this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
531 points (87.2% liked)
Technology
58011 readers
3076 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Has everyone forgotten coin-ops? Or maybe I'm just old.
This started a long, long time ago, pretty much at the birth of popular casual gaming. It's not part of the evolution, it was part of the blueprint.
The thing with coin-ops, and arcades in general, is that you still had to physically go somewhere, and have the coins to keep playing. If you walked away, someone would take the machine. Worst case scenario, the machine stopped working when it ran out of coin/token space.
I'm not denying that there are similarities, and that ultimately every game ever has been built on a fundamental mechanic of risk/reward, but it was rudimentary and broadly speaking deterministic and visible to the user (you knew how to get a free ball in most pinball games, for example).
The combination of easy payments, of very high amounts, and online competitive play where the high rollers can be multi-millionaires from anywhere in the world, and a pay-to-win mechanic makes certain modern games not just addictive, but financially crippling, if played by someone susceptible to addiction.
I agree, but I was responding specifically to the claim that the use of psychology to tweak the design of a game in favour of profitability happened in 2010 / 1990 / etc.
The fact that it's now orders of magnitude worse is, of course, true, but it didn't start there by any definition.