By Max Gabriele

Abstract

Technological breakthroughs in consoles and PCs have the potential to deepen the immersiveness of video games like never before. But while total immersion is an ambitious aesthetic project, it would mean the triumph of economic logic over artistry, aiding “persuasive technologies” which animate an extractive economy aimed at maximizing user attention. These technologies extend engagement with episodic content maintained by manufacturing a false sense of urgency through intermittent rewards and time-gated content. I argue video games’ greatest artistic potential – their capacity to not only please but also transform – requires not the removal or obscuring of games’ boundaries, but their closure.

Introduction: Video Games and Persuasive Technology

Paez D. “Latest PS5 Patent Hints at a Ghoulish New Kind of Microtransaction.” Inverse.com. — Paez D. “Latest PS5 Patent Hints at a Ghoulish New Kind of Microtransaction.” *Inverse.com*.

The video games industry is poised for a major upgrade in processing performance with the imminent release of a new generation of Xbox and Playstation consoles. Though these revolutions are now routine, each successive generation brings technological innovations that change the way games are developed and experienced. While some of these changes are less successful than others, all represent big bets by companies on where they expect and (more importantly) where they hope the industry is headed. The coming revolution is no exception and players and pundits alike have already been speculating for months or even years about what surprises the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X (slated for arrival later this year) have in store. Now Sony and Microsoft have released their systems’ specs and internet sleuths have discovered patents filed by the companies that hint at things to come. Next generation consoles will have enough processing power to instantly load and maintain multiple games, even after a system reboot (Minor, 2020). The Ikea-like patent images seem to depict systems which would allow the connected console to provide strategy tips during challenging sections of games (Paez, 2020), and controllers that monitor heart rate, body temperature, and possibly other biometrics (IGN, 2020). The motivating aesthetic philosophy behind these innovations seems to be one of total immersion—in-game tips and seamless interchangeability remove friction from gameplay by minimizing restarts (you won’t die as much) and loading delays while the biometrics could influence gameplay elements to maximize the affective engagement.

I’ve been a gamer for almost three decades. I have marveled at every leap ahead in technology and as a graduate student I’ve often turned to my consoles to provide a much-needed reprieve from my research, which can often be overwhelming and deeply depressing. I should be as excited as anyone about these new developments and the immersive qualities they could enable. In fact, I am filled with a pervasive sense of dread. As it happens, I’m considering sitting this revolution out. Why? Because those deeply depressing trends out in the world that I research are beginning to colonize my favorite imaginary worlds, turning a means of escape and mental refreshment into yet another source of distress.

For the past few years I have been tracking the discourse around “humane technology”—a movement that began as a design ethic but has since morphed into a full-fledged political program for regulating the predatory monetization strategies of Big Tech. While humane technology is only ever flimsily defined—the Center for Humane Technology describes it as “technology that protects our minds and replenishes society” (humanetech.com)—it is more explicit about what it is against: devices and software purposefully designed to maximize advertising revenue by monopolizing user attention. These technologies—which I suppose would be called inhumane if anyone had bothered to make the distinction—exploit all the insights of “captology,” which in turn integrates decades of cognitive and behavioral psychology research with computer science to maximize technology’s potential to change attitudes and shape behavior. “Captology” comes from the acronymic root, CAPT (computers as persuasive technologies) and is most ardently not derivative of the word “capture” (Fogg, 2003). Those “like” buttons that Instagrammers obsess over, the “infinite scroll” function of your Facebook timeline, the “swipe” mechanic on Tinder and Bumble, the default “autoplay” setting that queues up your next YouTube video or Netflix show—those are all persuasive design features developed with captology’s insights and the aim of maximizing a single metric, “time on device.”

Of course, it’s not just cell phones and apps that make use of these techniques, which suffuse the designs of casinos, amusement parks, marketing strategies, and political campaigns. In fact, they are not wholly new to the Video Game industry, either. "Endless play," Riccard Fassone points out in Every Game is an Island (2017), was core design philosophy all the way back in the early arcade-era of gaming, and much like persuasive design in today’s “attention economy,” was indexed to the arcade owner's desire to extend the longevity of engagement in order to extract as many quarters as possible from the player. This incentive became basically irrelevant when gaming entered the console era, but the industry never forgot. With the new paradigm of online play and downloadable content (DLC) enabled by lightning-fast communications technologies, "endless play" has re-emerged, this time bolstered by captological know-how.

A video arcade in Hollywood, Los Angeles, in 1982.

The Return of Endless Play

I first noticed how persuasive design was changing gaming when sitting down to play an online shooter RPG called Destiny 2 (Activision, 2017). The game, which I had been playing since launch, is built around multi-level time-gated opportunities: daily missions, weekly strikes and raid rewards, limited time events and content availability, season progression, double experience weekends, and more. These “milestones” were displayed every time I entered my menu screen, reminding me of all the timed tasks I had yet to accomplish that week. The game was giving me a literal “to-do” list, transforming play into a chore. Meanwhile, the very rich lore and story elements were increasingly marginalized to the point that the best way to experience them was through synopses offered by various YouTubers—not employees of the developer but gamers like myself. I had begun to recognize the ways the game—or rather its publishers—were manipulating me with intermittent rewards and drip-fed content, manufacturing and maintaining a false sense of urgency to keep me “engaged” long after I would normally have moved on to another game. While Destiny 2’s milestones are a particularly good example of how persuasive design has been incorporated into gaming, they are hardly unique. Consider “achievements” - those nominal rewards granted for accomplishing certain in-game goals now present on all gaming platforms (with the notable exception of Nintendo). When a player scores an achievement, their entire friends list is privy to the news and the accomplishment is aggregated into statistical metrics which let players know just how common or rare the deed was, increasing the social standing of a few high-performers and the envy of their under-achieving counterparts.

Milestones in D2 — Milestones in Destiny 2

The exploitation of persuasive design is, of course, different in video games than it is on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You are unlikely to see suggestive real-world product placement in game-worlds—that would be counterproductive to the logic of the video game industry, which certainly doesn’t want you to get up and go to the store, or anywhere for that matter. No, the gaming industry wants you investing all your time and money in one activity: games. It’s for this reason as much as any expansion in technological capacity that the industry funds more and more expansive projects. Consider the ironically named Final Fantasy (FF) franchise (now numbering fifteen titles, not counting direct sequels and spinoffs). Early entries in the iconic series usually clocked in at 30-40 hours, including some optional side quests to flesh out the core narrative. Contrast that with 2016's FF XV (Square-Enix): the main game could easily absorb 100 hours of playtime on its own, but that was just the beginning. FF XV ended up spilling out over four story DLC expansions, a multiplayer expansion, a “beat ‘em up” arcade-style spinoff, a mobile game, an anime mini-series, a feature-length CG movie, and a novel—not to mention numerous cosmetic expansions and cross-promotional events with Square-Enix's other franchises. Each of these was at first available for costs additional to the base game’s original $60 retail price before later being packed in with special editions. Three more planned expansions were canceled when the publisher realized the cost of production would have exceeded revenue, but this doesn't mean Square-Enix has decided to make more contained FF games. In fact, the publisher has announced that the upcoming remake of the series’ beloved seventh title will be broken up into multiple installments, the first of which will expand a three-hour section of the original game’s narrative to a breadth on par with the entirety of FF XV.

While many gamers might read the preceding paragraphs and feel the same despair that I did when I wrote them, many (perhaps more) might rejoice. After all, anything that motivates publishers to keep pumping out content for the games we love must be a net positive, right? There’s certainly some weight to this argument, but we gamers must realize that more often comes at the cost of better or different. The scale and success of an industry can lead to the hyper-rationalization of that industry, which in turn can lead to what Tschang (2007) calls “institutional isomorphism”—the tendency of organizations (and their products) within a certain sector to come to resemble one another (a more colloquial version of this has been dubbed the “Marvel Effect” for reasons which are easily guessed). It is important to understand that while the most obvious casualty of isomorphism is variety, the more significant one is artistry.

It’s been several years since Roger Ebert (may he rest peacefully) triggered the gaming community with his untenable assertion that video games were not and would never be art. And while it is hardly useful for me to argue here all the reasons I believe he was wrong (which for most of this Reader’s audience would be so much preaching to the choir) I do believe it is crucial to think hard about what he got right. The famed movie critic’s essay, which was more a response to one woman’s TEDTalk (Santiago, 2009) than to video games, end with a particularly searing burn: “Toward the end of her presentation,” Ebert wrote, “she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.”

The Importance of The End

That games are art is, in my view, practically beyond debate, but what is not is the extent to which they succeed as such. One metric for such success is aesthetic, and in that sense the incorporation and quality of visual, musical, architectural, choreographic, and narrative aspects of video games is often superlative. Another aspect to be considered is the intent of the artist or author (whether singular or plural) and, once again, the passion of gamer-artists in the industry ensures that its products will always be suffused with and evocative of emotion. But it is the potential to challenge the audience that can make a work of art a masterpiece. “Great art challenges the viewer,” wrote Ernest Adams in a 2006 article, pointing to a kind of challenge that lies beyond the enemies, puzzles, and other diegetic challenges that players must overcome. “It demands that the viewer grow, expand his or her mind, see things that have not been seen before, think things that have not been thought before.” In other words, great art does not only please the senses, it transforms them.

Immersion, alone, cannot reach these heights. At best, it can only replace the content of experience without transforming it. The subject is absorbed and thus rendered no less blind to its reality as before—just like David Foster Wallace’s parable of the fishes, oblivious to the water around them. This is the ultimate expression of total immersion and, for that matter, of the attention economy. “The success of all media,” writes Lisa Gitelman (2006), “depends at some level on inattention or ‘blindness’ to the media technologies themselves … in favor of attention to the phenomena, ‘the content,’ that they represent for users’ edification or enjoyment.” Fassone, quoting the same passage, links this to “a progressive naturalization of the user’s activity”. My point is the more successful a game is at naturalizing the user, the more it draws the user away from the “real” world and into a curated one. Thus, an aesthetic of total immersion stands not in opposition to an attention economy, but in deference to it. Even as creatives seek to maximize time on device with engaging content, whether to please fans or satisfy their own artistic ambitions, they inevitably maximize industry profits, sanctioning its singular and systemic rationalization, and in the process make Ebert more right than he deserved to be.

This does not mean game designers should abandon the pursuit of immersion, only that they should temper it. While Fassone sees immersion as essential to flow, he also understands the importance of its opposite, closure. Narrative closure, he says, is a critical component of a game’s architectural structure, appealing to the player as a relief from the continuous ambiguity of life. When a game sacrifices this (say by shifting away from endings toward episodes continuously extended until the audience loses interest rather than culminating in a satisfying conclusion) it loses much of its power. An important part of my thesis in this essay is that closure represents an essential appeal that is oppositional, though artistically complementary, to the kind offered by immersion. Whereas immersion wants to blind the player to the game’s boundaries, closure emphasizes them. Thus immersion offers escapist pleasure while closure, by terminating the fantasy, confronts the player with the decision to re-engage (that is, to engage differently) with the world outside the game. A truly great game, as with any great piece of art, must maintain a balance between these two kinds of appeal. It has to offer escape without obscuring the conditions one wants to escape from. This is the secret to harnessing game art’s ability to deliver social impacts for the individual in the form of catharsis, moral improvement, and identity construction, as well as on the political level by offering social commentary and subvert cultural norms (Bourgonjon, Vandermeersche, and Rutten, 2017). Only by affirming its boundaries can the game transcend them, becoming not just the reflection of the world, but a means of changing it.

Fassone’s framing of closure as an essential “architectural” element is apt, for architecture, not cinema or literature, might be the art form most analogous to today’s immersive games. At least in urban settings, buildings form the contours of our environment, shaping our activity and our social interactions in much the same way that games do. Describing his hopes for “an architecture of human possibility,” the philosopher Roberto Unger imagines a built environment that “expresses us and changes us … by mastering and transforming some aspect of the structure of arrangements and beliefs within which we move.” Like video games, architecture must negotiate immersion and closure. “A lasting architecture must always be one that both embraces and opposes settled experience,” says Unger, “pointing in one direction to the acknowledgment of the established order of things and, in another, to a transformed and ennobled life.” The building, like the game, must be useful to the user “while also registering that it is incapable of containing him.” Such design, whether in games or in architecture, “wants to inspire more than to edify or to console; to inspire, above all, a sense of world-making power” (Unger, Unger 1995).

A Tense Future for Games

The success of video games need not be the surrender of their artistic potential. After all, art always arises in a space of tension, whether between creativity and collaboration, reality and representation, author and audience, or passion and profit. The last, in particular, has been identified as one of the challenges shared across all creative industries (Paris and Mahmoud-Jouini 2019). This tension is perhaps even more palpable in the video games industry, which exceeded 100 billion dollars in 2019, eclipsing the revenues of movies and music combined (Anderton, 2019). In the video game industry, novelty most often arises from individual studios - especially independent ones - made up of gamer-artists whose creative passion acts as counterweight to the profit-seeking rationalization of corporate publishers. However, publishers have also been keen to acquire award-winning creators only to stifle or suppress their original ideas (Tschang). The question becomes whether the artists who design games can balance immersion with closure working within the cage of corporate logic, which will always favor the former in the interest of monetization. This is no easy task, in any art form. Unger writes, “even the most exacting architect finds himself driven to solutions conforming to established arrangements rather than announcing and enabling alternative ones.” But Unger is not entirely pessimistic. While “there is no easy and instantaneous release from these ties” he does not go so far as to suppose that release cannot exist. This is heartening for architecture and game design, alike, and in fact there are signs that the ambition to make and experience games that are artistically ambitious is a still vital force in the industry.

Game designers often package their own creative tools with their products, allowing the user community to “mod” studio titles (Pearce, 2006). As well, general improvement of design tools available to consumers has enabled small teams or even individuals to make their own games, providing an alternative from big-budget titles produced by large studios constrained by corporate interests. Many of these “indie” games reflect the narrative qualities I have been lamenting the loss of. An excellent example is Hyper Light Drifter (2016), a game designed by a man with a congenital heart disease about a swordsman on a desperate quest to expunge a darkness that is slowly killing him. The moving story, which does indeed end with the swordsman’s death, has no spoken dialogue or textual narrative but unfolds solely through expressive visual panels. Amongst the larger developers, there are still those making more contained, but still outstanding, content. The exemplar is Sony Interactive Entertainment’s reboot of the God of War series (2018), a visually stunning game which transformed its main protagonist from a revenge-driven berserker into a mourning single dad just trying to make sure his son doesn’t turn out like his father. While a post-credits scene setting up an eventual sequel followed the more poignant ending in which the protagonists scatter the mother’s ashes, God of War had exactly zero DLC expansions and a mere 25-35 hours of content and was universally praised by critics and fans alike, winning multiple prestigious awards and selling ten million copies.

dragon age inquisition war table pastemagazine.jpg — Dragon Age: Inquisition

But as revenue continues to increase and time remains a constant, more and more attention will be consolidated by a few huge publishers, and the signs suggest that the industry’s biggest players are ready to go all in competing for that finite resource. Major games like the Witcher III: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt, 2015) and Dragon Age: Inquisition (Bioware, 2014) boast a scale comparable to FF XV. Sony’s Playstation Store, Microsoft’s XBOX Live Marketplace, and Steam (for computer gamers) have used the convenience of online purchasing and digital downloads to undercut the market for trade-ins. These platforms offer a seemingly constant procession of member discounts, sales, and now streaming services to make sure gamers always have more content than they can reasonably experience (I would not be surprised if there are more hours of gameplay in my Playstation and XBOX libraries than I have left on this planet). Nor have we seen the extent to which the industry is likely to go in integrating persuasive design in games and gaming platforms.

Consider again the patents for the Playstation 5 and XBOX Series X. Besides whatever else they might enable in terms of immersion and gameplay, they are all perfectly calibrated to maximize time on device by minimizing the occurrence of any pauses in which the player might decide to go do something else. The player dies several times and the console offers a tip (possibly for a small fee) to help them progress before they get frustrated and put down the controller. The capacity to maintain multiple persistent game states makes it possible for the player to instantly switch to a different game the moment they begin to feel bored. Biometric trackers in controllers will allow Sony and Microsoft to capture the data and sell it to independent publishers and even to tech companies beyond the video games industry — user data, after all, is the oil of the attention economy, and persuasive technology is the drill. This is just what is already on the horizon. What will still-maturing gaming technologies like virtual and augmented reality make possible?

Conclusion

A restaurateur I used to work for once told me that I should never think of customers as friends. Rather, they were to be treated like ATMs and my sole concern was extracting as much money from them as possible. We were encouraged to give them nicknames so they’d feel cool and bring their friends in; to give them free drinks from the cheap bottles so that they’d buy more from the top shelf. Every act of kindness was indexed to a dehumanizing strategy of exploitation. Persuasive design in video games is, in principle, no different. Publishers will stop providing engaging content the moment it ceases being profitable and not a moment sooner. Thus Final Fantasy XV’s final DLC was canceled not because Square-Enix had finished telling its story but because the ATM was out of cash. I didn’t stop playing Destiny 2 because it was no longer fun; I stopped because I was overdrawn.

Max Gabriele is a PhD student in Human Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society studying hi-tech cultures of innovation from an anthropological perspective to understand how particular ways of framing, talking about, and “designing the future” foreclose alternatives.

References

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A Lament for Game Over