The Art of Guilting You Into Gaming
How game developers employ specific techniques to prompt habitual player behaviour
Neopets wasn’t my first venture into gaming but was certainly one of the first I grew addicted to. The addiction was definitely not occurring by chance as the developers were enacting a method that used to be known as “stickiness” to suck in even a kid like me in the mid-2000s.
When sleeping over at my friend’s house on the weekends, we’d stay up until midnight — a big deal for eight-year-olds, because we were essentially sneaking downstairs to the family desktop computer without being caught — because we thought this is when we had better chances to find Neopets with rarer skins and colorations in the Neopian Pound. We always thought the Pirate and Faerie paints were the coolest.
The virtual online game is geared towards earning fake currency to buy items for your Neopets. To do so, users must earn Neopoints via minigames, most of which were single-player basic browser games, but I can’t tell you how many hours I would spend playing Faerie Bubbles before realizing it was one of many replications of Bust-a-Move and could play it literally anywhere else.
But taking care of your Neopet also means feeding it, and anyone who’s played knows what happens when you log into the website after days of being away — because, you know, normal eight-year-old responsibilities like food and homework and parents needing to make landline phone calls. Your Neopet is suddenly dying of hunger.
Not only are they dying, but they will also stare up at you from the screen with big, sad eyes to make you feel even worse about it.
The idea is to keep you, the user, actively thinking about your Neopets and therefore, playing as often as possible because this could result in spending real, hard-earned cash (probably your parents’ cash) on its virtual currency known as Neocash. Most games with replenishable in-game money utilize this type of subliminal method that keeps you weighing its convenience in the back of your mind, especially mobile games. The hottest one on the market right now is Genshin Impact.
The joy with most single-player RPGs is that players can typically pick up the controller and put it back down with ease, whenever they want. But Genshin Impact, being a gacha game, operates a bit differently. While it doesn’t quite rely on you logging in every day and the game can be played without constant attention, the game is largely designed so that you’ll want to log in every day.
Firstly, the player is rewarded Primogems — in-game currency that can lead to pulling rare characters and weapons in the gacha — when they complete their four daily tasks. The player is also supplied with a limited amount of Resin each day, which is mostly used to reap rewards from beating bosses and Domains. Resin depletes quite fast but is also capped at 160. Also, the rewards from these bosses and Domains are extremely important for character leveling, which is needed to advance in the game. The point being, players need to spend their Resin often to make strides in Genshin Impact, and Primogems can get you four and five-star characters, which is where the game’s hype comes from, similar to how my friend and I felt with the rare Pirate and Faerie-painted Neopets.
What this does is makes you, the player, feel like you’re missing out if you don’t log in and spend your Resin or earn your daily free Primogems. It keeps you coming back to the game until you’ve fully formed a long-term habit of doing so. This results in subconscious justification to spend money on Genshin Impact as if it’s an investment: “I’m playing this game a lot, so putting down ten dollars on more Primogems is worth it.” Therefore, getting more money into MiHoYo’s pockets.
This tactic of habit-forming turning into the occasional justification for money-spending can be seen with many mobile or online “freemium” games, like Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp as well as the good old Neopets. The kicker is that once you’ve put down a number of dollars to feed your gaming habit, once you decide to walk away from the game or find yourself no longer playing it, it feels all the worse.
This is how Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets you.
The Animal Crossing franchise has always been about playing habitually, only logging in for an hour or two a day. Back when I did my Animal Crossing GameCube playthrough, it was difficult to find more than an hour’s worth of tasks each morning. Though New Horizons has advanced to include many more activities, it’s still meant to be played only a little per day (and not 40 hours per week like we all were at the beginning of quarantine). But there are no microtransactions in New Horizons, so it doesn’t really matter if we play habitually. Nintendo doesn’t make more money the more we play, right?
Not directly, no, but the pay-off for the developer comes with the hype of the game, similar to Genshin Impact. Wanting to be a part of this adorable social simulator, collecting the best villagers by judging them to the highest of standards when you finally have an open lot on your island, and designing the most gorgeous island to show off to your friends. It’s successfully resulted in the Switch selling out multiple times and New Horizons becoming one of the best-selling video games in history.
Making you want to play a game like it’s a habit means more revenue for the developer. And what’s one way to get you to keep coming back in the short-term? Guilt-tripping.
Again, after dedicated hundreds of hours to a single game, this time to terraforming in Animal Crossing (I’ve logged over 400 hours), you feel so much worse when you finally walk away from it. But the game doesn’t just subconsciously make you feel guilty, uniquely, New Horizons also directly guilt-trips you when you’re away for too long. Aside from the cockroaches and the weeds, your villagers will say awful things to you like “I thought you were ignoring me” or “I thought I had turned into a ghost” when you don’t talk to them for a while, which also includes not logging in for a few days.
So, if you’re ever wondering why must your Neopet stare up at you with large, hurt eyes, saying it’s “dying of starvation,” or your favorite villager is making you feel bad for having a life outside of gaming, it’s to get you to return, in hopes that the habit will lead to you or someone else spending money on it.
