Alas, Pandora's Box Has Already Been Opened

There are times when I wonder whether the old adage about necessity being the mother of invention is actually a good thing.

After all, look at some of the designs behind monetization in video games, and I wonder just whose necessity is behind those creations. Surely not the players' necessity, and certainly not the developers' necessity either. I suppose you could argue that those designs were created for the necessity of the investors so that the companies could make larger profits off of video games, but is that good for the long term health of the industry?

Note that I said industry, not the companies. I'm absolutely certain that video game companies --particularly the AAA game companies-- are more profitable because of the monetization techniques that rely heavily on psychological manipulation. That, however, doesn't mean that the industry itself is healthy. 

If nothing else, you could argue that by creating addictive responses to the monetization techniques, the video game companies have figured out how to adapt the same tricks used in the illegal drug trade* for their own profits.

It just doesn't sound the same, and
it would probably work as well as the
original "Just Say No" campaign too.
Original photo from USA Today.

Given that Grand Theft Auto V exists, I'd imagine my comparison of the AAA video game companies to drug cartels isn't something that those companies really are concerned about. Additionally, the embrace of "gambling mechanics" by the video game industry may sound bad to most of us until you realize that gambling is a fact of life among sports leagues. Just look at how many teams in the Premier League are sponsored by gambling outlets, or the embrace of the NFL and other American sports leagues by formalized gambling, and you realize that the stigma of "gambling mechanics" is likely considered a good thing by many investors.

Photograph from this article by The Guardian.
By Shutterstock; Getty.

But you know what suffers? The games themselves.

In the same way that tobacco industry executives and insiders considered cigarettes to be "nicotine delivery devices", I have to wonder whether the AAA game companies consider their products --video games-- to be "microtransaction delivery devices". Certainly the games themselves have suffered a bit in terms of quality, as if the games themselves aren't the most important part of the development process.

To that end, Josh Strife Hayes created a video that touched a nerve with me:

Hayes' Box of Abusive Monetization Strategies --or Pandora's Box of Bad Design-- pretty much encapsulates all of the practices that people dislike about video games today. And, I suppose, just like the original Pandora's Box, you can't put those items back and lock them away now that they've made their way into game design.

A game developer can choose to not utilize them. Or a video game player can choose to not purchase games that contain the Box's contents.

Me, I tend to wait for everything that was going to be released is released, and then wait for it to go on sale via Steam, before I buy a game. Some games are perpetually updated, such as Paradox Games' offerings (Europa Universalis IV and Stellaris, to name two of them), and I just wait until there's something I find interesting and yes, dependent upon whether it goes on sale (and I've the spare money, which is frequently an iffy thing) before I purchase it.

Obviously this does not work so well with MMO subscription games, such as WoW Classic, but I tend to spend a lot more of my time watching and waiting on expansions before I decide whether or not to purchase them. Considering I'm not going to be doing anything that requires me to be on the bleeding edge of a new expansion, I can afford to wait.***

But I'm not a lot of people, and neither are a lot of people the whales who are targeted by a lot of contents of Pandora's Box of Bad Design.

What can save us in the long run? Ourselves. We have to resist the Bad Design practices, and play games that don't have them, if we want to effect change. If nothing else, just play those games because they're good games.

And for pete's sake, don't preorder games from companies that use the contents of Pandora's Box. That's giving those companies a blank check. Make them earn your money by making good games.

*Back when I was still into the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series --circa the late 90s-- there was a free paperback of the first part of The Eye of the World available to people at bookstores. "You know what this is?" a bookstore employee told me, holding a copy up. "This is your free sample of crack." 

**And to be fair, a lot of the Software as a Service or SaaS model itself falls under that header too.

***Since I'm really keeping my WoW account active for Wrath Classic (and to a lesser extent Classic Era), there's no worry about being on, say, a current raiding tier there. I don't have to pay extra for WoW Classic, which is perfectly fine with me.