Hay Day is a freemium mobile game developed by Supercell for a general audience. In Hay Day, you inherit a farm to build up from scratch and learn how to harvest crops, tend to farm animals, and trade with other farmers.
How might this game put people at risk for addiction, and how is randomness feeding into addiction?
Hay Day’s farm economy, at least to the player, is nearly entirely dependent on the player spending diamonds to speed up farming processes. Processes needed to run a farm, such as building new infrastructure, can take up to 5+ real world hours to finish in the game. Additionally, crops can take over half an hour to grow and animal produce can take almost an hour until it’s ready for the player to collect their products. This farm economy is driven by delivery missions and special time-limited events that push players to spend diamonds to get their results faster.
Not only are diamonds used to speed up farm processes, they’re also used to make up for missing farm resources. Don’t want to wait another half hour for your wheat and corn to be harvested so you can make animal feed? Simply buy your way into the action by spending diamonds!
[IMAGE: Not Enough Resources]
This becomes a gateway into addiction for the satisfaction of completing missions and expanding your farm, but at the expense of your game diamonds and your patience. The “tap” that flows diamonds to the player is narrow in scope: you can complete long and arduous missions to earn a small amount of diamonds, or spend a couple dollars and get heaps of them. From there, you can spend your way into speed building the best farm possible, so your diamonds are easily depleted by bypassing time-based farm processes and resource-based actions.
[IMAGE: In-Game Diamond Store]
Besides the game economy incentivizing players to spend real money on in-game currency, Hay Day also employs a daily rewards system and daily quests to excite players with random rewards. Daily quests task players with gathering enough farm products to make a delivery for profit, although the amount of quests you’re given at a time is limited and the delivery quests are random. These chance delivery quests give players something to be excited for and come back to everyday. Given the fact that farm produce takes a long time to harvest organically and that you can’t get more quests until the current ones have been completed, impatient players are pushed to spend their diamonds to expedite deliveries and rake in profits to upgrade their farm.
Hay Day might put people at risk for addiction by making diamonds easy to spend and hard to earn organically, which incentivizes players to take shortcuts by buying diamonds with real dollars. Players aren’t exactly gambling their money away in this game, but Hay Day’s chance delivery quests serve to excite players to return and complete as many deliveries as possible until they can shape their farm to their own image. Excited and motivated to complete deliveries, players are urged to endlessly spend diamonds to get tons of deliveries done as fast as possible. In short, diamonds are an addictive way to give players agency over their farm.
How does it compare to other games that use chance or probability?
Let’s briefly compare Hay Day to another mobile game developed by Supercell, Clash of Clans. While Hay Day measures success in trading resources for profit to be reinvested into the farm, Clash of Clans measures success in successfully raiding other villages for their resources and protecting your own against others. Hay Day uses chance to give players random deliveries that dictate what resources to gather, while Clash of Clans uses chance to establish a hierarchy of scarcity for certain resources and as well as randomly match different clans for a raid. For example, the chests in Clash of Clans can drop a variety of rare resources and troops that players can use to expand their village. In short, Hay Day uses chance to dictate daily player missions which inform their resource gathering and subsequent diamond spending, while Clash of Clans uses chance to orchestrate clan wars and dictate resource scarcity.
When is it morally permissible or impermissible to use chance in your games?
While these games are developed to be played by anyone, I think strategies to pressure players into spending money can definitely be predatory towards players with spending addictions or young children who don’t realize how much they’re spending. While the act of using chance by itself to excite players with new challenges and quests is morally permissible, the surrounding game structure that restrains players from taking cost-effective routes to success is predatory and exploitative. Every game will have its players who want to take shortcuts and are given the tools to do so, but for every batch of them, there’s a sizable amount of players who want to play the game without being pressured by the game to spend money. After all, being pushed to do things that you don’t want to do is never fun.
