The opening hook of PROGRAMMING CHANCE: The Calculation of Enchantment piqued my interest into how and why players become addicted to gambling games and how even the mechanics, engineers, and designers can be sucked in to this powerful force while knowing the inner workings of these games so intimately.
From even a quick glance at the most popular online “gambling games”, the colors are gripping, sexy, profane in a way, seeking to grab and capture the looker’s attention.
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Their bright graphic designs, ear worm sound tracks, and dopamine-inducing “caching” sound effects hook the player, drawing on the elements we covered in “Juicy Week” for perhaps more capitalistic evil rather than entertainment… or perhaps both, which begs me to wonder how much these are in fact the same goal in the professional gaming and entertainment landscape today.
Of course, same hooks are used to draw players in across many types of games, often those that facilitate escapism from the real world, honing the player in on a focused task rather than a narrative, such as Candy Crush and Angry Bird.
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Thus, beyond the (over-)stimulating graphics and sensory design choices, it is the dopamine-inducing role of chance in these games that addictively brings the players back and back again. As Randy noted in his lecture on randomness, there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to game and model probability, but the most important measure is whether players are having “fun”. While “fun” is traditionally hard to measure, for gambling games, they have a well-established playtest metric of fun, which conveniently corresponds directly to revenue– time spent playing and times a player returns to the game in a day, week, and month. Both of these are also measures of addiction.
Another key difference between gambling games and chance-dependent games vs. other stimulating games where players can spend money, is the emotional satisfaction of the player potentially earning the money back. This outcome, fuelled mostly by chance but occasionally in combination with skill, hits a reward pathway and emotional need for financial support that other games who simply ask the player to pay money in return for a game product do not.
On first reading this Critical Play introduction, I was fascinated how and why “gambling” is even classified as a sector of games, after having focused on the joy of Puzzles and how the challenge is central to games in this course — the satisfaction in the mental pursuit for one solution. Yet, it is hard not to notice that even the word “gambling” shares what seems to be its root with the word “game”, which led me to investigate the etymology to see if it gives any clues to the genre’s gripping success. Evidently, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “gambling” is a direct descendent of the word “game”, showing the two forms of entertainment, similar and different in so many ways, have always been closely linked.
