Butterflies, Wasps and the Just-Us League of America
Videogames don't make sense, and it's kinda for the same reason that VR and MR's future might be terrifying.
I grew up with videogames, and videogames grew up with me. The earliest games I played as a young child were among the very first arcade videogames – Computer Space, Pong, Space Race – and as the medium grew, I grew up (although my parents doubted this was happening) alongside them. And I’ve been fascinated and in love with the medium ever since. Eventually I gave in to the inevitable, and metamorphosed into a videogame designer a quarter of a century later, but by that time the state of the industry had changed a lot. I signed on board around the time of PlayStation2 and the very first OG Xbox (the last one where Microsoft’s naming made any sense to me) and by then videogames were already big, big business with swelling budgets, plenty of risk, but plenty of fast cars and success stories to justify taking those chances.
As I settled into my new hobby-dream-job, and started to learn the ropes, something at the core of the business model of designing, building and selling videogames didn’t sit right with me, didn’t really make sense, and in the intervening years has never been resolved for me. In most of my day-to-day, it’s never been a prevalent issue. Instead, it’s something that I only really encounter outside of my work.
Every time someone asks me what I do for a living, I’ve learned to steel myself against one possible response. There’s one perspective of videogames that threatens to fracture the foundation of my own love and faith in the medium. Because sometimes when someone asks what I do, and I tell them, they respond with abhorrence, like I’ve just said I train fighting dogs for a living.
“How do you feel about all the people who get so addicted to your games?”
“Well,” I’ll reply, “that’s usually the goal as creators, and what our customers are looking for – a fun, addictive game they can keep playing and enjoying.”
“Oh really? So turning children into addicts is not an accident, it’s your goal? Don’t you think that’s incredibly irresponsible?”
The first time this happened it hit me like a ton of bricks, it was a perspective I hadn’t really considered. From the inside of my fuzzy warm game designer bubble, looking out, none of the game developers I had worked with or knew seemed like they were trying to create addicts, in any negative sense. Just guys and gals trying to make fun games that players would enjoy. And yet, this party guest / personal party-pooper did raise some questions that others have repeated over the years in similar situations. It’s mostly followed with a story of how their son or nephew ran up a ridiculous credit card bill from buying virtual currency or football cards. I’m not making light of that - those are real problems for the people I’ve met and the games industry at large doesn’t do much to stop it. As such, I’ve never managed to comfortably square away a whole host of issues that I have with it in the years since.
Why do we unquestionably aim to make videogames addictive?
Why do we design games so that players want to keep playing them?
Where and what is the dividing line between benign addiction and problematic addiction, and how will we recognise it when we’re stepping over it?
Are we being irresponsible? Are we doing enough? Is there a better way? Or is the Genie too fat to fit back in the bottle at this point?
And how does building a super-addictive game, (especially back then) even make good business sense?
On this last point, bear in mind that this was a glorious pre-DLC, pre-season-pass, pre-microtransaction time, the good old days when customers paid their money and took the game home (or ordered it off that newfangled internet) and there were no patches or updates, we just hoped it was bug-free, and that they would love it, and want to play it forever. It was a clear deal. There was no long tail of sales opportunities baked in, we weren’t measuring engagement or daily active users. Games were expensive but the love affair you could have with the ones you loved most meant every purchase was potentially the best deal ever. Hundreds of hours of entertainment in exchange for a few bank notes. But from a business point of view, isn’t that working against a market desire for the customer to buy lots of games? Do we really want them to play our game forever and never buy another one? It’s an implicit, unattainable goal in creating a game, but it’s also nonsensical. Why buy a new game when you’re still happily enjoying the last one? Why buy a sequel or a v2.0 of a game you’re still happily enjoying?
In the decades since, the size of the market, cost of development and the shape of the offerings have changed significantly, and some of those questions have become answered, have found solutions, or have been handled within games in what seems like a responsible way. But videogames have never changed their tune in this time, they are still built on a foundational understanding that the most addictive videogames are going to give players the best value and the most entertainment, and thus become hits and bring in the most revenue, through charging users an upfront fee to enter and/or charging rent to allow them to stay. In console and PC gaming, like with mobile, we’ve seen how this becomes twisted. Many of the biggest money-makers across all gaming platforms are free-to-start endless ‘live service’ games that monetize after the player is already hooked on the game; generous and rewarding in the first 5 or 10 hours, and then the screws start tightening and the pressure to play more often, for longer, to get the same dopamine hits starts building.
The alternative is to pay for those hits - shorten the grind, increase your chances, or just straight out buy the things you want instead of playing the game to earn them. I don’t have a bone to pick with these business models in principle - game development is incredibly expensive, studios have huge costs to meet, and making so making a game free to play without any startup investment is good for the player. And they’re not all exploitative, many strive to offer fair value. It’s a whole spectrum. But the purposely deceptive front-of-house acquisition phase, where you’re treated like a VIP until they know you won’t easily want to leave, must always give way to an increasing business pressure to squeeze each individual user to first make their money back, and then to turn a profit. Acquiring each user in a game like this can be expected to cost £15, 20 upwards per user, often much more, so the developer inevitably needs to design the game with these sunk costs and revenue thresholds always in mind. That’s the job, and it’s not ignoble by default. Very few designers from any industry will get the luxury of seperating their creative wants from the overarching business needs, of course.
But designing ways to reliably extract money is not the same thing, in my mind, as designing to entertain a user. Crafting game-based mechanics to ‘hook’ players so that you can then exploit them, no matter how fair you might intend that system to be as a designer, should rightly make buyers wary, because there are so many obvious ways to use the psychology of addiction to influence your player’s behaviour. There are plenty of behavioural psychologist PHDs working in and around game design with expert insights on how to do this, and plenty of game developer slide decks out there to learn the recipes from if you care to look. Most game designers I know don’t have much more of a background in psychology than a lifetime invested in playing the games and a deep investment in understanding what works and what doesn’t in their own games, but all of us understand enough to recognise when something’s fun and addictive, and to question our recipe when it isn’t.
I think my preferences in this are quite possibly an age thing, where videogames have always been something I have always paid for first, and which I then try and get the max juice out of — rather than something I want to drink for free until the juice runs out and then keep paying for more juice (which is probably now getting watered down). I want to carefully choose the next game I might fall in love with and get married to before I’m entranced in a seductive honeymoon period where my reasoning is not reliable. OG gamer, old-fashioned views? Probably, but those sorts of mercantile features and systems, while fascinating to me from a design standpoint, would not be something I would have any interest in designing personally - not in a traditional flat-screen game, and most definitely not in VR or MR, which are so far managing to offer a fun, enjoyable existence without too many of these unlikeable traits impeding. I don’t want to spoil that, but I feel like we are loosely wandering around some big rounded corner already, where hard commercial interests are become more prevalent as bigger games for wider audiences become viable.
Certinly we’ve been seeing that as the VR gaming scene has grown, it has attracted bigger budget games with more ambitious content slates and longer runtimes. Asgard’s Wrath II on Meta Quest, to take one example, designed to be a 60-100 hour game – and that’s just for the main story. There are calendar-limited quests, seasonal content, rare unlocks, and deep secrets. The checklist of addictive elements from modern AAA gaming are present and correct, and some users out there have spent well over 200 hours in that one game. The VR designer in me sees that as a great achievement and brilliant value if you’re a player who falls in love with that game. And if you got it free with your headset as many did, it’ll be the best free pack-in game you ever encountered - it’s super polished and extremely high quality, made by a large team funded by Meta, and the development cost estimates being thrown around are often over the $100m US mark. But of course, this mean there are more sinister perspectives to consider there as well, not least because 50, 100, 200 hours inside any reality where someone else is completely controlling what you see and hear inherently carries more potential for harm than playing a game on a TV screen ever has.
That gnaws at me, more now than it ever has before. I’m uncomfortable because Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, who are presiding to some greater or lesser degree over every layer of the XR vertical, would all really like to retain your eyeballs and attention for as much time as possible please, and have recently decided to collectively rebrand themselves to be the world’s new Bond villains. If you’re thinking about Tech in any way, that should be ever-present in the back of your mind because the gloves are coming off so the rule book can get torn up. The potential for misusing the addictive qualities of gaming, combined with the reality that our tech platforms are controlled by a few big players for whom disputing and denouncing the negative aspects of addiction and ignoring their responsibilities towards their users could easily go unchallenged, gives me chills.
Following Trump’s inauguration in the US, the major tech players have quickly assembled into what might be described as an off-brand, government-approved super-cartel team-up — The Just-Us League — and the normal social, legal and political implements that would keep villainy in check are being dismantled by the day. It’s not hard to predict some of the bad ways this might all play out. But I’ve noticed that in all the discourse around taking the safety rails and moderation away from Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, I’ve seen no talk about how this might eventually affect Meta’s XR offerings, which (lets be honest) can already be a cesspool of abuse and unfriendliness if you wander into the wrong VR titles, and which as a device holds a powerful potential to be used for malicious ends. Meta, custodians of the biggest VR/MR market share, are of course an Ad-tech business at their core, who make the majority of their imagination-defying money by driving engagement with their products to provide an opportunity to get your eyeballs on some ads. Their products and devices ultimately exist to provide an audience they can charge advertisers to access. And as we have seen the quality of the products have shifted over recent years towards increasingly shittified shadows of their former selves as new user acquisitions flattened out, and bottom line growth necessitated the switch to harvesting more from their existing users — something that’s quickly becoming de riguer for mature tech products. This of course has resulted in more of what Meta want you to see (ads, sponsored links, promoted story threads that pull you into broader engagement etc) and less of what you wanted to see (the people you follow, posts from your friends and family, your social groups and so on).
Meta’s VR is still very much in that immature acquisition growth phase; subsidized headsets, competitive app pricing with lots of sales, discount codes, and gratis store credit if your purchasing patterns suddenly cease — so we shouldn’t be expecting this wolf knocking on our particular door just yet. We’re safe for now. But let’s not forget that the wolf was the one who built this particular VR polygon house, with it’s endless potential and infinitely large swimming pool. It’s difficult to see Meta’s current Quest 3 and 3s offerings as anything other than incredibly appealing, and despite their UI woes and general software shonkiness, it does offer incredible value. On Meta’s VR front the sun is bright and rising, there’s a cool wind blowing, the door is open to all, the cost of entry is lower than you should expect, and the message is warm and welcoming. And right now, it’s a nice place to be.
But we shouldn’t ignore the big bad’s nature, because we know eventually they’re planning to bite. “Little pigs, come on in, you’re one of the first - a VIP (very important product) in our eyes! Relax, make yourself at home and kick back. We’ve got a big pool we need to fill got plenty of room for you to splash around, so here’s some discounts and benefits so you can bring in your friends!”. That the modern tech life cycle is like this doesn’t surprise anyone, of course, nor should the inevitability that this will happen to their immersive devices once day. But that means that as VR grows in popularity, we need to be expecting that the turning point, where the tech will inevitably start being used against us in ways we won’t like - whether by Meta or others - is getting closer too.
Peering at that distant cloudy horizon, my worries stem from the fact that the addictive qualities of VR might, in the long term, be more significant than social media or videogames. Consumer VR, despite being around nearly a decade at this point, is still developing, the tech is still growing, the horizons and possibilities are still being explored. It’s still exciting. I’m still, 15 years in, deeply enamoured with the possibilities. There’s a lot of unknowns and mystery surrounding what we might still discover, what XR mediums might become. But things have advanced fast in that time. VR is going into it’s pupae state, and arguably dragging MR with it, leaving their slow-crawl larval origins behind them, and starting their change into some mature hybrid form. And honestly, I don’t think anybody 100% knows what will crawl out of the cocoon at the other end, be it butterflies or wasps.
We’ve always been sold on the butterfly result - the wonder and utopia of what a shared immersive dream world could offer. But if it’s wasps, and we’re all trapped because we’re too addicted to splashing around in someone’s giant pool, it’s going to be hard to escape without getting stung. Abandon the software library you’ve paid for, forget your social connections? It’s the same choice users faced with facebook, Insta, Xwitter, Reddit… the list of prior cases is endless, we’ve all heard the stories, so as users and developers we would be smart to be prepared for the worst.
Does that mean not building up an app collection because you can’t take it with you when you go? I don’t know, but it’s certainly one of the issues I wrestle with before my credit card comes out. I’ve got plenty of headsets so I can survive the sting, but I do own around 150 apps on Quest (don’t judge me, I do this for a living) and that would be a lot of welts to put up with. For those sucked into the wonderful world of immersive experiences solely through the standalone Quest platform, though - and that’s a lot of users - I think the temptation to stay in the water rather than abandoning something they love and have invested in could be much more powerful. Walking away from facebook or Instagram might be painful, but at least with those you only pay in tears.
But on the other hand, if there’s a chance we can make sure it's butterflies, we should be pushing for that, because that shared experience would be really, really cool and lovely, right? Billions of us swimming happily with each other, entranced and in wonder of this amazing communal experience, something we all get to share together. People in the pool shake hands, hug, and become lifelong friends. Differences are settled, divisions are closed. Louis Armstrong glides past on a pedalo, singing about what a Wonderful World it could be. Butterflies everywhere. Hasn’t that always been one of the attractions of the metaverse – that it can be a great leveler where we’re all equal citizens of a new world that’s not tied so tightly to geographical, cultural or political divisions? A world where we can all potentially come together. The wasp alternative would be way more savage, brutal, and ugly. But I think it’s almost certainly the realistic outcome we should be expecting. The chances of the virtual space being regulated to prevent such danger are slimmer than they ever were. I worry that too many people working in XR won’t want to think about a future beyond a butterfly forecast until the wasps are already airborne and the panic sets in. Once that happens, I’m not sure VR, MR or wearable tech in general will be trusted. ‘VR is influencing your behaviour’ quickly morphs into ‘VR is controlling your brain and you don’t know it’ and suddenly there might not be much of a market for XR gaming any more. And whatever way AI gets applied to the XR experience will likely add to this problem- having an artificial intelligence controlling or influencing your reality is like the easy mode version of how the machines will win. We all know this.
That won’t make me want to stop working towards the good future here, of course. I’m somewhat of an upbeat pessimist so I’ll aim for Butterflies and do everything I can to make sure they’re delightful, pretty and friendly, and I’ll always encourage that in the people I help. I’ll probably try not to sound so apocalyptic about it when I do. But I’m also very aware that there are still many unknowns for XR technologies, countless possibilities around how immersion and believability might be improved to crazy levels. And videogames, especially in the mobile sector, long ago cracked the science and economics needed for hooking and reeling in users, and keeping them happily addicted - and normalized it to the point that users have become fine with it. We have no fate except that which we make for ourselves, and the one we’re currently making sucks.
And let’s not get started on the millions of sci-fi stories, TV shows and movies that warn us about the nefarious ways in which replacing our reality might be used against us in the sort of dystopian future we seem to be accelerating towards. Lots of things are pointing to the buzz around VR and MR getting louder over the course of the next couple of years. The user base will be growing exponentially as the ‘dude, you gotta try VR’ effect takes hold - the only way VR will really grow is through getting to experience it, so the more headsets out there, the more this will accelerate. I’m not shouting at people to get out of the water, but at the same time I think we should be thinking about this, starting to talk about this, and keeping a cautious eye on where that buzz is actually coming from, what plans big Tech is working towards, and making sure our towels and flip flops are ready if we decide to get out of the pool.
Fantastic. That’s actually been good therapy for me, I’m feeling a lot better and It helps me get my thoughts straight - there’ll be less uncomfortable ‘Uhm’ing and ‘Aaah’ing next time I’m asked by someone if I recommend getting a Meta headset, which is a question that can tie me in knots. I’d love to book another session with you; next time I’m going to try and straighten my brain out on this once and for all and work out if I can come up with a good, positive comeback to wipe the judgemental looks off of those party-poopers’ faces, or whether we are all just, in fact, blindly training hard to be the very best resources we can one day become for the data-villain overlords running the Matrix.
Until next time,
Jed
Jed Ashforth has been working in the games industry since 2002, and working with VR, MR and AR apps since 2010. He has too many headsets and not enough time. If you’re interested to find out more (or even bring him on board to help you) you can reach him, and check out more of his work and articles, at www.realisedrealities.com.
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Nice article Jed! May the butterfly’s win by (a) being better quality than the wasps, and (b) making users the customer (not the product being sold to advertisers)
Thanks Jed!