THE JOURNAL
Illustration by Mr Thomas Pullin
How the games we play are playing us.
In December 2014, Conservative MP Mr Nigel Mills was forced to issue an apology after being caught playing the puzzle video game Candy Crush Saga for more than two hours on his iPad during a House of Commons committee hearing on pension reforms. Mr Mills’ initial response stated that he would “try not to do it again in the future”. As former Silicon Valley writer Mr Eric Geissinger notes in his new book Gamer Nation: The Rise Of Modern Gaming And The Compulsion To Play Again: “he didn’t promise not to do it; just that he would try. We wish him luck.”
It may only be a game, but the threat that highly addictive titles such as Candy Crush pose to our mental wellbeing is real enough that the American Psychiatric Association has added “internet gaming disorder” for possible diagnosis in future editions of the Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders. Mr Geissinger singles out that game in particular as an incredibly manipulative piece of software, and he observes that its form of “psychological jujitsu” – bright colours, drip-fed rewards, an instinctive interface that even a child could operate – is increasingly influencing the wider tech industry. “Facebook used the same tricks as the Candy Crush game designers, and everyone in the ‘attention economy’ [as in any business that earns its money through eyeballs on screens] is being pressured to do the same thing”.
As the virtual world seeps ever further into the “real” one, here are three insights that Mr Geissinger provides into why games and social media are so hard to step away from, along with power ups to help you resist just one more scroll.
**You are programmed to play games **
As it turns out, most animals with even a modicum of intelligence seem to exhibit behaviour patterns that could be called play. In fact, as a general rule, the smarter and more social an animal is, the more it larks about. “In very few areas do humans actually best all other animals, with two clear exceptions,” Mr Geissinger says, “general intelligence and time spent playing games.” This, too, helps to explain why Americans spend more money on entertainment than they do on health insurance, fuel, education and clothing – and as much as they do on food.
Research has shown that rats who are successful at interactive games “are higher on the social pecking order, have better reproductive results, enjoy better nutrition, feel less stress and in general enjoy happier and longer lives,” according to Mr Geissinger. Projected on to humans, he suggests that children should be encouraged to participate in unstructured play – and while in an ideal world this should mean going outside with their mates, games such as Minecraft can provide a safe environment for this.
Games are designed to be frustrating – but not too frustrating
It might be a free-to-play game, but Candy Crush has proved massively profitable. Since its launch in 2012, Candy Crush and its variants have been downloaded more than 2.73 billion times, with 293 million active players a month at its peak, making it by some margin the world’s most popular video game. “The only game anywhere near this absurd total is Tetris, which was first released in 1984,” Mr Geissinger says, noting that Candy Crush has shifted more than five times the number of units as Tetris in a fraction of the time.
In part, the commercial success of Candy Crush points to the fact that users no longer need a specialist console to access such titles – all you need is a smartphone. But for Mr Geissinger, it also represents a shift in the gaming experience, with the title targeting casual users and providing an experience that bears more similarity to that of a Las Vegas casino slot machine than a round of Super Mario Brothers. Where being good at Tetris requires “90 per cent skill and 10 per cent luck”, with Candy Crush, the ratio is reversed. Instead of fun, the focus is solely on “extracting money from the player”. And if you recall that these elements employed by Candy Crush are being rolled out across the entire output Silicon Valley, Mr Geissinger asserts that somewhere along the line you’re being played for a mug.
“The current goal for many internet companies desirous of clicks and attention is to be as manipulative and annoying as possible up to the very limit of the end user’s patience, which they are often able to calculate mathematically, given the easy and powerful feedback mechanisms available to web-based businesses,” Mr Geissinger says. When the experience is so unpleasant that users start to drop off, the company will scale it back. “Finding that limit is key. Making the end user happy isn’t part of the equation.”
Very soon, eSports will outperform “real” sports
The “eSport” industry – as in professionals playing video games in front of an audience – is set to be big business. In fact, you might not realise it, but it already is – and not just in South Korea, either. A report from February last year suggested that the eSports economy would grow to $696m in 2017, a year-on-year growth of 41.3 per cent. Another survey found that in 2016, 22 per cent of male millennials in the US watched eSports, putting it equal to baseball and above ice hockey in terms of viewership for that demographic. And while participation in most sports is in decline, more and more of us are picking up video games. “Given that the younger generation takes video games even more seriously than their older peers (both playing more and spending more on games), there isn’t any reason to think that the eSports boom is anywhere near played out,” Mr Geissinger writes in Gamer Nation.
For professional players, this turns video games into what sport has become for professional athletes: a job, and one that’s based more on financial incentives rather than having fun.
