For this critical play, I installed Clash of Clans on my iphone. This is a game made by Supercell and even though all ages can play it, the game design tries to get you to spend money making it intended for adults with the patience, disposable cash, or impulse strength to withstand a long thrum of micro-transaction prompts. The game invites and sometimes corners players into caring about their village through two formal devices: marathon-length construction timers that gems can erase and a scatter of chance-based rewards that hint at windfalls yet rarely disclose the odds. Together those systems convert impatience into revenue and uncertainty into compulsion, raising genuine ethical questions about addiction risk and the legitimate use of randomness in design.
Each important upgrade is yoked to an outsized wait. For example, a Town Hall 15 upgrade can take 16 to 20 days before it finishes unless you pay gems to rush it. Supercell prices this speedup on a nearly exponential curve and the longer the timer you erase, the more gems each hour costs. The $4.99 monthly Gold Pass, which lops 20 percent off every timer and showers buyers with exclusive cosmetics. Without paying for the pass, it is almost impossible to keep up with the players who do. In effect, builders and passes weaponise real-world time into a pay now or watch rivals surge ahead trade-off. Costs are also strategically opaque. The upgrade screen only shows the gems needed for the next step, never the full price of maxing a tower, masking a multi-hundred-dollar commitment. The in-game Trader rotates magic items weekly without a published schedule, so coveted Books or Runes appear and vanish unpredictably, nudging impulse buys with a while-they-last mentality. Even basic arithmetic grows murky when seasonal builder boosts, research discounts, and potion accelerators stack in overlapping percentages. Thus, the game ties progress and progression directly with opaque amounts of money spent.
Where straight pressure falters, chance keeps the dopamine dripping. Even in a mechanic as simple as clearing trees and rocks, gems are distributed randomly. Drops range from 1 to a rare six-gem drop sparks the gambler’s itch to keep clearing obstacles, which is time consuming and forces you to remain in the game. Community tests have also shown Supercell has even nerfed the payouts while leaving the tantalising spikes intact. Competitive clans feel a similar tug in Clan War Leagues, whose eight-clan brackets are assigned randomly within each tier. A lucky grouping can mean a shower of League Medals, an unlucky one almost none. Furthermore, the very act of raiding other villages itself has a built in chance mechanism. I’ve often found myself cycling through dozens of villages looking for one with a lot of loot. Since the maximum amount of loot available to raid isn’t public information, I constantly feel the urge to gamble on a new village just in case it has more loot. All three systems run on variable-ratio reinforcement, the same schedule psychologists have tied to slot-machine addiction. While Clash lacks overt loot boxes, its opaque drop rates, time-limited sales, and pay-to-hasten model push the same psychological buttons as classic gacha games.
Chance itself as a mechanic is critical to fun gameplay and variation. It ensures that games don’t get stale and allows for variety in a simple manner. Games like Hades and Minecraft use chance in this manner very successfully. Hades uses chances to ensure that each escape is different by giving you different boons and levels on a random chance scale. Minecraft also has random item drops through your interactions with different game mechanics. The key is that both of these games use chance as a mechanic to keep things in the game fun. Clash of clans on the other hand uses chance as a way to generate impatience and frustration, leading players to spend money to avoid those negative feelings. This manipulative instrumentalization of chance is extremely coercive. The game has managed to monetize the negative feelings it creates, raising ethical concerns about the design. In general, utilizing chance to coerce players into negative behaviours like spending money on a game is not ethical.
