Blips: Try Your Luck

Source: Rage Against the Machines
Author: Ian Bogost
Site: The Baffler

Listen, if you're up on your Ian Bogost, the professor's new essay in The Baffler covers relatively familiar territory. He asserts that free-to-play games follow in the tradition of coin-op arcade games, built with the specific intent of continuously extracting money from players' wallets. Not only that, many F2P games include social hooks that encourage you to spread the games' cultural capital in exchange for virtual goods. It's still a very interesting essay, even if you're already sold on the idea that many game executives in the F2P sector are basically swindlers. Bogost calls out Zynga and King specifically; both claims that are difficult to contest. If you're looking for a quick abstract of what the piece is all about, I'd suggest the second-to-last paragraph, which comes after a declaration that Silicon Valley operates as a kind of mafia.

"And in this sense, free-to-play games are a kind of classic racket. They create a surge of interest by virtue of their easy access, followed by a tidal wave of improbable revenue that the games coerce out of players on terms that weren’t disclosed at the outset. The game knows more than you could ever hope to about the stakes it presents, and it uses the logic of its own immersive environment to continue generating reasons for you to pursue its skewed stakes. The creators use your attention to build collective value that they cash in before anyone can see inside the machine that produced it. Like free digital services more broadly, the real purpose of the videogame business—and, indeed, of American business writ large—is not to provide search or social or entertainment features, but to create rapidly accelerating value as quickly as possible so as to convert that aggregated value into wealth. Bingo!"

Yep.

Blips: Free 2 Disagree

Source: Game Design: The Medium is the Message
Author: Jonathan Blow
Site: Creative Mornings

This video is a few weeks old, but worth checking out if you missed it the first time around. Game designer Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) breaks down why free-to-play games are a regressive movement away from the medium as one of artistic expression. For the most part, I'm on board here. The convincing analogy Blow sets up is one with hour-long TV dramas in the 70s and 80s. These shows were formed around the commercial breaks and the promise of syndication. Acknowledging that every medium has creative constraints that need to be worked within, these old TV shows felt much more constrained than modern hour-long dramas on cable networks. There are games that do F2P in an ethical way, but regardless, it changes the form that the game takes and the relationship between developer and player.

I'm about to start playing Gran Turismo 6, and have just learned that it contains microtranactions for cars. This has shifted my desire to play the game as one of excitement, to one of "I hope it isn't gross." From what I've seen of Forza this year, I'm not super confident. And that's a real shame. I haven't played a Gran Turismo game since 3, back when I was in high school, and have been greatly anticipated jumping back in with GT6 ever since it was announced for PS3. Having played DiRT 3 earlier this year, I've seen how commercial intrusion can put a damper on what otherwise feels like a pretty fantastic experience. In DiRT 3, you could not earn gold medals on certain events without purchasing additional courses and races. The extra gameplay isn't "extra" when it interferes with what I've already paid for; it creates an artificial gate (made worse by being in a game that costs $60 upfront). I've got my fingers crossed that GT6's microtransactions are truly extra features that will only appeal to people who care way more about cars than I do.

I just hate playing games that feel like the real challenge isn't the puzzles or the enemies, but in figuring out how to get the most satisfaction for the least amount of money. Unfortunately, this is the mentality that F2P perpetuates, and it's very popular.

Blips: Free-to-Play and the New Harpoon

Source: Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games
Author: Mike Rose
Site: Gamasutra

In an expansive report for Gamasutra, Mike Rose researches the ethical implications of free-to-play financing models for games, and how they thrive off of whales: individuals who spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on these games. While the majority of F2P players never pay a penny for their time in those games, a very small percentage of players pick up the slack by spending what from the outside appears to be an unhealthy amount of money. Do these types of games exploit individuals most susceptible to these kind of addictions? How closely are F2P models tied to gambling? What are developers doing to acknowledge this issue?

Rose's piece doesn't have firm answers for all of these questions because it is an area that has received little research and not all F2P games use the same approach. The most unethical business models seem to be the ones derisively referred to as pay-to-win. These games are free upfront, but delevopers have carefully constructed walls that push players to pay for virtual items that will increase their performance and get them past the blockade. In competitive games, pay-to-win strategies are often seen as unfair in that players who spend more money will trump players who might exhibit more skill, but haven't made certain performance-enhancing purchases. Other F2P games like the super popular League of Legends and DOTA 2, strive for a level playing field where virtual goods are only purchased for aesthetics and have no direct impact on performance.

Still the question remains, how ethical is it to make the majority of your company's money through the addiction of a select few players, some of which play and spend to the detriment of their quality of life? No one seems to want the government to get involved, so hopefully the industry can refine their practices on their own. As pointed out in Rose's article, players are already shifting in droves to more balanced playfields that eschew pay-to-win models, but until developers put a cap on how much their willing to let players spend on virtual goods, or intervene when players exhibit signs of addiction, there's still a lot of work to do.