For this week’s Critical Play, I chose to play Luigi’s Picture Poker. This game is hosted online (HTML5) and free to access, and is designed by Marcy4000. It is a picture-poker game where the goal of the game is to beat Luigi and gain as many coins as you can. There is no final goal, as it is with many of the betting games, and the player gets to decide when they want to stop. As a player funnily puts it: “Great game! Caused me to get a gambling addiction and now I live in my car in Las Vegas and can’t get home!”.
As someone who does not feed into gambling games, this was an interesting one to play because it was entirely based off of chance. Sure, the player gets to choose the cards they want to switch out of their deck and there seems to be some player agency in that respect, but the majority of the game (if not all) is based off of luck. However, as stated in the “Addiction by Design” reading, this so-called “luck” is fully programmed by Random Number Generators. Game designers use the “magic” of chance to lure players in and allow players to feel like they are in control by enabling them to strategically choose to swap cards within their deck.
However, this does not put people at risk for addiction. What I noticed myself doing as I continued to play the game was that I would increase either the betting amount or the amount of decks I was switching out. As a player gets more comfortable with the game, it is natural for them to become courageous. This is not only due to the mechanics of chance within the game, but also repetition. Like the way a Walking Sim game introduces traveling mechanics to the player early on, games of chance introduce players to the mechanics of betting. This allows for players to become “masters” at betting, yet that just means psychologically switching from focusing on the game to focusing on the feeling of winning. This is where the risk of addiction develops.
Winning hand
The design of Luigi’s Picture Poker is also meticulously made. Similar to a real-life casino, Marcy4000 uses allusions to familiar architecture to bring players into the game, but uses a cartoon character like Luigi to lower the stakes. Players are not betting with real money, but time. Therefore, it can be argued that it is morally permissible to use chance in this game because it is not stripping a user from their actual socioeconomic status, or threatening any condition within their life. However, it can also be argued that the amount of time a player spends on the game is unethical and damaging to their health, but a core element to games is for them to be addictive. All games are meant to attract and continue to attract through innovation, therefore it is natural and justified. The bright red “You Win” title whenever a player wins their hand is also a way in which visual design impacts emotional arousal. Players are likely to feel more excited because of the bright sign and will continue to search for this dopamine rush.
Furthermore, the game continues to attract your attention through the background. New characters run in and out of the background so that you stay focused to your screen. This adds on to the randomness of the game, furthering the potential for addiction. Now why is this important? As the reading puts it, it becomes dangerous for a player to play a game when they no longer play the game for the sake of the mechanics but rather for an extrinsic feeling of chasing towards a goal. The game becomes the tool to chase towards the goal, and it no longer serves the player in a healthy manner. The seemingly agency-filled aspect of Luigi’s Picture Poker is similar to a player pulling down the bar of a slot machine: it triggers the RNG to fire, and continue its calculations. This thus becomes a physical action towards becoming more addicted.
Other characters run in the background to attract your attention
Chance is not inherently negative, but it becomes negative when it is the only thing that keeps a game going. Games solely designed around chance should not be created or heavily encouraged because there is no “chance” involved. Especially when it comes to poker, probabilities are calculated so that you will lose regardless of how many times you win. On the other hand, games which introduce chance through picking mystery reward boxes, such as Candy Crush, are not harmful because the main mechanic and focus of the game is to level up. Therefore, games of chance are dangerous to players when they encourage players to chase after a goal that will not ever be achieved.
