For this week’s critical play I played Hay Day, a mobile game by Supercell. With a wide target audience I believe the game is suited for ages 8 and up, best for achiever player types. The game has a free-to-play business model, with the option to select watching ads to advance and many opportunities to purchase different items within the game economy.
I think the game puts the players at risk for addiction through its form as a type of zombie game. Because of its live service model the game is constantly evolving and growing, and there seem to be endless levels for players to unlock with tons of new features. There are different neighborhood events, seasonal farm item collections, special offers, and valley shop seasons that change based on dates. This presents a sort of “randomness” since players can never predict if an opportunity will return. While the narrative doesn’t expand as players advance, the shiny new features prompt users to keep going to try something new.
 
The randomness of items that you must acquire to complete your orders is what drives the gameplay. Players can’t predict what orders will come in, which means they sometimes must guess which products to produce, and if they guess wrong, they either must spend money to speed along the process, or return to the game at a later time, or keep playing until that time passes. This forces users to either spend money or keep coming back to the game (which presents them with more opportunities to spend money).
Completing the different orders is the central objective to the game, and is deeply tied to the game economy. The tap of the economy is through harvesting crops, fishing, and collecting animal products. Your inventory is stored in your silo or barn, and includes the produce, ores, tools, and more that you find. In addition to that, there are multiple forms of currency throughout the game. Coins and diamonds are the main ones, which can be purchased through the shop at inconsistent prices. Then there are vouchers, gift cards, piggy bank tokens, land expansion, and more. The sheer number of inventory items creates a kind of fruity game balance structure since it is so difficult to compare and evaluate the value of each item. There are many converter systems, not only through shops where you purchase items but also through all of the machines you build. These turn your inventory into other products such as baked goods or gold bars. Then there are many different trader avenues such as your roadside shop, truck orders, boat cargo loads, and town visitors. Each of these categories are added to as players advance through the game, which in turn plays into the addiction of the game. There become so many different smaller objectives or things to achieve that as players get more invested, there is more for them to focus on and get sucked in.
There are also different daily rewards that you can achieve, a daily wheel of fortune, and random items that may just appear on your farm. While none of these are large enough rewards that players can count on them to inform their gameplay, they provide enough excitement to get them to return each day. If players aren’t satisfied with their daily wheel of fortune spin, they can watch ads (for a limited number of times) or pay in diamonds to earn another spin. Since diamonds are purchased in real money at a non-standard rate, it obfuscates the value of the money that players are spending, making them inherently more likely to spend.
I think what differentiates Hay Day from other games that rely on chance is that it is relatively obfuscated that it relies on chance (outside of the wheel of fortune example). Players are not likely to think of orders as random, since they are so focused on adding the new items to their already very long list of items to manufacture. Other games are more explicit in their randomness through things like dice rolls or drawn cards, where users are intentionally trying to think about odds or probability. Given the chaos of all of the different possibilities in Hay Day, it isn’t really a good use of a player’s time to anticipate chance, which I think makes it more dangerous. While we know that players who think about odds aren’t necessarily going to make smarter decisions, when they aren’t in the heat of the game, they can at least reflect on how the game is affecting them and what their chance of winning might be. Since you can’t “win” at Hay Day, it continues forever, and you can’t predict what will happen, I feel it is more addictive. I would argue that it is more morally permissible to use chance when it is clear to the user what is and what is not random.
