This week, I played Genshin Impact which was a game created by MiHoYo/HoYoverse which is a Shanghai-based video game company. The game is available across many platforms (PS4, iOS, Android, and PC), and I personally played the game on my iOS phone. The target audience of this game is teens with the video game company saying that most of its players are between the ages of 15-20. The game’s design attracts explorers as the type of game players (of the four types of typical players).
The game design eased players into the compelling narrative quickly, making them attached to surviving to find out what’s happening. The mechanics of the game are that you start off with a player and each character you unlock has their own elemental affinity (e.g., water/hydro, pyro, etc.). In the game’s design, as you progress, you unlock more characters which is really helpful, especially during tough combat when the dynamics of the game are combining different character’s powers to defeat enemies quickly without losing too much health/EXP. Players can find new elemental combos and this dynamic of being a powerful player is what convinces people to want to unlock as many new characters as possible to be able to defeat Stormterror’s wrath on Mondstadt (fictional Genshin town). These mechanics and dynamics come together to form aesthetics where players have fun through Challenge and Narrative (aesthetics).
Players can either go on mini missions to maybe gain a new character or players can “make wishes” for the opportunity to unlock a new character that will help the player level up and discover the plot quicker. The wish concept of being able to progress through the plot and get stronger characters is definitely more enticing to the player, especially because the player mainly has fun through continuing the narrative.
The designers put pressure on players to spend money to progress through the game. In the game design, wishes are always visible in the screen but manually unlocking a character takes more time and effort, which is how designers obfuscate certain information (that you have to complete missions to unlock characters for free) to encourage spending. The “wish” system is also spending on chance, but guaranteed chance (randomness entices players), which simulates gambling ideas. A cognitive bias the game exploits is when the player thinks, “I can save myself time and get through the plot if I make a wish. And I’m guaranteed to win, so there is no harm, right?” This is a type of chance design as discussed in the Addiction by Design article where when players are in the zone and feel attached to finding out the rest of the game’s narrative, they will do anything to continue the level.
The game design pushes for in app purchases of wishes (mechanic) by having players be stuck at a certain adventure level for a long time. When I completed Prologue, Act 1, the game said I couldn’t progress to Act 2 until I got to a higher Adventurer rank, so I found myself in this precarious position, where I didn’t want to spend any money, but I did want to quickly get through parts of the narrative.
One flaw of this game is that the map and narrative system often felt a bit too complex/took too long to manually go through. One way to improve the game’s design is by having more small narrative developments weaved in frequently would help characters feel even more engaged and less feel like they are just going through the same passages over and over again. Another gacha game in the RPG genre is Fate/Grand Order. Genshin Impact is different from this game because it is an Open World Gacha game where players can explore the entirety of the designed map and control/switch characters within the game instead of having turn-based mechanics.
Ethics
Genshin Impact puts people at risk for addiction, because it is easy to get into the flow of the game and want to progress through the narrative quickly. The randomness of the wish mechanic feeds the addiction, because it is a “guaranteed” winning scenario, where it seems as though there is no harm to buying wishes, because you are guaranteed to win–it’s more of a matter of your luck and how long it takes you to get the wish granted. This compares to other games that use chance or probability, because guaranteed wishes seem more enticing, especially to more “logical” players. In other games, if each wish is 1 dollar and you may never get a wish granted, you would probably give up and feel guilty because of money spent. However, for Genshin Impact, if you make 7 wishes, you are compelled to spend more because you have already spent so much and you only need at most 3 more before you win the character (sunk-cost fallacy). In my opinion, it is morally impermissible to use chance in games when it feeds off of the “in the zone” mindset where the player feels guilty for spending money, and decides to follow through on spending because they don’t want to have lost money for “nothing,” and Genshin Impact only reinforced my game design morals.
Overall, Genshin Impact’s compelling narrative, elemental abilities, and gacha mechanics make the game engaging, but ethically questionable because it fosters addiction through cognitive biases, sunk-cost fallacy, and player engagement.
