The game I chose was Pokemon Go, a live service game. The intended audience is children and young adults. It was made by Niantic, Inc and is meant for iOS and Android devices. How Pokemon Go works is that players capture Pokemon of different kinds who appear as augmented reality figures in the world around them. For example, a player might just be walking around and then they could see a special pokemon figure displayed on their phone next to images of a real-life camera feed from their phone’s back camera.
One way that Pokemon Go might put people at risk for addiction is precisely the aspect of randomness that permeates the game. A player of the game might constantly be checking their Pokemon Go app as they traverse through the world, because the pokemon are location-dependent so different locations in the real world are associated with different pokemon, potentially of different levels and rarities. Additionally, the pokemon are also time-dependent, so different pokemon might pop up at different times. In the article on Live Service games, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell writes that live service games “install themselves as habits by means of regular, planned updates and additions”. This shows how Pokemon Go, as a live service game that requires the user to constantly be on the alert for different pokemons, actually strives to create a deep-seated habit in the user – even an addiction.
This is made all the more relevant by the incentives at play. The more people who play the game for a long time, the more money Niantic will make. Because Niantic’s goal is to make as much money as possible, it is totally in Niantic’s interest to make Pokemon Go as enticing as possible in order to “keep us plugged in and plugging away till we die”, to once again quote Evans-Thirlwell. Ultimately, Niantic is a for-profit company and will keep striving to make the game as sticky as possible so that users come back again and again.
Unlike other games such as poker that use chance or probability, Pokemon Go is meant to be played throughout a long timescale. In contrast, a game of poker is limited to a certain amount of time (one session). Even though it is more common to lose more money during one game of poker than one day of playing Pokemon Go, because Pokemon Go is meant to be played almost infinitely, the overall effect of Pokemon Go is quite striking.
It is definitely difficult to hash out specific moral rules for chance usage in games. On one hand, if the players of the game are adults then they are ostensibly making their own decisions about their actions. On the other hand, we need to be aware about the harms that a game could cause even to consenting adults. Either way, the game needs to be very clear about what the inherent risks are, so users are aware of the risks and can thus act accordingly. Specifically with Pokemon Go, two glaring moral errors is that the game does not warn users of the habit-forming and addiction risks, and it is also marketed at children who are not fully developed as adults are.
