Pleasure in Conveyor Belt Games

Over on CapsuleCrit, Kavi Duvvoori explores their particular and somewhat ambivalent pleasure taken in 'extractive captialist' games such as the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and Factorio. In the article, Duvvoori highlights two of the central pleasures videogames tend to feed on, neither of which are the adrenaline-pumping, conflict-oriented "competition" that one might typically associate with games in general, and videogames in particular.

Instead Duvvoori highlights a curiosity to discover "what happens if...?" given a certain level of mastery over the game. These sorts of games require/allow the player to construct elaborate (or simple) chains of cause and effect, which shuffle entities (in most cases, paying patrons, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Theme Hospital, for example), from beginning to end. The general idea is to extract value from those customers. In Factorio, the metaphor is more industrial: construct vast networks of literal assembly lines which add and modify components in an ever-increasing network.

I'd suggest the "what happens if?" question arises in the mind after a certain point of mastery. The initial questions are usually more like "how do I [do something specific]?" The game usually requires a certain level of proficiency in order to make the machine work at all, so players will typically have a series of smaller, more concrete goals which create a self-sustaining assembly that accepts whatever input is available, and creates a positive feedback loop more or less ad infinitum.

Often, these games will offer a wide array of objects whether rides and attractions, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon, or resource gathering and production equipment, as in the Anno series (trade routes being nautical production lines). These give the player a fixed goal to aim towards on the way to learning the basics of the system. The key is to combine these in such a way that they create more than the sum of their parts. Whether we term this resonance or positive feedback, the goal is to multiply value exponentially.

However, I feel that those numbers of imagined value are a skin over the top of the more primal pleasure of figuring out how a gadget works, then setting up ever-increasingly complex versions of that gadget to manipulate. The pleasure comes not only from setting and meeting goals, but from something primordial in humans - the same itch that is scratched by watching a ridiculous, convoluted and pointless Rube Goldberg machine work successfully. We needn't justify them in any other way than to say it feels good to build something that works.

Warcraft Time

World of Warcraft is ... well it's a game because they sell it at game shops, and you 'play' it. But it is also a virtually interminable social space in which people interact in competitive, cooperative, and myriad other ways. To put it simply people spend time there, together.

The most recent expansion has been controversial for a number of reasons, but this article stood out to me. In it, James Whitbrook describes an unexpected melancholy that was immediately recognizeable to me. I wonder how many other players have experienced the dawning realization of real, mortal time passing based on milestones in that game. I wrote about mine years ago, when I learned of the one-off sale of one of the original WoW servers.

These years later, I've had similar feelings of nostalgia and the sensation of quiet loss that growing older brings with it; I wonder how much the association with WoW for both Whitbrook and myself is simply the context in which we've turned a corner. We've realized a new metric or scale of time. We can measure things in years - longer than high school, longer than college or that job we had in our early twenties. Yet, something has caused us to notice that the relationship we have with WoW to change. For me, the server, for Whitbrook, the burning of Teldrassil.

It would be interesting to compare these anecdotes to the players of professional sports. Someone who played basketball through high school, college and professionally. How do they relate their life to their game? Is it any different?

Designation of a "Gaming Disorder" by WHO

In January 2018, the World Health Organization identified a "Gaming disorder" as follows:

as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.

For gaming disorder to be diagnosed, the behaviour pattern must be of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning and would normally have been evident for at least 12 months.

Many in the gaming community would typically circle the wagons and defend the medium, as has occurred for decades, typically with respect to causing violent behaviour in players. The mantra has been that games have no impact on players and should not be singled out as being more effective at modifying the thoughts or behaviour of the players than any other media form.

Reading the above diagnosis carefully, however, one must focus on the explicit criteria for the disorder, specifically "despite the occurrence of negative consequences." This is not stating that playing videogames (to any particular measured extent) is a negative consequence in and of itself.  For this diagnosis to be valid, the player must be experiencing "significant impairment in personal, family, social educational, occupational or other important areas..." Meaning, then, that only when the focus on game play takes precedence over other important (necessary?) life functions does it become a problem.

My view on these matters has always been cautious scepticism. Describing videogames as having no effect on their players is tantamount to saying they are meaningless - hardly a tenable position for a media scholar to take. I've argued vehemently in the past for an R18+ rating in the Australian classification system not because I believe strongly that mature games should be restricted to adults (though I think some kind of warning or guide is certainly useful) but because such a rating would ensure mature games are not banned outright. In the Australian context, such a 'restriction' is actually a liberalisation of an already parochial system.

Though I don't agree with him on every point, Jeremy Ray proposes that such a designation by WHO is a necessary step in the maturation of the medium. He focuses in particular on the compulsion exploiting design employed by videogames, derived very clearly from the gambling industry and Skinner-type psychology.

From my limited understanding (after all I am not a medical doctor or psychologist!) it appears that the WHO designation takes a sober view of game practices. Unlike the Australian classification system which excepted videogames from the R18+ category due to their purported "higher impact" baseline, WHO appears to be focused on the relative impact on other aspects of the player's life, not on some exceptional, unique aspect of videogames themselves. This, then, is only fair.