I really enjoyed Joey Schutz’s article from last month To Kill a Dragon: Video Games and Addiction. Joey is a colleague of mine I’ve known for a few years and I really admire his work- He’s a thoughtful designer and I appreciate reading his thoughts on games and game design. This piece touched on some topics that I think about a lot also, and my feelings about games and addictive design have changed a lot over time. So I wanted to jot some of those thoughts down. If you haven’t read Joey’s yet though I suggest doing that first, since this is more or less in response to some ideas he is raising. (Actually, if I’m honest, I’m mainly writing this to try and convince him personally. Hi Joey!).
I think ‘addiction’ might be one of the main axes for understanding games and games as an art form, and it’s relevant to so much more than just slot machines or addictive mobile games. As Joey notes, these compulsive ‘hooks’ appear across many different kinds of games, sometimes by design and sometimes unconsciously. A great deal of game design ‘craft’ writing focuses on making games compelling, engaging, moresome, and other euphuisms for ‘compulsive’. Taken on its own, designing for compulsion in this way can be a bit revolting, and Joey expresses a not at all uncommon disgust with it all:
There is a hypnotic effect to the flashing screen, and, most troubling, it becomes difficult to put down. We play again, and again, and again, past the point where any of us still want to. It becomes a game of addiction. In all of these cases, I think there are interesting games in the dirt. Beneath the layers of addiction and compulsion, the flashing lights and auto restarts, we can find games that enrich us, that add to our lives. But I don’t know how to reach these places when I lose myself in the process. We are gaining player retention, but losing play – what we’re left with are addiction machines.
I think it’s right to question this and speak against. But I want to make an argument that maybe these addictive qualities of games are… good, actually? That they’re possibly even one of the central ways games are enriching to our lives. I know this is a bold claim, but if you’re willing to bear with me, I’ll try my best to explain why I feel that way.
Addiction Considered As One of the Fine Arts
There’s a bit in Joey’s article jumped out at me, following this discussion of a GDC talk about this kind of compulsive design:
It is not an accident, though, that these elements have found their way onto our computers. I don’t know exactly when this began, but sometime in the 2000s or 2010s, AAA studios began to bring psychologists into their design rooms. Together, they would probe the human mind for vulnerabilities they could exploit in the pursuit of player retention. In 2017, an Epic Games developer gave a talk “[dispelling] the neuromyths around dopamine,” titled “Throwing Out the Dopamine Shots: Reward Psychology Without the Neurotrash.” It is an appallingly uncritical look at the psychological pain points designers can weaponize against players. One slide, subtly titled “Feedback, Feedback, FEEDBACK!!! [emphasis their own]” reminds us: “If players don’t know they got a reward, they can’t try to get it again. If players don’t know why they got a reward, they can’t do the behavior again.” It is brazenly uninterested in aesthetics, art, or even entertainment: the ultimate goal ends with the player still playing. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
I want to push back a bit on the “brazenly uninterested in aesthetics, art or even entertainment” part, since I think maybe this does show an interest in entertainment, art, and even aesthetics!
I think it’s easy enough to cordon off something you don’t like and label it “not art”. Being artists, we’re naturally inclined to view ‘art’ favorably, even as intrinsically a moral good. So upon seeing something we don’t like, especially in our own field, it’s natural to feel it is something else. Something which ought to be taxonomically rejected. Thus, the rapacious design of compulsion must be not game design, nor art.
I used to teach a class called ‘Math for Game Designers’, and in the unit on probability, I’d assign everyone to read/play this interactive piece from the Guardian called Hooked: How Pokies Are Designed to be Addictive (2017) by Nick Evershed, Ri Liu and Andy Ball. It’s a sort of interactive mini-version of Addiction by Design (and web rot being what it is, who knows how long it’ll still be functional, so go read/play it yourself too!). It was important to me when talking about probability that we also discuss the ethics of its application in games. So we would talk about the article for a bit, and then I would ask everyone, “So, is this game design?”
Because one of things we’d talk about, if you read it already, is the thing about how slot machines use wheels of different sizes. It’s honestly pretty ingenious: punters like you and I would naïvely assume that each wheel in a slot machine is the same wheel, right? That in fact the wheels don’t have the same symbols on them, or are even the same size, is incredibly clever. It means the machine produces that delectable near-miss of “Jackpot, Jackpot, and… Cherry, nooo!” more reliably than raw chance alone would provide. Like a magic trick, it plays on the gap between our assumption of how it works and what it actually does. And it does this to intentionally cultivate a particular experience for the player.
Is that game design? Some students would instinctively reject the idea of this as game design, contriving some reason why it isn’t so. And you have to understand, I teach in a department of game design, where game design is each and every students’ avocation, and it’s something more or less held sacrosanct. So the awful reality of the life destroying effects these machines have on people, that must be… something else, some other worse domain of knowledge. But eventually, someone would reluctantly voice the concession, “Yes… this is game design.”
Which of course it is, how could it not be? These aren’t just designed experiences, they’re well designed. Because slot machines are imagined to be so intrinsically addictive, people think designing them must be easy, and can’t imagine the sophistication and craft which goes into their design. I think it is possible to admire the craft of how they’re designed, while acknowledging that the purpose of that design is, most often, to destroy people’s lives and take everything from them.
Good game design is orthogonal to morally good. This isn’t a quibble, I think it’s a load-bearing assertion. If the crafting of deliberately addictive behavior is part of game design, is part of art, it means art itself isn’t universally positive. Even if you believe, as I do, that the capacity to create art is the main reason it would be a bummer if all humans were to disappear off the face of the earth (to paraphrase David Graeber). It reminds me of On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827), which is a great series of satirical essays by Thomas De Quincey. In it, he advances an argument about considering murder from an aesthetic standpoint. Which seems ridiculous, but…
A man is not bound to put his eyes, ears, and understanding into his breeches pocket when he meets with a murder. If he is not in a downright comatose state, I suppose he must see that one murder is better or worse than another in point of good taste. Murders have their little differences and shades of merit as well as statues, pictures, oratorios, cameos, intaglios, or what not.
It’s tongue-in-cheek of course, and at times quite funny, but he also heads off some of the more obvious refutations you could think to make in response. There are many ways you can read it, and I don’t know enough about De Quincey to say what his true feelings about art and aesthetics were. But the point I take away from it is that whatever makes something art, or what constitutes an aesthetic experience, a positive moral valence doesn’t inhere in it simply by being art. The same cultivated appreciation we have of the purposive and in-itselfness of statues, pictures, intaglios and what not can also be applied to more upsetting mediums too.
I bring this up because I think that consideration of games’ addictive qualities is part of the craft of game design, and is an aesthetic consideration. There are designers who want to do nothing more than make a game that is so fun it is hard to stop playing. In and of itself, I don’t think that makes them any less of an artist than the designer who sets out to express a personal truth (and those aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive either!).
Now, I think that if he were asked, Joey wouldn’t say that he considers compulsive game design “not art” or anything like that (if only because he’d no doubt sense the annoying definitional trap implied by such a question). I’m not trying to make a legalistic argument about formal definitions. But the implication is that well maybe this is art, but that it shouldn’t be, or that we ought to strive for better. That’s what I want to interrogate a bit more.
A Trip Into The Machine Zone
Let me back up a step. Joey’s writing in response to reading Addiction by Design (2012) by Natasha Dow Schüll, and I want to talk about the book for a moment. If you haven’t read it, it’s a seminal text that is absolutely worth reading by game designers of all types. The book is an incredible achievement, the result of over a decade of anthropological field work in Las Vegas. I think it’s an important work, and I’ve assigned readings from it in classes I’ve taught. But I also think the book has a critical failing, in that it avoids following through on some of its own conclusions, which I’ll get to.
First let me highlight the ‘angle’ that Schüll has in writing the book, at least in a criminally abbreviated form. She’s reacting to a particular argument about gambling machines which is advanced by the gambling industry. That slot machines are themselves inert and blameless, and that it is players’ preexisting psychological problems which lead to problem gambling and dependence. So gambling causes societal ills, that’s hard to deny, but it’s actually those people’s fault. To refute this, Schüll’s task then is to, in painstaking detail, show how slot machines are designed, and designed specifically with the goal of engendering addiction. Simplifying the book’s structure quite a bit, let’s say this argument proceeds in three phases:
First, that gamblers are not actually interested in monetary gain: This can seem quite surprising, so Schüll touches on this quite a bit throughout the book, dismantling earlier theories of gambling addiction that revolved around risk. To me, this is actually not so surprising at all. Games of all types can exert an addictive pull, slots included. Slot machines evolved as a gambling game with monetary payouts, so it would seem like that money is an important part of their appeal. But it’s an evolutionary coincidence. It turns out that it is slots themselves which are the addictive part. They’re addictive because they are games, not because they involve money. We could test this by asking if people would play slot machines that didn’t even pay out money. That would seem absurd to writers of previous decades. But here in the present we can observe that yes, some of the most popular mobile games played by millions of people are slot machine games which only pay out pretend in-game money.
So, secondly, if gamblers aren’t in it for the money, why are they playing? In the book’s own words:
Why, then, does she play? “To keep playing— to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.”
I ask Mollie to describe the machine zone. She looks out the window at the colorful movement of lights, her fingers playing on the tabletop between us. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm, is how I’d describe it. Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there— you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”
The reason they play, and can’t stop playing, is to experience the machine zone. This is the primary focus of Schüll’s analysis, “the zone”, this disassociative flow-state that gamblers seek. The book describes at great length the particular and contradictory natures of the zone. It is described as numbing, self-annihilative, a “state of suspended animation”. But it is also not passively enjoyed, like the recumbent euphoria of a drug. It is an active process of singular focus in action. It is a perfect combination of decision-making and nondecision-making that approaches the sublime.
This state she describes is likely instantly recognizable to any game designer as “flow”, that perfect balance of skill and challenge that the designer is encouraged to create for the player. The concept is from Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990), and it’s a staple of game design writing, mentioned in most all introductory texts. It is a state where nothing else seems to matter except for the ‘deep work’ of the task itself. Schüll herself explicitly makes the connection between flow and the zone. This paragraph, excepting the final sentence, could almost appear verbatim in virtually any game design text:
Csikszentmihalyi identified four “preconditions” of flow: first, each moment of the activity must have a little goal; second, the rules for attaining that goal must be clear; third, the activity must give immediate feedback so that one has certainty, from moment to moment, on where one stands; fourth, the tasks of the activity must be matched with operational skills, bestowing a sense of simultaneous control and challenge. Machine gambling, as we have seen, possesses each of these properties
It is this difficult to attain and maintain state of pleasure that gamblers seek. So, thirdly and finally, Schüll shows the great lengths that the industry and its designers go to enabling and prolonging this feeling, encouraging dependence in order to monetize access to it. This shows that it is not the preexisting psychological condition that turns someone into a problem gambler, addiction is not a regrettable externality. The machines are designed to addict, and their purveyors are not blameless. So the conclusion is that all the destructive effects that gambling brings, to individuals and to society, are not the fault of the addicts, but the industry that profits from their addiction.
Reading it all, it’s difficult not to be revolted by the exactingness of this predation. How the machines are designed so precisely to enable the zone state while extracting the maximum amount of money from the player in exchange. It’s hard not to walk away from the book without a feeling of righteous indignation towards the gambling industry, and by extension game design as well.
It’s offensive because they’re building Skinner Boxes for people. That’s the famous ‘operant conditioning box’, where animals can push a lever to make good things happen (like getting food or water), or to make bad things not happen (like getting shocked with electricity).
One of Skinner’s major findings was the effectiveness of variable reward schedules, that if the animal might get a reward, they’ll pull the lever more times, and ultimately eat more, than if the feedback ratio was fixed. Discussion of this also appears in both Schüll’s book, and in many game design texts. I think it’d be pretty natural at this point to feel that if this is game design, maybe games are a mistake after all.
Why is the Void so Appealing?
We’ve skipped over a rather big question though, I think. So it turns out slot machines are not intrinsically addictive, it’s that they facilitate experiencing the machine zone. But that just begs the question of why is the zone so appealing? Schüll treats this l’appel du vide as self-evident to some degree: It is simply a unique and compelling pleasure unto itself. It cannot be articulated, the interviewees only describe it gropingly via metaphor. It is clearly an escape of some kind though… but an escape from what? It’s clear the appeal of the zone has something to do with the state of people’s lives. The interview subjects frequently report the problems and stresses in their lives, although they do not adhere to an obvious pattern:
This escape is evident in the scenes presented above from supermarkets, gas stations, and pharmacies— spaces populated as much by the socially overburdened as by the lonely and isolated. As O. B. tells us, he gambles not only to gain a reprieve from the grimness of the caretaking role in which he is caught but also to gain a reprieve from his estranged relationship with his son and from his yearning for female companionship. Rocky describes his descent into gambling as a response to isolation from his family, disillusionment with peers, and a sense of disconnection from society as a whole.
The appeal of the machine zone is correlated with a profound discontent. Schüll is able to distill the array of responses and experiences into a clear prognosis. The machine zone offers a sort of idealized certainty:
Addicts of gambling machines invariably emphasize their desire for the uncomplicated, “clean cut” exchanges machines offer them…
Machine gamblers enter a kind of safety zone in which choices do not implicate them in webs of uncertainty and consequence; digitally formatted, choices are made without reference to others and seemingly impact no one. This mode of choice making at once distills the autonomy of the actuarial self and unravels it, for behavior is no longer self-maximizing, risk-taking, and competitive, but rather, self-dissolving, risk-buffering, and asocial.
We’re getting closer to an answer here. But why would this self-dissolving, risk-buffering and asocial experience be so pleasurable? We’re talking about something so pleasurable people will destroy their lives to keep pursuing it. Why? Why do people seek idealized certainty and self annihilation to the point where it becomes a nearly physical need?
Get In Loser, We’re Going to Rat Park
For the answer, let’s take a small detour. I don’t recall where I first read about Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park experiments, but I found it instantly revelatory.
That Skinner box we talked about before is an ancestor of gambling (and game) design, but it has another descendent too. Variants of those boxes were used in countless experiments about addictive drugs. In the 50s and 60s, countless experiments showed the extreme addictive power of drugs like heroin and cocaine. Under certain conditions, animals will forego food and water to self-administer drugs until they die. Those findings in turn form a major basis for the disastrous drug policies of the past seventy years. If a substance is that addictive, that people will die to continue taking, there is no rational response besides absolute prohibition. While our drug policies are also underwritten by moralism and racism as well, there is also a sincere concern in the sheer addictive quality of these drugs. These are life destroying substances.
But someone else reacted differently to these experiments, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander. Reading these papers about rats self-administering drugs, he made an observation driven by remarkable empathy. The rats in these experiments were kept in isolated cells. You’re probably familiar with the image of banks of cages that usually house lab rats. But that is not at all the natural environment for a rat. Rats are social creatures, like we are, curious and gregarious. This yielded an important insight: these results were contingent. Rats will take heroin until they die… if locked up alone in featureless cells. Why wouldn’t they, without anything else to live for?
So to test this, Bruce Alexander conducted one of the great underappreciated experiments of the 20th century. He and his team built a paradise for rats, nicknamed Rat Park. Rats there aren’t kept in cages, they live communally, can socialize, mate and fight, with toys to play with and things to scramble over.
And… the rats in rat park do not consume heroin until they die. In fact, the rats reject heroin. Given the choice between heroine laced water and normal water, they will prefer the normal water. They tested this in every variation: rats raised addicted to heroin, rats given limited exposure to heroin, heroin in sweetened water, and so on in every permutation. In every case, the rats will tend to reject the drug, even enduring withdrawal to ween themselves off of it. Why? Because while taking heroin is pleasurable, it is debilitating, and it prevents rats from doing what they actually want to do, which is frolic and play in Rat Park with other rats.
If you’d like to learn more, I can’t recommend strongly enough that you check out Stuart McMillen’s comic Rat Park, an exceptionally well researched retelling of the experiment and its findings.
The implications of Rat Park are obvious. If the conditions in which the rats live changes how they respond to addictive drugs, what does that mean for how we think about addiction? McMillen’s comic makes that question explicit:
And what was it about the cages, which prompted the rats to lose themselves in drug consumption? Would humans need to be locked in a cage to feel the same way? Or are there other types of isolation which might lead to addiction?
If it’s the conditions that precipitate addiction, it would mean that prohibition is doomed to be a costly failure, and that the way to solve drug crises is by improving the material conditions in which people live. Or, looking at it in reverse, we could say that harmful addiction is a response to isolation and alienation.
Knowing Why the Caged Rat Sings Self-Administers Heroin
Because of course it isn’t really just about rats. Just as rats in the Skinner boxes serve as easy stand-ins for humans in the design of addictive systems, the rats of Rat Park that prefer play to heroin are stand-ins for humans too.
So returning to Las Vegas, I think this complicates our understanding of gamblers, slot machines and the industry.
The appeal of the machine zone isn’t intrinsic to the player, it’s coming from outside of them (one of the book’s core points). But it isn’t coming from the machine either! The need for the zone is taken advantage of by the gambling industry, but it is not created by them. They are just petty toll collectors standing between the gambler and the zone. It is rather the material conditions people are living in which necessitates their need for retreat into the zone. This is what explains why so many different kinds of games can be similarly addictive, the commonality isn’t in the games, it’s that the people who play them are depressed.
Games often thrive in times of economic hardship, consider how the Great Depression had pronounced impacts on the development of sports as a spectator pastime, and on board games transition from teaching tools for children to a family activity, and the creation of pinball and the arcade. The period in which video slots (and video games) rise to prominence happens to coincidence with the decades of neoliberal decay, which we’re living in the later stages of.
This, to me, is an earthshattering conclusion. But reading the book, you could blink and miss it. These wider structural conditions are only rarely mentioned. In footnotes, Schüll does note how after the 2008 recession Las Vegas had the highest unemployment rate in the country, and that “Las Vegas scores exceptionally high on rates of poverty, crime, bankruptcy, automobile accidents, child abuse, addictions of all manner, and most infamously, suicide. At twice the national average, the city has the highest number of suicides in the country, a significant number of which are local residents”. To me, this seems like a pretty important point. The addictiveness of the machine zone is caused by living in a society that is fundamentally hostile to human life! And yet, this conclusion is only mentioned in passing, in a handful of paragraphs like these:
As machine gamblers will continue to tell us in the next two chapters, what they seek is a zone of reliability, safety, and affective calm that removes them from the volatility they experience in their social, financial, and personal lives. Aspects of life central to contemporary capitalism and the service economy— competitive exchange between individuals, money as the chief symbol or form of this exchange, and the market-based temporal framework within which it is conducted and by which its value is measured— are suspended in machine gambling. The activity distills these aspects of life into their elementary forms (namely, risk-based interaction, actuarial economic thinking, and compressed, elastic time) and applies them to a course of action formatted in such a way that they cease to serve as tools for self-enterprise and instead serve as the means to continue play. The process of distillation and suspension amounts to “a mutation that is totally immanent to late capitalism,” as Tiziana Terranova has written of a similar phenomenon; “not so much a break as an intensification, and therefore a mutation, of a widespread cultural economic logic.”
So why is the machine zone so addictive? It’s capitalism baby!
The book does raise this point, I’m quoting from it to show that. But the implications of it are not explored further. The final chapters explore attempts to resolve some of the problems of gambling at the societal level. Schüll showcases how the ineffective and largely fake reforms that the industry proposes themselves don’t work, and how they also resist other attempts at reform by capturing the political apparatus that ought to regulate them. But after that, it trails off, leaving how to solve the problem an unanswered question.
If it’s the case that the root cause here is the unbearable condition that many working class people face living in modern America, then it complicates the (simplified) argument I mentioned earlier. It means slot machine makers may predate on gamblers, but they don’t cause their addiction. The real cause is the grinding, crushing, precarious and alienated life our society requires.
So now I can get to my real point: Put in this way, couldn’t it be what slots offer is relief? They are an anesthetic, a painkiller in a world that is otherwise unbearable. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Games can provide distraction, something to take your mind off of toil or misery. I think that’s actually quite difficult. Humans are very smart, our brains never stop working. It’s difficult to provide a little pocket of idealized activity capable of keeping us engaged like that. It’s worth remembering that Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow was not about games, it was about work. And games can provide a distilled and idealized form of work, a fantasy of labor. In the same way that any sea shanty, like Spanish Ladies (1624), has probably done vastly more to uplift human spirits than even the greatest opera, the portal to the machine zone that games provide might be a necessary escape. It’s not the only purpose games can serve, but isn’t an ignoble one either.
Marx’s famous quote about religion being the opiate of the masses is often misunderstood. It’s sounds pejorative, like that religion is pacifying the masses. It comes from the very beginning of A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844, though only published posthumously). And in context, that isn’t what he’s saying at all:
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
I think addictive games too, are both an expression of real suffering, and a protest against real suffering.
Machine Zone by Design
One last thing to think about. To some degree, I’m talking about ‘cordoning off’ the predatory monetization of slots and other games. I don’t think that’s totally unfair, since the addictive part of slot machines, and other games, isn’t caused by their monetization. Rather, their predatory monetization relies on the addictiveness of the flow state the game provides. So, stripped of that monetization, games can still be addictive, if you’re in a state vulnerable to addiction.
But I don’t think that exonerates the industry in any way. I’m saying that maybe the problem with slot machines isn’t that they’re addictive, the problem is that addictive quality is exploited for money. This seems pretty defensible to me. But something nags about me things like… lootbox design or battlepasses, where the ‘predatory monetization’ and ‘interesting game design’ are much more convolved.
Back when there was still such a thing as games Twitter, at some point I happened to meet an actual slot machine designer, responding to something I had posted about math and games. At first, I was a little scandalized. I mean, I had read Addiction by Design after all, and here was one of these people who designs these things, walking around with no shame! How could he live with himself?
I found he had appeared on an episode of Geoff Engelstein’s awesome long-running Ludology podcast. Listening to it, at first I was annoyed that Geoff didn’t take him to task about the negative sides of slots. Instead, Geoff engages with him as a fellow designer, a designer who works in a strange and peculiar subdomain of game design. It’s a great discussion, as they get into an insider’s level of granular detail about how slot machines are designed. Not in the “how are they made addictive” sense, but the more in the weeds aspects of game design and development.
Hearing him talk about his work changed my perception of slots and slots designers a bit, but significantly changed how I thought about slot machine players. Since they’re addictive, it’s easy to imagine that players of slots are somehow unsophisticated, like they’ve been tricked into it enjoying it. But they are as sophisticated and nuanced appreciators of games as you and I. They want new mechanics, innovative new takes, variations on a theme, they too appreciate novelty but tire of fads. Hearing him describe the intense competition for people’s attention and how difficult it is to make a hit slot machine, it gives a much fuller picture of the denizens of the machine zone, I think.
Play in a World Worth Living In
So, that’s my meandering take on addiction in games. I think the quality of games for providing totalizing machine zone experience isn’t inherently bad, and might be providing a necessary comfort. And that the reason for people’s addiction isn’t because of the zone or the machine, it’s because of the alienated condition of their lives. The final takeaway then, is obvious. If we want better games, then what we need to devote ourselves to bringing about is a better world.
There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Thanks for reading.
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