Vietnam restricts online gaming
The BBC reports that Vietnam has restricted game session length to five hours, because of concerns over addiction. This of course ties in with China’s regulations, which lately are getting more attention because of their focus on content and expression (e.g., submitting games for approval, and having them reviewed monthly for banned religious or political content), but which were kicked off with the government-imposed three-hour session limit. China later gave up on enforcing this against adults — we’ll have to see if Vietnam follows suit or not.
In general, the climate over in Asia seems far more receptive to this sort of regulation, which would seem to be difficult to put into place here in the States. Events such as the Sea Story scandal as well, of course, as the multiple deaths reported from playing to exhaustion, have pushed governments there to take greater action. Heck, a while back I recall hearing about China being concerned about online marriages.
There’s much to ponder from the developer side on this. Playing a lot of games over the holiday (over 60 of them — don’t ask, it was catch up time) it was very obvious that there was a real split between games that were fun challenges, games that were fun challenges but simply had too much of a difficulty ramp, and games that weren’t actually fun, but instead led you by the nose from task to task always feeding you another pellet. Last night, i had dreams about pinatas because of Viva Pinata — but I don’t know that it was actually fun so much as just literally compelling. My wife called it “the fiddle factor” — you just kept wanting to hit the next close goal. But Viva Pinata also suffers from several interface problems that make many of the actions — actually, almost all of the actions — a real chore. Was I having fun, trapped at it for hours yesterday, trying to get one more Whirlm baby to feed to my whatever-the-bird-things-are-called?
Online games, particularly of the MMORPG stripe, suffer from this to a very great degree. And it really is that classic Skinnerian thing that everyone oversimplifies into “addiction.”
I don’t think that online games have to be this way; compelling and fun aren’t necessarily the same thing. And yet, we see so much being done with exactly this sort of carrot: Xbox Live achievements that reward insane hours of play or incredibly repetitive play. (Gears Of War has one called “Seriously…” which is for 10,000 hours of play or something silly like that).
So are the governments right to take action? Probably not, and not just because it’s impossible to enforce, but also because it’s extremely difficult to generalize out that something is psychologically addictive to everyone. I’m addicted to books, for example. But I do think that as developers, we should be trying to make our gameplay be rewarding, and I don’t mean just another pellet. We speak highly of designs that leave “trails of breadcrumbs” for players to follow, and we should — but we should also move beyond giving players just the crumbs off the table, and find ways to incorporate less repetitive gameplay that is fun in its own right, and not just because it lets you notch up another achievement, another few points, and another several hours on the clock.
Fascinating. I was completely unaware of this law. And we thought prohibition had its problems.
I can’t help but wonder how much of this is an artifact of the process. By the time a game hits shelves, the development and test teams have both played the game ad nauseam and it becomes truly difficult to tell whether a feature is truly tedious, or you’re just sick of playing the same stupid game month after month.
It’s generally easier to build features that are tedious than it is to build those that are fun, so once you can’t tell the difference, we probably tend to lean heavily in the “tedious” direction.
I’m thinking along the same line as you.
In terms of the psychological aspect of design and government involvement, I am not aware of research that focused seriously on leveraging psychology and game design. Mostly what I have come across are studies of after effects rather in the design phase.
Bartle gave us an early model of player psychology and if you map them to the standard Myers-Briggs and Kiersey’s temperament, you start getting insights and a sense of player demographics (given that the two models have demographic breakdown of personality types).
Add that insight with other research on learning modes (operant conditioning–skinner model that get labeled as addiction and all that) and you get more insight on interactive and game design.
Some of my insights are:
1. Getting good at anything takes lot of practice and practice is rewarded in real life (Tiger Woods didn’t get to where he is by being just talented). Repetition is psychologically reward and we, humans, have been conditioned culturally and historically to respond. While we may mentally not like the pellet system, most of us are living in a pellet system (salary anyone?).
2. Solitare and Minesweepers are one of the most popular games because both games can be played at the unconscious competence stage by many (this is the flow). With practice, people do get to this stage with Gears of War; add the visual, auditory, and kinesthetics (Wii is tapping on this angle with their remote-sticky-thingie) you get people “addicted” to this flow. Also this is much easier to do individually. To get a team working in sync is hard. See all the info on guild raids.
3. Because, this psychology is mined to death, people are looking at other psychological responses. Youtube mine the variety and novety aspect and aggregate sufficient quantity to keep the train going (combining the long tail and wisdom of crowd effects). Kongergate and other flash game aggregators (opened vs. closed systems) is trying this model too.
4. Games will be harder to use this model because game design is much harder than recording some funny clips and uploading it to YouTube.
5. So what rewards are desired by players? Which brain chemistry should we go after?
Raph, if you are moving toward the YouTube of game model, my unsolicited suggestions are to:
1) established your gammar of games
2) reward what you and players feels worth rewarding. Open this system and let players decide. And create a system beyond mere voting and money.
3) develop an innovative way to connect the unconnected games. Meta-connections are easier, but if you can create system that allow people to create narrative connections (like the collaborative story-writing of old BBS forums) all the much better.
4) Shepherd players toward content creation as a value-added function to the society, government will back off on the addiction angle…..they don’t complain much about people’s addiction to work, right? Hey, some people see MMO gold farming as a valid occupation that earn hard foreign currency.
5) Everything in life is just a game until it is taken seriously 🙂
Frank
I think you’re on to something when you complain of “addiction” being an oversimplification.
Long log-in times are not necessarily at all addiction-related. I am so little addicted to WoW that I often disappear for a month at a time (and lately, I don’t think I’ve logged in at all since sometime before Christmas, in spite of being on vacation for a number of days). I’ve never played a character to level 60. I don’t constantly think about WoW, and I don’t become anxious when I’m away from it for any length of time. I don’t satisfy any of the requirements of addiction. Yet, I am incapable of playing a short session. When I log in, I’ll sit down and blow six, seven, eight hours at a haul.
So, there’s something clearly distinct from addiction going on here. But what the heck is it?