Sounding Board: Do No Harm

As this article was being written, PocketGamer published an interview with Unity CEO John Riccitiello by journalist Khai Trung Li. In it, Riccitiello, who was formerly the CEO of Electronic Arts, calls developers who don’t bake monetization into their creation process “fucking idiots.” From his corporate overlord perspective, this sentiment makes sense; the direction the games industry has taken in 2022 tends towards mega-blockbusters and live service games as the only way to justify game development’s ever-ballooning costs. However, the name-calling has overshadowed a far more sinister utterance from Riccitiello.

“I’ve seen great games fail because they tuned their compulsion loop to two minutes when it should have been an hour,” Riccitiello said, shortly after his “fucking idiots” comment. 

“Compulsion loop.” It’s a term that probably doesn’t need much of an explanation if you’ve played many modern video games. It’s a concept that has become increasingly enmeshed in the way we interact and pay for games. 

Fellow game critics, we need to talk about this more.

Enough of us aren’t talking about the creeping tendrils of late-stage capitalism that’s warping the very medium we love examining, whether it be the slow yet sudden shift in conversation from “price” to “monetization” or the complex psychology of manipulation that’s now at the center of so much of what we do in games. By and large we’re not talking about the whale in the room that keeps growing every year, threatening to fill every square inch of it and engulf everyone caught in its inescapable flesh.This is by no means true for every critic out there as there’s a lot of good work, especially emanating from smaller outlets, but when you see many of the big sites not grappling critically with pay schemes, it’s time for the industry to take stock of what’s happening in games and stop putting blinders on.

Games critics have always grappled with the difference between critical analysis and consumer reporting for as long as games media has been a thing, but games are in a very different place today. You aren’t just exchanging money for games in a single transaction anymore. Since the dawn of retail games, a lot of developments in how we pay for games happened in an ever-escalating cascade of corporate greed: the rise of DLC, the dawn of free-to-play, subscription services just for the privilege of playing games online, and, of course, the worst development yet, the gambling and pay-to-win aspects that games seem littered with now.

It’s this last bit, though, that takes the usual corporate greed angle and brings it to a darker place, bringing us back to “compulsion loops.” The con is simple: Provide a gameplay experience that encourages players to repeatedly perform the same actions over and over for some kind of reward, add a money gate somewhere on the loop, and tease players with a whiff of more of the good stuff once they breach the money gate. This loop may or may not involve gambling to maybe get a favorable outcome. But whether it’s gacha mechanics, loot boxes, or pay-to-win constructions, the idea is the same: Use gambling industry techniques to get people hooked and then separate them from their money.

We often hear that these monetization schemes are acceptable because “you don’t have to spend any money,” thus shifting blame for the abuse from the corporation to the individual user’s choices. This is an easy position to settle into because it absolves the games press from worrying about it. It lets us focus on The Content, which is, after all, where the artful meaning is. But the truth is that’s convenient bullshit. People with brains susceptible to addiction who then go on to become whales do so because that’s how the entire system is held up. Corporations knowingly prey on addictive personalities to drain them of their money in perpetuity. And we know that this is baked into the compulsion loop strategy because corps use terms like “whales” as if that’s a fine profit strategy and not the victimization of specific brain patterns. In fact, one of the loudest beating this drum, Stephanie Sterling, did an excellent video on the subject. More reviewers need to take a page from their book.

Over the past few decades, games crit has become more personal, more socially aware. Marginalized writers have been given more chances to be heard and to speak their truth. The fact that, say, the Orientalism of the mostly White development team of Sifu is being called out at all is proof that we’re making progress. But that progress has only gone so far. We’re fine with calling out racism in a game but make it a sidebar that has no bearing on the score a game receives. Hell, we’re still using the word “addictive” as a positive descriptor in game reviews.

Diablo Immortal recently raised eyebrows when the community figured out that someone can drop as much as six figures on the game to get everything and blitz through, a number that eclipses the already abusive practices of addictive games by several magnitudes. Meanwhile, the earliest reviews of Diablo Immortal sidestepped the monetization conversation in favor of what was actually important, the gameplay. But if we really want to be legitimate critics, if we really want to be an industry that gives a damn, then we need to call out abusive practices no matter what form they take. Let’s not mince words: Whale-centric monetization schemes cause harm. It doesn’t matter if they’re perceived as technically separate from the gameplay. They cause harm. Publishers know this. They do it anyway because in the rotten machinery of capitalism, maximizing profit is all that matters.

Doctors have to take the Hippocratic Oath before they become doctors, pledging to “do no harm” with the delicate healing techniques they learn. In a just society, that should be true of everyone. In a just society, everything we do should be in service of taking care of each other. But corporations are a tangled blight on the world, a many-headed hydra of amorality that sustains itself through pure greed at any cost. We can’t control that. But we can control us. The voices of game critics have power. We can examine mechanics, find meaning, and call out injustice in games whenever we see it. But that means having the moral bravery to do that in all ways. We have a moral obligation to call out abusive monetization schemes reliant on addiction. Anything less is sheer malpractice.