For one of our last (:cry:) critical plays this quarter, I decided to play one of the most addicting games I’ve played in a while — Balatro. I actually started playing this game last weekend on a whim, not even considering playing it for the critical play, but after not being able to put it down for an entire weekend (I think I spent like 10 hours on it in 3 days), I decided it would be perfect for this critical play.
Just to be completely clear, I personally believe that any game with a stochastic component puts players at risk for addiction. For most players, mechanics of chance encourage them to engage in gambler’s fallacy — I can’t count how many times I’ve watched a friend play a souls game, dying repeatedly for hours, murmuring to themselves “one more time” after each failed attempt. With Balatro, this is especially true, as its illusion of increased agency through visual distortion and short information horizon creates an incredibly addictive experience that encourages the player to continue gambling with their time until they get their big hit.
One of the largest contributors to the addictiveness of Balatro is the way the it tricks the player into thinking they have more information than they actually do. Card games are notorious for having an incredibly short information horizon, and some people dedicate their entire lives to counting cards to try and get an edge over the odds in a card game. Balatro is no different — what’s on the screen is really all the information you have.Â
However, the game employs a few different tricks to give the player more confidence through their run that encourage them to continue playing. One of these such mechanics is the ability to view your deck, as seen in Figure 1. This overview of your deck lets you know exactly whats in your deck, and even highlights cards that have already been played in order to emphasize to the player what cards could be in their hand the next time they draw. If a player is in a dry spell and just needs that extra Ace, they may take a look at their deck, see that most of the Aces are still in it, and try to draw into them instead of trying to play something with their current hand or to draw into a different hand that has a higher probability of being played. Additionally, Balatro explicity includes its cards odds on many of their descriptions (Fig. 2). This surprising clarity of odds creates a sense of control in the player, as despite knowing odds are against them they can choose the card anyways, implying that if they only believe then the payout will occur. Combined, these mechanics trick the player into thinking they can make an informed decision on their odds, encouraging them to take more risks and lose faster.
Despite the Balatro‘s trickery in visual distortion, its true addictiveness comes from the illusion of agency through choice it gives to the player. Players in Balatro are given a mountain of choices — more than any other card game I’ve ever played — each of which include risks that are typically either dismissed or not even considered by the player. The developers of Balatro have created a system in which each and every action taken by the player involves risk such that there is no such thing as a “safe choice.” Do you want to skip a level to gain a bonus (Fig. 3)? Risk not gaining more money to strengthen your deck or improve your Jokers. Do you want to play the level instead? Risk dying before you reach the end of the game because you got unlucky with your draws (Fig. 4). Do you want to open a pack of cards in the shop? Risk opening a completely useless pack and wasting all your money. Players can even make an effort to fix the odds of their decks, giving them the ability to destroy cards from their deck, enhance cards with different abilities, or copy cards that already have powerful abilities. All of these choices give the player the illusion of control over the odds in their deck which are fixed at the end of the day, leading to overconfidence in the player and, inevitably, death.
Although I do firmly believe any inclusion of stochasticity in a game puts people at risk for addiction, I do not think games should be deterministic. As discussed in lecture, solved games make for incredibly dull games. Personally, as mentioned previously, I really enjoy playing and watching games from the infamously difficult Souls franchise, particularly Sekrio: Shadows Die Twice. For those unfamiliar, the Souls franchise is a line of games in which the player goes engages in battle with overwhelmingly strong opponents and uses their scrappy builds to roll, block, heal, and attack their way towards the end of the game. Sekiro is challenging for many reasons, but one of the reasons why I enjoy the game so much is because of the diverse move pool the bosses have. Boss enemies in Sekiro, especially the final boss, have a wide variety of moves and combos they can execute in order to try and kill the player, which are typically chosen at random. This allows for a furious, breakneck back-and-forth with the enemies that simply wouldn’t exist if their attack patterns were completely predetermined. In our P2, we plan on implementing randomness like in the Souls games to slightly randomize attacks, making it harder for someone to win the game just by pressing a combination of buttons.
