Irresistible
Page 13
You can see the same loss aversion even more clearly in so-called penny auction websites like Quibids.com, HappyBidDay.com, and Beezid.com. To begin using Beezid, for example, you buy a pack of bids. Packs range in size from forty bids (for $36, or 90 cents per bid) to one thousand bids (for $550, or 55 cents per bid). The Beezid site features hundreds of ongoing auctions for products like laptops, TVs, and headphones. This is how an auction for a new TV looks after the first bid:
The first bid was for one cent—a single cent!—and it was placed by a user named bidking999. The clock reads five hours, which means that bidking999 will win the TV for the princely sum of one cent if no one else bids before five hours have elapsed. Each bid usually raises the price of the item by one cent (hence the term penny auction). Bidding is scattered at first, but when the clock drops below roughly fifteen seconds, the auction enters “action time,” during which every new bid restarts the clock at fifteen seconds. On particularly hot items, this happens dozens of times—a bit like the Reddit April Fools’ countdown button that took weeks to reach zero. Some items sell very cheaply, but others sell at close to face value. The problem for the consumer is having to bid thousands of times before winning anything, which burns through thousands of pre-purchased bids while paying nothing in return. The site makes a tidy profit, while the consumer gradually loses a few cents at a time until his losses become enormous.
Hundreds of penny auction participants complain online. Some argue that the site is a scam, and others compare it to gambling. One consumer reports expert at SiteJabber.com tested a penny auction platform and said that, despite being wary, “Even I was drawn to those sites and I felt like I was putting quarters into a slot machine but with no real chance of winning.” The process is so addictive because you pay for bids up front, so spending them doesn’t feel painful at all, and the lure of saving thousands of dollars—in this case paying one penny for a three-thousand-dollar TV—is hard to resist. Once the bidding period enters action time, you can almost taste the win. The stakes are low when you place your first bid; but by the time you’ve placed your hundredth bid, and you’ve seen the timer drop to one second dozens of times, you’re heavily invested in the process. No wonder consumer reports sites call penny auction platforms “risky,” classify them as “scams,” and often recommend buyers avoid them altogether.
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Penny auction sites have earned their awful reputations, but not every engaging experience is predatory. Some experiences are designed to be addictive for the sake of ensnaring hapless consumers, but others happen to be addictive though they’re primarily designed to be fun or engaging. The line that separates these is very thin; to a large extent the difference rests on the intention of the designer. Penny auction sites are predatory by design, as are slot machines. (Natasha Dow Schüll titled her book on gambling Addiction by Design.) But when Shigeru Miyamoto designed Super Mario Bros., his primary aim was to make a game that he himself enjoyed playing. Instead of consulting focus groups, he played the game for hours on end, ironing out its bugs and settling, in time, on the version that Nintendo released in 1983. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Miyamoto designed the wildly successful Pokémon games, and again his primary allegiance was to the integrity of the game. “That’s the point,” he said, “not to make something sell, something very popular, but to love something, and make something that we creators can love. It’s the very core feeling we should have in making games.” When you compare Super Mario Bros.—regularly voted by game designers as the greatest game of all time—to others on the market, it’s easy to recognize in the competition the hallmarks of a predatory game.
Adam Saltsman, who produced an acclaimed indie game called Canabalt in 2009, has written extensively about the ethics of game design. “Predatory games are designed to abuse the way you’re wired,” Saltsman said. “Many of the predatory games of the past five years use what’s known as an energy system. You’re allowed to play the game for five minutes, and then you artificially run out of stuff to do. The game will send you an email in, say, four hours when you can start playing again.” I told Saltsman that the system sounded pretty good to me—it forces gamers to take breaks and encourages kids to do their homework between gaming sessions. But that’s where the predatory part comes in. According to Saltsman, “Game designers began to realize that players would pay one dollar to shorten the wait time, or to increase the amount of energy their avatar would have once the four-hour rest period had passed.” The game ensnares you, like penny auctions and Shubik’s Dollar Auction Game do, and manipulates you into waiting or paying. I came across this predatory device when playing a game called Trivia Crack. If you give the wrong answer several times, you run out of lives, and a dialogue screen gives you a choice: wait for an hour for more lives, or pay ninety-nine cents to continue immediately.
Many games hide these down-the-line charges. They’re free, at first, but later you’re forced to pay in-game fees to continue. “Those hidden charges are one way of behaving disrespectfully toward your audience of players,” Saltsman said. “They’re a bit like the classic arcade games that charged you a quarter to play the easy opening level, but then forced you to confront a really tough boss at the end of the level. The whole level is easy and fun to play, and then the boss is super hard to defeat. So you have to put in lots of extra quarters to get to the next fun level. The game advertises itself as costing a quarter, but there’s no way to kill the boss without spending a dollar or more.” If you’re minutes or even hours deep into the game, the last thing you want to do is admit defeat. You have so much to lose, and your aversion to that sense of loss compels you to feed the machine just one more time, over and over again. You start playing because you want to have fun, but you continue playing because you want to avoid feeling unhappy.
Even if the industry’s biggest game designers aren’t sure how to make their games addictive, they learn quickly with the help of a clever technique. “It’s called color coding,” Isaac Vaisberg, the former gaming addict I introduced in chapter 2, told me. He gave the example of an online role-playing game, in which players form guilds to complete missions. “Say you have two million players already, and you’re trying to figure out what’s most engaging to them. You attach a color to the [computer] code associated with each mission, or even to different elements within each mission, and see which is most addictive.” The color codes, or tags, allow designers to track how much time players spend on each element within each mission, and how many times they come back to try the mission again. “Since you have a huge sample of players, you can run experiments. Mission A might require you to save something, whereas Mission B is very similar except that you have to kill something.” Similarly, Mission C might give you a burst of positive feedback early on, while Mission D, which is otherwise identical, doesn’t give you any feedback. A designer can see that, for example, people spend three times as long playing a mission that requires them to kill rather than save, and return 50 percent more often to a mission that gives them short bursts of micro-feedback. The result is a weaponized version of the original game that evolves over time to be maximally addictive. “World of Warcraft is particularly good at this,” Vaisberg said about the game that ensnared him for a couple of years. “Over eight years they’ve engineered the game to include everything people like.” FarmVille, for instance, is an addictive game about running a virtual farm. At its peak, tens of millions of Facebook users played the game. “FarmVille was huge on Facebook, especially among women, so the World of Warcraft team embedded a version of FarmVille within World of Warcraft to attract female gamers.”
Historically most gamers have been men, but the gaming world has begun to appeal to women and other underserved groups. In fact, in August 2014, women over the age of eighteen became the largest demographic in gaming. They represent 36 percent of gamers, whereas men over the age of eighteen make up 35 percent of all gamers. This rise was fueled, in part, by games like Kim Kardashian
’s Hollywood. Kardashian released the game in June 2014, and in its first year it took in tens of millions of dollars. Almost half of the game’s revenue went to Kardashian herself. The game is free to download, but there’s a tiny “in-app purchases” warning under the download button, and it’s almost impossible to play the game without spending money. The aim is to rise from E-list to A-list celebrity by doing the sorts of things that Kardashian herself might do: change your outfit often, be seen in public, parade your friends wherever you go, date lots of people, and, above all, avoid getting dumped. Players earn K-stars whenever their celebrity stars rise, but to make meaningful progress they have to buy booster packs. A small star pack is five dollars, but an extra-large pack costs forty dollars. You can also spend your real, hard-earned cash to buy virtual cash.
Like World of Warcraft, Kardashian’s game delivers small doses of positive feedback to entice players as soon as they begin. The game’s production company, Glu Games, does plenty of testing to make sure those rewards are delivered at precisely the right intervals. One Business Insider columnist declared the game “uniquely toxic and addictive . . . perhaps the only app that really deserves the comparison to drugs.” Other journalists reported similar addictions. Jezebel’s Tracie Morrissey admitted spending nearly five hundred dollars on the game: “You guys, I literally think I have a problem. What a lame, embarrassing addiction to have. What would I even say if I tried to get help for this at AA or something?” Emilee Lindner wrote an article on MTV.com titled “True Life: I Got Addicted to the Kim Kardashian Game,” and admitted using most of her family’s data plan when she played, sometimes through the night. Many of these “addicts” are high-functioning people who otherwise hold down impressive jobs and raise families. They aren’t the stereotypical addicts of yesteryear, which is precisely what makes the products that seize them so insidious. One minute, they’re novices passing time with a new, free game, and the next they’re apologizing for blowing the family budget on gameplay.
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In the world of budding addictions, beginner’s luck is a serious hazard. When I was eight and my brother was six, we visited the local ten-pin bowling alley with our parents for the first time. Bowling is a difficult game for adults and a terrible game for children. Modern alleys deal with this by replacing the gutters alongside the bowling lane with bumpers, which make it impossible to bowl a gutter ball. A game of skill becomes a game of luck as the ball bounces wildly off the bumpers. In the late 1980s, when we visited, there were no bumpers, and there were no concessions for hopeless beginners.
We paid for our two games and walked past an endless row of bowling balls. The first rack was filled with a dozen black sixteen-pound balls. These were the no-nonsense bowling balls reserved for serious bowlers—strong men with big hands who could turn their wrists to impart enormous spin on the game’s heaviest ball. We walked past the fifteen-pounders, fourteen-pounders, and down to the far end of the alley where a small rack held several balls made for younger bowlers. You could tell they were for kids because they were pink and blue and orange, and because the finger holes were almost too small even for our tiny paws. Also, they weighed six pounds.
We broke no records that day, but my brother was forever hooked on the game. Where he enjoyed a freakish dose of beginner’s luck, I bowled with consistent incompetence. I racked up a couple of pins here and there, and we finished on a similar score, but his eight points—his entire haul for the day—came on his first attempt. I still remember his shuffling approach, and the awkward double-handed sidearm throw that drove the ball much harder downward into the floor than it did toward the pins. By some miracle, the ball ambled down the lane, avoided the gutters, and very slowly toppled all but two of the pins. We cheered and he celebrated, but that was the last time he would score that day. For years afterward he was obsessed with the game, and I’m convinced that his obsession was driven in part by the early taste of success that came before a long era of failure.
Beginner’s luck is addictive because it shows you the pleasure of success and then yanks it away. It gives you unrealistic ambitions and the high expectations of a more seasoned competitor. Your second dose of success is a mirage that seems nearer than it actually is, and the sense of loss that mounts with each new failure drives you ever harder till you recapture that early (and undeserved) sense of glory.
I watched my brother bowl a long string of gutter balls—not just that day but each time we went bowling for many years. More than twenty years later, I decided, with my colleagues Heather Kappes, Dave Berri, and Griffin Edwards, to replicate his experience in the lab. We invited a group of adults into a lab to play darts. None of them had played before. We told them their performance would be scored, but to be fair we gave them a chance to practice first. Half of them stood so close to the dartboard that success was all but guaranteed, while the other half practiced from much further back and generally struggled—a far more realistic piece of feedback. Later, when we asked everyone how much they enjoyed playing and how motivated they were to play again, the “lucky” beginners were game to continue. The unlucky beginners weren’t completely discouraged, but their early dose of realistic feedback dampened their enthusiasm for the game.
Many game designers know that beginner’s luck is a powerful hook. Nick Yee, who has a doctorate in communication and studies how games affect players, has written about the role of early rewards in online role-playing games.
One of [the factors that attract people to online role-playing games] is the elaborate rewards cycle inherent in them that works like a carrot on a stick. Rewards are given very quickly in the beginning of the game. You kill a creature with 2–3 hits. You gain a level in 5–10 minutes. And you can gain crafting skill with very little failure. But the intervals between these rewards grow exponentially fairly quickly. Very soon, it takes 5 hours and then 20 hours of game time before you can gain a level. The game works by giving you instantaneous gratification upfront and leading you down a slippery slope.
Designers discovered this tactic after combing millions of data points—the sort of exploratory exercise that Isaac Vaisberg described. Where my brother’s beginner’s luck was a true fluke, the “luck” that graces novice gamers is engineered.
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Beginner’s luck is addictive, but some experiences are so friendly to beginners that luck is unnecessary. When I visited David Goldhill, the Game Show Network C.E.O. I mentioned earlier, he began by handing me his phone. “I want to show you a game that I find fascinating. My youngest kid who’s seven years old loves it. It’s incredibly simple and stupid. Do you know Crossy Road?” I told him I didn’t. “See how long it takes you to figure out how to play the game.” It took me three seconds. All your avatar has to do is cross the road without getting run over. He moves with simple taps of the screen. This “simple and stupid” game, like Super Mario Bros., is designed so there are no barriers to entry. The minute you see the screen, you know as much as you need to know to start making progress. “This reminds me of another game . . .” I told Goldhill before he interrupted me: “It reminds everyone of some other game they’ve played.” Crossy Road borrows elements from so many games that, if you’ve played just one or two of them, you’ve effectively played them all.
The Game Show Network hosts and produces games, but the organization is best known for its TV game shows. They work on the same principle. “If you watch a good game show that you’ve never seen before, within a couple of minutes of tuning in the rules will either be clear to you, or they’ll actually be explained to you,” Goldhill said. “Part of the design of a good game show is that there are no barriers to entry. And there’s a worldwide vernacular. No matter where you are, if you tune in to a game show, they share the same set of basic elements. If you look on YouTube, you’ll see fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds designing their own game shows, and they use that same vernacular.”
I thought back to the games that had rec
ently occupied my time and attention. Almost without exception, they were remarkably simple. Earlier I mentioned Adam Saltsman’s game Canabalt, which is a perfect example. Your aim is to control a man who’s running from some ambiguous alien threat along a futuristic cityscape, hopping from building to building, moving faster and faster as he goes. The game determines his running speed, so all you have to do is tap the screen when you want your avatar to jump. During a particularly turbulent flight across the Atlantic, I soothed my nerves by playing the game over and over again. It was the game’s simplicity that made it the perfect vehicle for meditation. I know I must have looked odd, because I saw a friend play Canabalt once. His face was screwed up in concentration, his body completely motionless except for his index finger, which waggled cartoonishly up and down as he coaxed his avatar to jump—slowly at first, and then faster as the game wore on. There is no end to the game—you can play forever if you’re superhuman—and Saltsman was credited with spawning a new genre of games called “endless runners.” In a New Yorker interview, game designer Luke Muscat recalled, “I remember playing Canabalt and just thinking, How has nobody ever thought of this before?” As if to underscore the game’s simplicity, Saltsman came up with the game’s odd name by listening to his six-year-old nephew merging the words “cannonball” and “catapult.”
For decades, video games were played by teenage boys and men who never grew up. That’s no longer true, because gamers don’t need consoles or big chunks of free time. Smartphones have changed the gaming landscape completely. Take FarmVille, the game that WoW embedded in its platform. “FarmVille was wildly popular,” says Frank Lantz, director of the New York University’s Game Center. Roughly one in ten Americans have played FarmVille, and for two years it was the most popular game on Facebook. Players were charged with building a farm by tending to virtual crops and animals. The game was addictive and predatory: once players built their farms, they had to return to the game at preset intervals to water their crops. If the crops died, which happened to millions of players whose lives and sleep schedules sometimes prevented them from returning to the game, they could pay to “unwither” those crops. People spent untold sums of money undoing that neglect. Time called the game one of the fifty worst inventions of all time because its “series of mindless chores” was so addictive. “Harvest Moon was very similar to FarmVille,” Lantz said, “but you had to own a Super Nintendo console to play the game. Well, these people playing FarmVille don’t need a console, and it doesn’t make sense for them to crouch down in front of a television set and play Harvest Moon. But here’s a game you can play for five minutes at work, or whenever you want to take a break. In some ways it’s very similar to an existing genre, but with a new rhythm that fits into these people’s lives. It introduced people who hadn’t played games before and hadn’t thought of themselves as gamers to some of the fundamental properties that make games fun.”