Game: Arknights
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Target Audience: Strategic mobile gamers; fans of anime, sci-fi, and tower defense mechanics.
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Creator: Hypergryph (China), published globally by Yostar.
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Platform: iOS, Android (also playable on PC via emulator).
Live service games thrive on two things: habit and hope. Arknights, though more generous than many, still plays with both—using daily rhythms and randomized pulls to keep players coming back.
Compared to other live service games such as Genshin Impact or Clash of Clans, Arknights strikes a strange balance between generosity and temptation. It offers multiple ways for free-to-play users to earn enough in-game currency (Originite Prime) for regular participation in gacha events. It has a transparent pity system, clear drop rates, and—most importantly—requires no player-versus-player mechanics. This removes the pressure to “keep up” with others, an element often central to addiction cycles in online games. In other words, it’s a vampire that asks for permission before taking your blood.
Yet despite this fairer design, Arknights still poses addictive risks, especially for players who form emotional attachments to its characters and stories. Like many gacha games, it uses variable ratio reinforcement—the same structure used in slot machines—where the next “pull” might be the one that grants the desired 6★ Operator. The Designing Chance article explains how unpredictable reward schedules are not just exciting but neurologically addictive. Arknights capitalizes on this by wrapping its mechanics in immersive lore and character development.
You don’t just want “a strong unit”; you want her, with her voice lines, side story, and alternate skins. This emotional framing intensifies the pull of randomness.
Ethically, this places Arknights in a gray zone. It’s not a zombie game—mindlessly grinding for microtransactions—but a vampire: elegant, charismatic, and hungry for time. It doesn’t trick you so much as seduce you. The randomness in Arknights is morally permissible in some respects—it’s disclosed, bounded by a pity system, and avoidable for skilled players. There are guides that show how to clear even the hardest levels with only low-rarity operators, and the community often celebrates these “F2P clears.” But that permissibility depends on the player’s capacity for restraint. I, for one, recognize that I’ve spent money willingly. And that’s what unsettles me: the game didn’t lie—it let me rationalize the choice. Arknights didn’t exploit me. I walked in.
What differentiates Arknights from games like Pokémon Go or Fortnite is that it doesn’t manipulate through scarcity of time or social dominance. Instead, it builds slow-burn attachment. You log in daily not because you’re afraid to fall behind, but because you care about the story, the characters, the world. There’s less of the slot machine’s aggressive neon and more of a quiet casino with books, music, and long conversations. But the fundamental structure is still probabilistic. It still nudges.
From a game design perspective, Arknights also demonstrates clever use of the MDA framework (Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics). The mechanics—gacha, tower defense stages, operator leveling—support dynamics of planning, rerolling, and strategy refinement. The aesthetic experience isn’t just fantasy or challenge, but fellowship and submission—the pleasure of grinding, of logging in daily, of completing routines. These are subtle hooks. And in the context of live service ethics, they reinforce what Evans-Thirlwell describes: an industry in existential crisis, selling eternity disguised as weekly events.
Ultimately, the question is not whether randomness should be used in games—it’s when, how, and why. When it supports gameplay without coercion, when it’s transparent and bounded, and when alternatives exist for players who opt out—it can be permissible, even elegant. But when it hides behind affection, rhythm, or community to pull you back again and again, it becomes more than a mechanic. It becomes an addiction dressed as care.
