Ethics, Consuming Player's Time, an instance

News & General Discussion
1

hmm, this is actually sort of a passing thought,
but, just recently i have seen this:

for Path of Exile, an ARPG game,
admittedly by them, it is a grind fest, the company’s name is “Grinding Gear Games” , you grind for gear.

now the problem that comes to mind is, where is the ethical limitation of designing a game to consume people’s time,
naturally, “time, is the most precious resource we, as living creatures, have”
therefore, to willfully design a game to waste people’s time is unethical.

so, the thing is, this game, they will have new “challenge leagues” to add new and differing content to the game,
and they will have challenges, and the players win items, cosmetic graphical effects, akin to what they sell as microtransactions.

this new league they have a challenge that includes
“kill voll 1200 times” “Complete Two End-Game Grinds”

… its one of the bosses, not a hard or exciting or fun boss particularly, but it RARELY drops an item that is very valuable in the in-game’s economy. (and i mean RARELY … ive seen, in the game’s forum, posts saying he got one of the items after “months” grinding it) … and you need 8 of these items (divination cards, basically 8 of these = 1 actual item, its a coupon to get an item, you need 8)

someone pointed out that killing Voll 1200 times, will take about 20 hours of play time. (not sure how accurate that is but seems maybe right)

… the challenge is totally optional, and is actually like, a joke challenge, its a challenge that is obviously a “skip this one”

but i think the implication of having it be a challenge at all is ethically dark.
i mean, for real,
that design is like, serial killer level of depravity,
(whoever decided to put it as a challenge)
basically is saying “YOU SHALL SACRIFICE A DAY+ OF YOUR LIFE FOR THIS GAME!”

the thing is, the game devs are suggesting that players, play an “unhealthy” length of time, grinding one boring boss.
i believe this instance is ethically corrupt, as game design.

(and pushes me away from the game, on principle, as a player of it)

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2

players will play that much, if they desire to.

but the dev’s insinuation, or acknowledgement of an unhealthy level of play,
is unethical for them to insinuate, to encourage.

3

i guess in one way, games are meant to hold attention over a duration.

i think the “outrage” i experience is exemplified by, they are offering a reward (equates to) paid items.

… hmm, the game always has the item “The Brittle Emperor” hidden behind a wall of extreme RNG, low chance.
… designing such a low chance may be deemed unethical by my above judgement, but it may be argued that the RNG chance is of the workings, of the challenge of the game… it is a metric by which the game operates…
a game of chance.

but when the challenge is made by ~ defined time length (a ridiculous length), rather than, governed by chance,
it becomes more a question of the ethics of the design.

… it becomes a game of endurance, rather than of chance or skill.

4

Meh.

Games are about giving the player a sense of accomplishment. Some people will kill 1200 voles, knowing full well that very few people would actually stick with it that long, and get a sense of accomplishment from it. Not me, but some folks I’m sure. It’s no better or worse than spending the same amount of time on 10 different highly varied game experiences.

All games (except those with some educational content) are fundamentally a waste of time, a form of entertainment. If people don’t find this particular game entertaining, they will quit wasting their time on it (and probably waste that time on something else). I see nothing sinister or dark about what you’ve described.

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5

sure, it serves me as an observation, a consideration

… my goal is educational, and enrichment via the video games medium.

6

There is a term I’ve seen a couple of times called “black hat game design.” It’s when games are designed specifically to exploit people who tend to fall into additive or at least compulsive behavior:

I think where it gets a bit nasty is when you have a game with scheduled rewards that can be accelerated with micro-transactions. When real money gets involved, it takes it to a whole new level.

I don’t see an issue if a well-adjusted person just wants to do some mindless grinding after work to unwind though. It’s not a “waste of time” if they got something out of it and that can be determined by most reasonable folks themselves.

It doesn’t sound like Path of Exile is necessarily doing anything particularly “evil” by having a side activity that involves massive grinding, but the devil’s in the details. If I was designing the game, I’d be a little worried that such a boring activity is so explicitly baked into the game though.

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7

This is actually a major factor for me creating games. My company’s purpose is to do the exact opposite of this. We believe games are just like any other form of entertainment in that they are ways for people to escape and relax. What’s better is that games offer the same feelings that books, music, and movies do combined into one facet. It’s the ultimate experience. Turning that a way to exploit people for money (because that’s really what we’re talking about here) is sacrilegious, for all intents and purposes. It’s dirty, underhanded, inconsiderate, etc. That game is not or my benefit and the developer knows this.

At one point in one of our now abandoned projects I told the team that we needed to add more flash/flare to some of the positive effects, as this triggers those happy feelings and keeps people coming back. I then realized that if the content itself doesn’t engage people then the flash and flare isn’t as important, and we should be making the game look cool for the sake of looking cool, not to trick people into believing they’re getting something out of it.

8

I didn’t play POE in a long time. I actually started playing it in closed beta when you still had to buy access to it. For me it always was one of the few ethical F2P game that I knew and could accept as a concept. I don’t see a problem with a boring grind challenge that seems more like a joke than anything else.
I’d have a problem with competitive PVP online multiplayer games giving players the choice to either do 20 hours of mind numbing grind or pay 50$ to get some super overpowered advantage over other players. As long as it’s only cosmetics, I don’t care.

9

Games by definition are a waste of time. No matter how you build them. If wasting people’s time bothers you, get out of games.

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10

The purpose of games in my opinion is to entertain and allow people to escape reality for awhile, just like movies, comics, books and any other “time wasting” activity… and since humans are flawed it’s unavoidable that some people will get addicted.

A bit of a long shot but it’s kinda like the well-known and really tiresome discussion that shooters generate serial killers, sure there are psychos that eventually could get triggered by a game, movie or any violence and go bananas… but most people can handle it and understand that it’s entertainment, not some obscure message or serial-killer exercise.

You can’t really keep every single individual and their behaviourish problems in mind when developing a game 'cause then you could probably not create any games at all.

I agree with what someone said in a post above though that it might be slightly unethical when it comes to in-game mini-transactions, although I can’t be objective about that since I really just hate in-game transactions…

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11

It reminds me the time when “Achievements” were introduced by the Xbox 360, and everyone became sort of pre-occupied or addicted to this shit ; and when people spent hundred and thousand cents for fucking 50 by 50 pixels avatars.

Nowadays there’s so much games being made, especially indies, that I doubt people are still in tune with these virtual collectibles. Instead, I’m quite sure they seek to consume more games than achievements today, just like collecting massively movies and music from the douchebaggery industries, thanks to steam sales for example, which may be a worse conditionning when you think about it…

But some may stick to a couple of great and famous games, and simply play with friends for years to come on them…

At least, the best you can get from these time-wasting experiences is to find yourself in a better state of mind sooner or later. Unless some neuro-marketing vampires find some new shit to feed your brain with garbage forever.

Also, it makes you wonder why do you play video-games that much, especially alone and all day in your bedroom, if it doesn’t make you lose the enjoyment of playing video-games little by little.

I think I have an interesting question : Do you think players as communities should have the ability to legally fire developpers or editors for alienating concepts ?

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I believe that’s called voting with your wallet. :wink:

Actually the concept of turning the current model on its head is kind of intriguing. Currently we thing of games as something the dev makes and owns, and let’s the players share in. I’m thinking a game coop or some sort of weird democracy. The game is owned by the players, not the devs. And the devs simply come and go as employees of the coop.

It’s a weird concept. But in this day of the Internet and crowd funding it might actually be doable.

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13

I WHOLEHEARTEDLY disagree with this.

If we’re boiling it down, games are entertainment. Boil down anything that isn’t eating, sleeping, or working and it’s simply filling the time until the next period of eating, sleeping, or working. Hiking, building, painting, reading, film-making, playing games.

There is however a very fundamental dividing line between time well spent and time wasted.

It’s been scientifically/psychologically proven that entertainment is vital for sanity. Relaxing and taking your mind off of life stresses is one of the most important parts of a healthy lifestyle. Some people read a book, some people do woodworking, some people hike, some people paint, or watch tv, or play games.

So when does that suddenly become a waste of time?

When it stops serving the purpose it was initially engaged with. If I sit down to relax with a puzzle game and you want me to read a novel before I start playing, you’re wasting my time. If I want to sit down to play a shooter and I have to solve math problems before every match, you’re wasting my time. If I want to play an RPG and level up and get cool loot but I’m expected to kill the same monster hundreds of times and might still never get that loot, you’re wasting my time. If I want to watch a movie but you put 50 previews in front of it, you’re wasting my time. Why? Because it’s not what I engaged in. I didn’t intend to engage in a novel, or math, or a previews. I wanted to shoot stuff or watch a movie, etc.

My company’s #1 goal is not to waste people’s time. I personally hate seeing people waste away in front of their computers playing games for endless hours. It’s very unhealthy on a lot of levels, physiologically and psychologically. That makes game development sort of hypocritical on my part, because I’m just feeding the problem. So to counter that issue we’re designing games that aren’t meant to be binge played. We believe that games should allow people to escape from life; to take a vacation in your home. It’s a form of entertainment that’s meant to engage you and make you feel like you’ve accomplished something without accomplishing anything. That feeling you get when you finish a good book, or a good movie? We’re going for that. We’re still going to have games were we level up and things are blown to pieces because that’s what we think is fun, but the mindset during development follows a particular train of thought.

“Is this engaging?”
“Does this feel like a chore?”
“Is this boring?”
“Is this fun?” (It really is different than the previous question)
“Does this encourage habitual binge playing?”

Ask yourselves those questions and funnel your development down that path and you should end up with a fun form a entertainment that doesn’t waste people’s time and functions exactly as it was designed to function.

Now, some people want to make games that create addictions and enforce binge playing. That’s your deal. You live with it.

The End.

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14

I read your post after I posted mine. Sorry for the repeat.

15

I think that there is a line. and Red5 studios has crossed it with FireFall. I’ve been an avid FireFall player for about 4 years. recently they decided to revamp a lot of the game play and increase the level cap by 5 levels, without adding a new area for the higher level content. As a result they took my main weapon from me that took easily 30 hours of grinding to get. and then proceeded to tell me that that was an end game weapon and I’m no longer at the endgame anymore. I now have to regrind for hours just to get back up to where I was. oh it makes me so mad. that’s the main reason I have ended up hear. I would like to make a similar game for all those players that have been burned by Red5. most of them have moved on to games like War Frame. and I’m sure that by the time I’m finished with my peace of junk no one will remember FireFall, but the bitterness drives me, and one day I might have something that resembles a videa game.

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16

Yeah, it’s important to remember that when players have worked hard to obtain something in game, then it is, in their eyes and by any reasonable standard, their property. They own it and it has value to them, even if it’s just a flag in a database somewhere.

If you take that property away from them, they’re quite rightfully going to be cheesed off.

A somewhat more subtle slap in the face is to devalue their property. For example, suppose the game had been rebalanced such that the sort you grinded 30 hours to get is now available in the shop to any newbie with a nickel. You still have your property, but it’s no longer precious or valuable — you feel like a schmuck for having spent so much time on it. Again the player will be cheesed off.

That’s blatant, and the developers should be taken out behind the woodshed. But something similar happens quite often, when a game economy just goes way out of whack (usually, with runaway inflation). And keeping a game economy from going out of whack is hard, at least in an MMO, even when the developers are trying hard to do the right thing.

But anyway… game assets == property. That’s my point. :slight_smile:

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Just for precision :

Etymologically, the term of Entertainment / Entertain comes from the old French Entretenment, which became Entretien and the verb Entretenir, which means “to keep things or people into a certain state” (the best equivalents are to maintain or to keep in english ; which is not the same thing as to entertain / amuse, as you can notice).

So, keeping people into a certain state can mean a lot of things ; and the spectrum goes from Amusing or pleasing, to Manipulate or Hypnotize.
It’s especially true for Mass Medias, which may concern videogames nowadays (videogames are medias).

So, if videogames were something still experimental during the last millenium, they certainly became a part of a “Universe” everyone can easily be subject to today (“Universe” itself is from “Univers”, meaning uni-, “united”, and vers, “towards” in French ; “directed / versed towards something, as one”).

Just look at all these incult and soulless douchebags (sold to the god Google) on Youtube massively playing Call of Duty, Battlefield, FIFA, Minecraft, GTA V, and what not. Is it something so much comforting to witness in the end ? And what’s the point, ultimately ? The perpetual sake of egocentrism ? (Western propaganda perhaps ?)

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18

Don’t worry 'bout it :wink: you added alot more depth to it than I did!

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Grinding done well is a great mechanic. Grinding is a fundamental human nature. We grind flour and the reward is bread. We patiently hunt and the reward is prey. But that prey might escape, and mostly does escape. Yet this is the thrill of the hunt, the risk, the reward, the failure and will to try again.

So it’s bull that grinding abuses players. Done well, it is a great thing, as most of asia will no doubt agree with. The difference with western games is that western developers take away the reward from grinding. We bring out new items, new challenges too quickly, and this invalidation of your grind is the true crime.

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This is why I’ll always take a ten-minute story based game over a five-hour grind fest. [:P] It’s why I’d rather play MNOG than most JRPGs. [:P]

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