About — Gaming Disorder and Compelling Mechanics
The World Health Organization in its most recent version of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) added “Gaming Disorder” under it’s Mental, Behavioral or Neurodevelopmental disorder section (6C51 if you would like to take a look).
Interesting enough the previous section (6C50) is Gambling disorder, which more or less is described the same.
“Gaming disorder characterized by a pattern of persistent or recurrent gaming behaviour (‘digital gaming’ or ‘video-gaming’), which may be online (i.e., over the internet) or offline, manifested by:
1) impaired control over gaming (e.g., onset, frequency, intensity, duration, termination, context);
2) increasing priority given to gaming to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other life interests and daily activities; and
3) continuation or escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences.
The behaviour pattern is of sufficient severity to result in significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning. The pattern of gaming behaviour may be continuous or episodic and recurrent. The gaming behaviour and other features are normally evident over a period of at least 12 months in order for a diagnosis to be assigned, although the required duration may be shortened if all diagnostic requirements are met and symptoms are severe.”
While I am not here to debate the legitimacy of the disorder as many people have over the years, I feel it is necessary to provide some missing context to the ICD Gaming Disorder Description.
First of all, video games even though people can, will, and want to spend many hours of their waking (and sleeping) lives playing them are not ‘addictive’ in the neuroscientific definition of the word. An addiction alters brain chemistry which is not something that games have been shown to do, although it is known that playing games can improve your attention and spatial awareness skills (Science Daily).
That being said, like in many other industries game developers have come up with ways to keep players from quitting their game. The use of daily rewards, weekly missions, and huge virtual skill bonuses locked behind upwards of 200 hours of grinding create some seriously compelling mechanics.
These ‘sticky’ mechanics as the industry calls them go to work in casino’s as well as conglomerates like Facebook. As touched on before in one of my previous articles About — Compelling Attention Devices. These dark design techniques reduce human interaction to primal, predictable behavior.
“There are only two industries that refer to their customers as ‘users’: illegal drugs and software. “ — Edward Tufte
While the ICD has classified Gaming Disorder and Gambling Disorder, I find it odd that there is no general Tech Disorder as many of the dark designs that games use come from other applications and websites. I mean the description is so general, that you can switch the word ‘Gaming’ in the ICD description to any piece of software and get just as accurate of a description.
All this saddens me, as like Extra Credits says, I know that games have much more power than other forms of tech. Why else would Google, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter try to ‘gamify’ their products? Games have immense healing capabilities waiting to be fully funded.
When a game is good, all the mechanics, systems, and art come together to make the intended experience for the player. But with these design patterns that more or less enslave users and detract from the experience the game is trying to give, as a game developer I feel more dishonest with the level of fun my game is giving. There is no way around it, “grinding,” or the use of attention seeking mechanics, are very unhealthy for people, but recently, some single player games have incorporated “assist mode” to help players feel less discouraged about challenging game mechanics. This is just one of the ways in which games can be used to provide a “healing” or empowering user experience, rather than impair day-to-day user life.
I’d like to see grinding and these dark designs become optional because although games are not addicting, compelling players to continue to play for hours on end without asking them to take a break is inhumane. You could argue that it’s up to the players to decide when to take a break, but when your mechanics incentivize them not to, whose fault is it really?
I’ve heard some of the best developers I’ve worked with say that they would never let their kids play video games because of all the ‘addictive’ and ‘violent’ tendencies they cause. Video game violence is another issue altogether, but when game devs are turning their back on games, what does that say about the games we are creating?