When I was a child in the 1990s, I began my campaign for my first video game console several months before Christmas. My parents, like some parents who came before them and most who came after, were wary. They associated video games not so much with the thrilling secrets of Super Mario’s undulating hills or the literary flair of Infocom’s interactive fiction games, but instead with vague ideas of truancy, delinquency and probable ruin. My grandmother, a pragmatic woman, took pity. She secreted under the tree a Game Boy and a copy of the Soviet-era miracle that is Tetris.
In the years that have followed, video games have evolved in astonishing ways, often expanding to fill the advancing technologies that power them. Tetris remains as potent as ever, but today’s players are drawn to video games that function more like social media platforms than discrete interactive stories, playpens that employ psychological tricks and gambling-adjacent techniques to dissuade their audiences from immigrating to rival virtual worlds. It’s a creative shift occasioned by economic concerns, one that has come to actively harm the medium and those players most deeply embedded in it. While the creators and publishers bear responsibility as stewards of that field, so, too, do I and other parents whose choices this holiday season help shape the culture.
Video-game makers, like novelists, filmmakers and Netflix executives, have always employed a raft of techniques to keep their audiences engaged. But there is an especially close link between engagement and economics in video games, where, for the first two decades of the medium’s existence, most players paid to play by the coin. In the 1980s, an executive at Atari, the company behind Pong, remarked that the ideal arcade game should provide a short burst of entertainment before frustrating players, so they insert another quarter to continue: something easy to pick up, hard to master, and with a difficulty curve that followed the trajectory of a mountainside.
In the early 2000s, after video games became widely internet-connected, publishers discovered that keeping players engaged for as long as possible could be even more profitable than trying to move them on to their next product as quickly as possible. At the peak of its popularity, in 2010, the online fantasy game World of Warcraft had over 12 million subscribers, a population roughly equivalent to that of Senegal at the time, all of whom paid a monthly fee to live out digital lives in the game. Players were incentivized to join clans of like-minded players and pursue their shared goals with the determination of a sports team hoping for a promotion. While through the ’90s and early 2000s designers had vied with one another to attract players through novel, imaginative design, now, for many, the main goal was to keep players engaged for months, even years at a time, mainly through familiarity.
With so many virtual worlds competing for our attention, publishers did anything they could to lure players away from rival games. Rather than sell a video game for a fixed and profitable price, like a hardcover book or a Blu-ray Disc, many began to offer their titles free, at least in the beginning. Once invested in the game, players could then purchase a season pass, a kind of I.O.U. from the publisher promising to bestow a clutch of rewards such as digital costumes, potent weapons and other benefits in exchange for a fee — the allure no longer the creativity so much as the promise of virtual trinkets.
Fortnite, released in 2017, refined this “season pass” model, which helped generate more than $9 billion in revenue for its creator, Epic Games, during its first two years. This extravagant success had a profound effect on the industry’s major players, who began to see their games no longer as discrete pieces of entertainment but more like destinations, such as Instagram or Facebook, to which users would, ideally, log in every day. Jacob Navok, former director of business development at Square Enix, one of the largest Japanese publishers of video games, recently pointed out that pre-Fortnite most players would, like readers of books, finish one game before moving on to the next. Today, while the industry continues to grow, he wrote that a smaller number of games are developing “stickiness seen in social media companies.”
The accountability office said many of those systems “have critical operational impacts” on air traffic safety and efficiency. Many of them are also facing “challenges that are historically problematic for aging systems,” according to the report.
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