90WPM

Excerpt from My Essay for Distance

The past few days have been a whirlwind of writing, editing, and constant collaboration with my editor. The end result of this was that the essay is now extremely close to completion, and I’m finally able to share a brief excerpt of the text with you, my loving readers.

I touched briefly on Distance and my topic on this blog already; if you’d like to know what this is all about, this post from last week is a good start.

The project is moving full steam ahead, with 276 backers and $11,772 raised as I type this. That said, we’re still not there yet, so if you haven’t already, check out the Kickstarter page and help us get the word out any way you can.

So, without further ado, here’s the first excerpt from my essay for Distance:

---

In 1769, a man named Wolfgang von Kempelen came up with a startling invention to impress the queen of Bohemia, Maria Theresa. The machine consisted of a cabinet with a chessboard on top, and it was able to defeat even the most skilled human players. Dubbed “the Automaton Chess-Player”, it baffled spectators across the Americas for almost 84 years and inspired a piece of journalism from Edgar Allen Poe.¹

It was later revealed that the machine, more commonly known as the Mechanical Turk, was an elaborately constructed ruse, where a highly-skilled human chess player of extremely small stature was hidden in the cabinet. Openings on the sides revealed gears, levers and machinery designed to misdirect the viewer into thinking that the Baron had devised some mechanical means of intelligently responding to a player’s moves.²

The Mechanical Turk is an early example of unethical game design³. Later examples include three-card monte, in which a spectator is shown a card, is asked to follow it with their eyes, and is then misled into following the wrong card. Many casino games are unethical: for example, slot machines usually randomize their payouts to ensure that players keep coming back, even when they’re clearly losing money. But unethical traits can appear in any game, no matter how subtle, and a recent crop of games shows a fuzzier moral ground.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns⁴: common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin take advantage of deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards in much the same way as the slot machines described above. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools⁵. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!⁶, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

Creating hard fun isn’t an easy task. It requires thinking deeply about the gamer’s experience, not just using cheap tricks to drive engagement. FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin all employ tried-and-true techniques from behavioral psychology⁷ to persuade people to spend more time and money. But there are plenty of honest ways to create real engagement, and it’s our responsibility as creators and consumers of games to demand more honest and fulfilling fun from our entertainment.

♠