, in short, goes like this: the rat presses the button, and a reward may or may not appear. There are three test groups: in the first one, the reward appears always; in the second one, the reward appears predictably (for example, every three button presses); in the third one, the reward appears randomly.
Then all three groups stop receiving the reward, and the time until rats stop pressing the button is measured.
In the first test group, the rats stopped pressing the button almost right away; in the second, they lasted a bit longer. In the third, their hopes lasted substantially longer. They lasted even longer if during the first phase of the experiment the reward itself was randomized, so it could be smaller or bigger at times.
Let’s get back to games. When you search for a game in LoL, Dota, CS or anything like that, what do you expect to get in the end? You definitely want to win, but are you certain about your victory? You’re not, especially if you’ve just lost several times.
But if you were 100% certain to win every game you play, would you keep playing? I think not.
I think games, especially MOBA games (and here I include team-based shooters too) play into our love for gambling. Do we succeed with this gank or do we fail? Do we win or do we lose?
This type of excitement is not for everybody though. May it be that MOBAs essentially weed out non-gamblers?
If we go with this hypothesis we may better understand why any MOBA community is deemed “toxic”.
How can it not be toxic, if it consists mostly of emotionally charged gamblers who get their high from essentially random chance to win and get a huge influx of positive emotions or lose and get a huge influx of negative ones?
And if we go further, aren’t most games like that? When you start a level of Candy Crush Saga, are you sure you would win? When you go on a raid in WoW, are you sure that the item will drop? When you play Dark Souls, are you sure your character won’t meet his millionth demise?
Ok, so did you notice that games are very successfully monetized via randomized loot boxes? I wonder why.
