Gaming Goals, and...Whales?

In a previous blog post I mentioned how I'm very much a goals-oriented person. I feel a real need to work - and work often - with measurable/showable results. Producing 3D models; game levels; writing; or just making some little bit of progress towards, well, something, and having a marker point for how I spent my day. You might wonder how that works with being a gamer - games are, surely, just a waste of time for a person like that, right? Of course, people play them for enjoyment, which isn't a waste of time, but when I enjoy work, I could be working instead. There's the kicker - games these days have gameplay loops designed for people like me, and to indoctrinate people who aren't like me into treating the game like work, sort of.

Picture two games - one is a total sandbox with no clearly defined goals for the usual player. Garry's Mod is a great example - what you put into Garry's Mod is what you get out of it. It forces no goals in front of the player - goals are self-made. You might be the kind of person who goes on a random server, fights other people for an hour, and that's it.

The second game is one that constantly shoves goals in your face. Destiny 2 is my sometimes loved, sometimes hated, example here. These goals might be to, say, kill 500 enemies with a particular gun, and it will make that gun 5% better at killing more enemies. That's simplifying it - usually, every gun in your arsenal has 5-6 goals of this caliber to be working towards at any given time, not to mention a whole host of side goals, activities, story threads to be reading and working through...You get the idea. These games are designed to tap into that productive part of your brain. They establish a loop of drip-feeding new content, having to work for that content. It makes you feel like you've achieved something physical when, in actuality, you've achieved nothing beyond the game world.

No harm done, you might be thinking - if it pulls you in to a satisfying gameplay loop, then surely, it can only be a good thing? You'd be right, if companies weren't deliberately going out of their way to nickle and dime customers at every step of the journey. From season passes, to microtransaction bundles, to expansions, and more, every game with this feedback loop is designed around two things - FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and whaling. No, not the kind banned under some international convention or whatever - whales are a sub-genre of gamers that used to be a rather small proportion of a game's audience. The modern monetization metric is now aimed at creating as many whales as possible, and turning the average consumer - whether they realise it or not - into one.

FOMO is played into by MMOs and all sorts by tapping into our psychological need for completionism. Human beings hate to leave a task, collection of items, or similar thing incomplete. FOMO in games therefore plays into this by dangling exciting little morsels just out of a player's reach, with the only way to nab them being microtransactions. Cheap little purchases, when magnified in volume by hundreds of potential items, build up over time. Better yet if the items bought aren't purely cosmetic - the biggest MMOs like Destiny 2 or World of Warcraft generally keep items in cosmetic territory as they have large enough playerbases that trickling microtransactions are enough to keep the ball rolling, but smaller MMOs will rely on so-called "pay-to-win" mechanics to make their dough.

Whales, then, are a type of player that generally buy as much content as they can possibly get, whether out of genuine love for a product or because they've been hooked in by the feedback loop an MMO is designed to create. I've been hooked into this before, though more rarely since I began working on games and thus learned about the mechanics behind these psychological manoeuvres. Even then, so compelling are these loops that I catch myself almost feeding just a little bit of cash into a game here or a game there because something shiny is trying to get my attention. It's a habit I've luckily kicked in recent years. Nonetheless, it's a mechanic ever-present in modern releases, and one likely to be going forwards.

This was a bit rambly as there was a lot to explain, but the sum-up is this - games these days are designed to either make you set your own goals, or shove goals in your face, to make you feel like you can justify playing them instead of working on that essay or finishing up that clear-out you started. Being aware of the positive feelings of progress they fabricate is crucial - I still enjoy games, and I enjoy the feeling of progression a game like Destiny 2 gives you, but I am always acutely aware that when I stop having fun but still feel compelled to play, that's not me making that decision - it's the game, tricking my brain into making it unconsciously. That impulse is a hard one to ignore. When so many games are vying for your time, though...it's a necessary skill.