I want it to be known that this review is mostly up for posterity. My refreshed views (mostly on worry of how it can hurt eyes) became more refined in a later post you can read here: https://backloggd.com/u/Erato_Heti/review/664032/
Please do not read this 40 minute review unless you have an obscene amount of time
CW: Gambling, Invoking Queer status to support an argument, quoting other users at length, terminally online debatelording, Russian Roulette, Exceedingly Dry, Lots of Hypotheticals
Est. Time to read: 40 minutes
Policy
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PART 1: THE GREAT VIP CASINO METAPHOR
Vampire Survivors is a relatively easy one stick shooter, with game design that consists of walking as the form of play and no actual ability to shoot. Instead you are tasked with moving around to avoid contact with the enemies as you pick up collectables. You can also pick up chests that reward the player with random amounts of loot with a long and exciting chest animation. As you play a half hour run, you continuously level up choosing between what to level up through a pool of 3 choices, however once you get to the end of a run you will have exhausted the majority of the options in that pool, meaning that keen players can force specific builds after playing for long enough.
There are performance issues with the game, the game produces 'number go up' gameplay through having the player automatically produce projectile spam, but the game starts to chug along and lag out at the end of a run due to the number of objects on screen careening the game to a halt. It is very odd that most people who play this game don't point this fact out at all because it makes it more nauseating and difficult to look at than it already is. However my impression is the reason this isn't focused on is that runs tend to play themselves out in the last 5 minutes so no amount of lag could prevent your character from winning. The game also looks like a visual skunks fart, with the halloween tier 'spooky' castlevania enemies sticking out like a sore thumb over the rest. That being said, while these issues are very grating aesthetically, my overall issue is with the design psychology, not just that it runs poorly or has a bad upgrade tree.
I think you could summarize my perspective on the design trappings of this game through the 2 following premises:
1. The game is a time waster with very little intervention or challenge against the player, since the only thing you can do besides walk around is choose from an incredibly limited upgrade pool that becomes samey and effectively fixed across runs.
2. The prior is an intentional design decision, along with flashy animations and reward jingles that are meant to mimic a sense of catharsis that you would get from being at a casino and to put you in a similar zen state.
Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic. The question is why do I find this worthy of such an absurd condemnation? To illustrate properly it may be worth turning our attention to the design inspirations for the game: pachinko parlors and the mobile games market. The dev of Vampire Survivors mentions that his inspiration for the game was a mobile game called ‘Magic Survival,’ which I don't think anybody has played, but it's a carbon copy of that game with a new coat of paint. Same UI layout and everything.
You know what phone games I'm talking about: the maliciously designed pay-to-win grandma trap Candy Crush, the actually made by an Australian casino company Raid Shadow Legends, and infinite runner mobile ad junk like Subway Surfers. I don't think most people would come to the defense of these games, and many more would actively condemn them as seedy and gross. However, because Vampire Survivors is so deeply popular as a PC release, people are comparing it positively to games like The Binding of Issac instead and missing that particular connection point.
Anybody who has played any of the games previously mentioned knows what I mean when I use them as a point of reference, but people still find it uncomfortable to actively talk about why mobile games are like this in the first place. It's in part because the primary way you can get apps on your phone is through the monopolized app stores, which are not optimized with customer service in mind. Instead their store algorithm explicitly promotes free games with ads and microtransactions as much as possible. Following this is an issue of immersion through the lens of Natasha D. Schull’s ‘Addiction by Design’, as being in the 'machine zone' where experiencing play in a fugue zenlike fog is the only thing you care about. Phone games do actually have a bit of a problem in achieving this because of the fact that you usually mess with your phone while doing other things. That being said the most successful games are able to pull off a microcosm of this version, Candy Crush has a sordid history for actually addicting its player base, but instead of sitting in front of a large machine for a half hour and losing your money before finally peeling yourself away, you can play a few rounds of it and games like it whatever adware junk in your pocket at the bus, then in line for the restaurant, and then as you're falling asleep. Etc.
I'll concede something here: a large portion of the hangup on this argument, and how intense the discontent is, seems to be that most mobile games at least try to fuck you over with microtransactions and pay-to-play models, which are considered bad. But this game is 3 dollars you pay all at once and then never have to worry again, how bad can that really be? Surely that's not indicative of gambling or addiction and thus needs to be described via something else.
I want to defer to a rather brilliant analogy that Pangburn came up with during a fantastic discourse on the game’s addictive (or in his view, lack thereof) elements:
"I am strolling around a casino, perhaps nursing a drink, and a floor attendant notices me, beckoning me over to a new wing of the facility. it's a VIP room with a low price point of several dollars to get in filled with the same slot machines as out on the floor. the difference here is that once you have paid you have a lifetime of access to the suite, where you can continue to push the one button to your heart's content. the catch here is that there is no payout and you know for a fact that you'll never roll the jackpot for your first few hours, you must sit there and continue to press the button until your odds rise and rise, converging to a near perfect chance of the triple 7s after multiple dozen hours of play. at this point, you can return to this hall at will to watch the triple 7s appear again and again. this is how vsurv sounds to me. I think this sounds fucking stupid and I have no interest in playing it. " in the comments here
However, he contends that he doesn't have a 'moral issue' with it. He then goes on to say that
"the end state is fixed and you're always aware you will reach it at some point. it's not really ‘gambling’ when the odds are always in your favor, right? which is not to say it can't be addictive in its own right, but I hope this makes my thoughts on the matter clear. "
I don't want to deconstruct this too mercilessly but I do want to point out a few interesting things about the VS scenario and how it distinguishes it from this analogy. Mainly the idea that if you play for long enough you will hit the point of getting 7s and always will get 7s. Here's where I find this slightly misleading: the 'jackpot' of VS play is winning which means in order for the analogy to be accurate it would be something closer to guaranteeing you get 7s after waiting and intently interfacing with the screen for 30 full minutes. Although one could argue that the destruction of enemies is also a 'jackpot' reward system, I feel it's actually comparable more to just visual encouragement data like the bright candy explosions in Candy Crush, or the neon bright machines and loud sound effects of slot machines, rather those smaller moments are not the real 'jackpot' you are in pursuit of. Whereas people who play Binding of Isaac are playing to see a new unique run and how the tear effects synergize, its not just about finishing the game in itself.
At the same time there's the assumption that gambling is merely bad because of the house edge, but this risks over simplifying the process of gambling itself. Just yesterday, I played no money poker for the point of prestige and no money was involved, and as such I find that a genuine interest in playing poker as a game seems to distinguish it from a perception of gambling. However, the idea of risking increasing stakes is still there and can thus lead people to take up higher risk poker. Sports betters start off by watching the sport, then they start betting after warming up a while.
However, let me ask you a question: if I played real money poker and I was the best poker player in the world, is that not still gambling? If I was the best poker player, and I was playing with random people, my odds of winning are probably 90%, maybe even more, so is gambling identified by that 10% risk? Is it identified by the house edge? You can come ahead consistently in poker, people play this game for money after all.
Perhaps the nuance here then is that poker is a genuine game that can also still be described as a vehicle for gambling. If that's the case then honestly maybe any game could be a vehicle for gambling, and it's just about how well that engine is tailored to do so. To come back to the "slots'' example then, here's what GoufyGoggs has to say on it when musing about arcade games in comparison:
"No one wants to play a slot machine where you aren't forced to put your money on the line after all. The reliance on leaving outcomes up to chance fundamentally prevents a creative space from ever forming, they’re inherently destructive as Caillois put it. So what you're left with is just the addictive practices and negative impacts on mental health without any of the tangible benefits. " cited here
Now I feel like it's worth comparing this point to something like Blackjack. Blackjack is an insanely simple 'game' that has to a large degree been solved on what number and below you hit and what number you don't. it's automatic, with the only room for discretion being when you should split or double down. There's no room for a creative space of play to breathe, it's a totally static play experience. Poker is incredibly dynamic. They are both gambling. Even so, another question that might be worth bridging: can Candy Crush be called slot machine gambling? After all, the later levels absolutely have a 'house edge'. I'll leave that question for you, but hopefully you can see on some level it reveals a pedantry over word choice and the contexts we attach them to. That pedantry in part implies a moral disgust with gambling where there isn't with single player game experiences, in spite of the fact the boundary between both is very unstable.
PART 2: GAMBLING IS ACTUALLY AWESOME
This is where I start saying things that really just completely veer off the map from anybody else so far: I don't even dislike gambling, I dislike money, and I dislike people being coerced into situations where they feel they can't stop, and I dislike the games that encourage this. Money is not the sole reason Gambling is good or bad. The idea of playing something for stakes, even with a house edge, can be reapplied to other forms of stakes, like Prestige or an erotic form of stakes like strip poker. Gambling can exist in a world without money and sort of already does through shit like 'spin the bottle'. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that the only real concern is that the play needs to be dynamic enough not to mentally fatigue and lull the person interacting in it. Slots and Blackjack get washed out when you remove money, but not universally. Some people still like being in the zone with Blackjack and I can imagine people getting a compulsion to play on these slot machines without money once a habit has been built. It's not really about the money, it's about the habituation through automated play. On the contrary, what we currently consider gambling can be seen as a vector for genuine expressions of creative humor and identity. For example when playing a best of seven of different games, popular streamer personalities Ludwig and Jerma traded out the idea of playing for money for instead playing to see who else has to wear a silly shirt on stream. The games they all played as well were dynamic, in a way all competitive multiplayer games by design tend to be.
This is deeply funny and engaging version of stakes, and the explicit difference that Detchibe focuses on in their own post,
"The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you." source
Being acted upon for pleasure under Detchibe's ruleset can only happen through games that don't pass a degree of dynamic threshold, for example playing at the roulette table, the results strictly only happen to you through random chance, a pleasure, rather than being joy seeking in themselves through a dynamic input that causes the results. In poker you have an incredibly wide array of options: bluffing, folding, playing a weak hand to the bridge, purposefully losing hands in order to win later for intel, etc. This is by design dynamic play. Earlier I mentioned the enjoyment a person can get with 'playing for stakes', but I didn't mention how doing this for an ego and without money involved can obviously be bad in both games and 'gambling'.
Some ways people perform self harm with a game is by playing it for far far longer than they should without taking a break. Meanwhile, gamblers often play without 'taking a break' and in the process losing more money or assets than they expected, this process may produce pleasure for them but not enjoyment. To get dark for a moment, there's nothing about Russian Roulette that makes it a non-game, the results just happen to you with minimal player agency and input. Clinically we could refer to russian roulette as technically a pre-established and static 'game' of chance with no input from the player whatsoever besides rolling the barrel until a certain random point, the results are by this metric technically 'pleasurable' for the living player as the operation of death was not done upon them, but not enjoyable. There's obviously the stakes themselves which are awful, but even if it was being done with a nerf dart the game itself is so static and unrewarding if played many times that the only way to have fun with it and produce more pleasure is by either getting in a tantric zone, or by raising the stakes. For people who play static non microtransaction single player games, those stakes are by time and reward catharsis "I will play today until I get 3 wins", which increases to 4, or 5, etc. Playing a static game like slots is the same. The results are static and not deeply determined by what the player does.
It is my belief that the most 'addictive' games in part can come from playing simply for the reward receptors of having something 'happen upon you' and not engaging in your own branching set of decisions and cognitive inputs, and where it no longer becomes about the dynamic play of the player. To tie this explanation to the Great VIP Casino: A team in WoW start learning how to do boss Raids and they are getting wiped, but in a dynamic and chaotic way where random players are rushing in and dying, its hilarious, but the way to win is actually almost perfectly solved and the results of a win or a loss become increasingly unconcerning and unchallenging. Eventually they get good enough at knowing how to build and prepare for the raid that the odds of success ever increase, yet being prevented from 100% by internet issues, physiological interventions, etc. Eventually the issues of pure success stop, that stops becoming the 'jackpot'. They now know exactly how to pull the enemies etc. Now they are redoing this raid for a .5% rare item drop which they are going to sell or use in arena fights, the new 'jackpot'. The only reason for playing the raid is in order to get this next level of jackpot which is inevitable, but takes much stress and many hours, after the point of vastly diminished dynamic returns, to get. The results are not enjoyable, they are pleasurable, they fulfill a compulsion. This is indistinguishable from the VIP Casino except for the fact that the real 'reward' jackpot for play is much more rare, this seems like a very important distinction except when you recognize that this is the exact type of person who would be compelled into a WoW Raid loop after having spent a week at the great VIP Casino.
Fuck WoW and fuck Blizzard (hot take I know) for doing this, this is how this system operates and it shouldn't need to, there's no reason to limit certain items to such a low drop rate, it should just be a test of basic ability and skill not pure compulsion and time gating. The issue with this version of the events is that it encourages compulsion and encourages a raising of the stakes in at least a few problem players. Some players will never stop playing in the Great VIP Casino or they will seek out a version of the casino now with lower odds and higher stakes, or they will play at the Great VIP Casino for a longer amount of time than last time for the same pleasurable results. For WoW raids, a new boss can come out that now has a .1% chance of dropping that item but maybe it takes quite a bit longer and a few more players with no change in the dynamic set to play, this means it takes more time and labor in order to achieve the same base pleasure. For Vampire Survivors then, this can be seen in 2 different ways, either receiving pleasure from trying to get higher win streaks in the original game. Or through playing Clones where the only change is how long a run takes, or if you need to spend real life money to get further. We are assuming that these 'Knock Offs' provide no enhanced player input and are still 1 stick shooters with small upgrade pools. In this case, either Vampire Survivors is an addicting gateway game for static increased stakes gambling (with time, money, or mental acuity) or its a boring game that sucks to play. The only difference being decided by when the player has the decent sense to 'cash their chips' and leave. There's no way to leave this situation untainted.
From this you could say that I hate this type of gaming more than the umbrella medium of 'gambling' itself as the static and hedonically unrewarding nature of a game would stress you to the point of going further and further in order to activate those same pleasure receptors, eventually to the point of either oblivion, self harm, or non-play. Most players will choose non-play, but because of the existence of the primary 2 potentialities, there needs to be various approaches to mitigate or be aware of the mental trappings of play.
Now to go back to Vampire Survivors for a moment. The issue and stakes purported by the game are obviously not money but time. Your reward for doing well enough in the game is that you get to learn and beat it slightly faster, which is an unengaging form of stakes. Compare this instead to the false equivalence examples I've seen brought up within the idle game genre. Cookie Clicker can obviously ask for large amounts of your passive time, months in fact, which by my time wasting critique may seem damning. That said, there's a significant distinction between those idle games where the goal is to find out more of the lore and world like Universal Paperclips or The Longing and games that are primarily interested in locking off content and completion behind time walls that you either have to pay through or play to compulsion to escape out of like Adventure Capitalist. These malicious design traps can exist in idle games but it's not core to the genre, and in fact Universal Paperclips is a great example of a short idle game that conveys its message and gameplay without taking advantage of the player's time needlessly. This is not a genre issue, this is not a gambling issue, and this is not an 'upgrades in games are bad' issue. This is uniquely a game design issue.
That being said it gets quite complicated talking about the nuances of where that difference can be identified so I'm going to outline some common rebuttals I've seen first:
1. All games, especially those you get good at, are about getting to win-states you have to wait out through increasingly minimal cognitive levels of interfacing.
2. Concerns over how the condemnation is described, ie. calling design malicious, evil, or predatory design practices feeling like loaded moral language.
3. The game can be completed 100% in 30 hours, and many other games like CS: GO, League, etc. eat much more player time and are thus more worthy of condemnation
4. Why refer to it as 'morally bankrupt' etc. rather than just unengaging design or simply just a bad game?
For points 1 and 3, I agree that within the premise of being concerned about the excessive waste of player time you could say that any arcade game being functionally endless is just as bad if not worse. However, I think that while the 'jackpot' of VS gameplay very much is connected to finishing a run, not all games are about the compulsion to finish. For score attack games the concern is just to get further, and for shmups the concern is about also completing the game on one credit, not just completing a run in general (though completing the game also is find). Thus, the implicit challenge of a game is its most salient point of consideration. Run completion should be one of many carrots for play, not the only one. VS has nothing implicit in its system that says you should stop playing when you hit 100% or if you should go for it at all but it has nothing of the opposite either. Instead it presents such catharsis through finishing a run and viewing shallow on-screen destruction that your mind will tune out quickly. The only desire for such completionism is in the player who might want to unlock new characters, but even after doing that getting 100% is not seen as a legitimate overarching nested goal in the way it is for Binding of Isaac, nor would it make the play better if it was.
Time and time again you read what people say and they refer to game as 'addictive' and that they 'dont want to stop playing'. This has to be thought of as an issue that is primarily compounded through static play, as what undynamic play can do is cause the player to treat the repetitive task as simply a way to make time goes by faster, and hibernate the mind in a tantric state. This is best expressed in Cakewalking's post on the game,
"I have 50 hours in Vampire Survivors. I treat it like a time machine. I use it to travel 30 minutes forward in time and feel nothing afterwards." source
The issue I have with this is that trying to time travel forward, considering everyone's time on the earth is limited, seems like quite literally a self-loathing gesture (which is why I refer to it as self-harm earlier). A primary argument for why people would want to do this is to quell anxiety or stress, but then this gets you back to those external stressors faster, whereas most games with a challenge tend to slow people's time down. A more reasonable explanation for it is that it's not a consciously-desired process and is instead being utilized for various other means, but I think the primary symptom that arises from this practice is at the very least low self-esteem. Focusing on only a select few games that speed up time means you have far less to dynamically socialize with others, which trends towards social atrophy. You could say that more dynamic gameplay like the Binding of Issac are equal in this regard, however I think the staticness of a game has a freezing effect on the mind such that if the few games you play are more static than dynamic it's much more likely to make you fall into that social atrophy. This may seem crazy or absurd to point out, but I think it's a valid reason to be upset with art that causes this. Less dynamic games register us as less dynamic people not in the sense of making us literally less interesting as a shallow judgment but in that it limits the scope of speech. Currently I've been obsessed with Undercards, and I recognize that's a game that nobody really knows or cares about. That being said, if given a moment to genuinely express and be excited about the game I could speak about it for hours upon end. But the repetitive and limited scenarios mean that you could probably only squeeze the lemon of discussion out of Vampire Survivors for a few drops if that. Similarly, a Candy Crush player has a lot less to say on their game of choice than a Tetris player. This may seem odd since Tetris is, on the surface, a far simpler game, but Tetris experts can talk about various stacking combinations, tricks, and speak about bonding over their hobby with others. Candy Crush players are isolated, and a lot of the purpose of the design, I feel, is to alienate people by crushing emergent gameplay into simple randomness generation checks that can be surpassed by playing over and over, but also increase your odds and thus lower the lack of pleasure from a loss through spending money. If you don't believe me that this actually happens to some Candy Crush players, don't take it from me, take it from the following study called
"Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction"
In the conclusion on the data, where they query the habits and preferences of play of 400 Candy Crush Saga players, they note that:
"According to DSM-IV’s classic definition of addiction, the present study found that 7.3% of the respondents were addicted to mobile social games. Given that there are 215 million mobile online game users in Mainland China (CNNIC, 2014), 7.3% does not represent a small number of addicts." And that, "With regard to the psychological variables, loneliness and self-control were found to be significant predictors of mobile social game addiction."
Vampire Survivors and Candy Crush play vastly differently of course. Vampire Survivors is a numbing experience with a time set that you are moving to complete and finish, whereas Candy Crush is a short series of individual time limited high stress levels. Candy Crush has you acting with swiftness and high cognitive and anxious response. These games on the surface could not contrast more, but both offer only the illusion of control and of outcome. Your results in Candy Crush are only found through how the next set of candies coming in are generated, it's easy to get to a point in Candy Crush where you fail a level by not being able to match the candies. In Vampire Survivors your results are decided by the random generation of the item pool upon level up, meaning that even if you can go for a specific build some amount of the result is left up to chance. The odds of the loss are of course vastly different, but neither provide the player enough agency to breach the upper limits that might come from bad luck nor are random elements forced to make them change and adapt their style of play to what is on screen. I will admit that this specific point may be perhaps the weakest in this whole post by far, but if I was wrong here and that Candy Crush did have a lot of control and variation in play, that would not be a defense of Vampire Survivors, it would be of Candy Crush. Perhaps the best way to quantify how they are both addicting is by highlighting the low amount of player agency and the endless appeasement of play.
PART 3: THE THOUGHT-TERMINATING DISTRACTION POINTS
With all of this settled, I now want to turn to the points of contention that I consider less relevant to the game in itself. Let's start with point 2. The idea that labeling this predatory or evil design is worth resisting. Woodaba put it best when they referred to this as 'tone policing,'
"No, I'm not terribly convinced by this tone policing, I think "predatory" is a perfectly reasonable word to describe a design philosophy cultivated from the ground up to create and reinforce gambling addictions, given that these mechanisms are literally designed to prey upon people. [...]
I think managing tone and tenor in conversations like this can be worthwhile, I just wasn't convinced by your statement that the tone was inappropriate in this instance." comments here
Ironically, even the value-neutral attempt to use the phrase tone policing is getting tone policed, because in our current political climate a lot of words feel polarizing and loaded. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how these descriptors to a game of leisure would upset or distress people. The phrase 'predatory' is one that I try not to rely on as right now it's a phrase mainly invoked for the purposes of transphobic grooming accusations and thus is tinged with that moral weight. On the other hand, I actually enjoy words like 'evil' or 'amoral' which have been used as negative descriptors by friends in the past see for example Detchibe recently concluding their review by calling Moriyama Middle School "A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it." source , which makes me want to seek out and play the game more, not less. This is a struggle that is often core in my relationships with others. That said, even though my perspective on wording is very odd, I can still fully appreciate what they are actually trying to say and recognize that I'm bringing my own over-conscious linguistic baggage and identification with 'evil' to the table which can distract from the discussion. In a way you could say all moral language like this is distracting and meant to apply needless pathos, but these are speaking trends that are also really difficult to get away from in part because using more loaded language gives us a leg up in the attention economies. This is why all of the most outrageous social media posts are strange moral claims. Frankly nobody even tries half as hard to tone police over ableist remarks like 'stupid' or 'schizo' etc. and especially stuff like the r-slur was so common in gaming circles until about 2 years ago when everyone decided that its a no-no slur. I'm not saying increasing sensitivity to that is a bad thing, merely illustrating that there's far more hypocrisy on word choice than people let on. Nobody sits there and studies over each and every word they speak to make sure it's maximally accurate, because someone can just pick the one word you messed up on and highlight it for why it means you're wrong anyway. Doing so can only really be seen as a pedantic distraction. Language is messy and this is why the sentiment of 'good faith' online is so important.
On that note, Point 4 on moral claims, is one that I think is also a distraction point, as morality in general is a murky subject. However, I'm sympathetic as to why people find this worthy of contention. It feels like an attack, especially considering the fact that if you try to make an argument for or against a game or its developer, it can read like the same sort of political censorship that promotes book burning or banning mature video games. As Pangburn points out, "my first thought is that it affirms china's stringent limit on online gaming by minors, but I don't think me saying that here is going to be very popular on either side of the debate LOL"
However I don't think, taking the example of Candy Crush and the negative effects from its players that this is a defacto bad policy if certain games are regulated or restricted, to quote the paper utilized there that issues of self control and isolation were the largest factors of addiction to the game, following this they point out
"Society should be aware of the threats that mobile social game playing pose to players. Research on vulnerable groups has shown that children and adolescents are more susceptible to the influence of the media than others are (Gentile and Stone, 2005). Therefore, parents should pay close attention to their children, and teachers should monitor their students. "
Now I think that the specific restriction of all online games leaves a lot to be desired, and plays into my concerns I'll reference more in depth in a moment. However the actual doing so is based on objective policy data, but it's important not to conflate this meaning of objective and data with the 'my opinion is right because I said so' version. A good analogy might be how smoking regulations happened in response to the negative results of smoking being scientifically proven, it was first outlawed from kids and then warning labels were given to adults. I believe you can do pretty much the same thing and make a similar argument of regulation of a game like Candy Crush or Vampire Survivors.
For me, it's just about pointing out that it’s worthy of condemnation first, not endorsement. I don't want people endorsing games that create negative habits or, more strictly, waste my time. This is literally no different than, say, expressing that you think a story has damaging elements while not trying to actively ban the book. It's just that instead of a narrative, it is design, something people have less awareness of than they think they do.
As for the issue of policy implications in particular I'm just an internet dork, not a politician, and neither are you probably! This also has nothing to do with the point LOL. However, I'll try to address this best I can. Others have positioned arguments that the ESRB should have discretion in terms of highlighting gambling elements in a game, especially to minors, but that sort of regulatory framework leaves a lot to be desired. You could do that nudity popup disclaimer that steam has for games, but that's not a client capacity that can be universalized unless you get the government involved, which is a hefty conclusion. I don't put a lot of faith in the regulatory networks for making a clear distinction between a 'gambling aesthetic' like say Sonic Adventure's casino level, and 'addictive game design elements'', I feel like the core problem here is that we would need to rely on some sort of state policy procedure in which the government could specifically and objectively identify non dynamic and destructive play and properly regulate it. Aesthetics are always in flux even if they are alluring to the right demographic, but as I've pointed out earlier, what we consider truly to be the worst of gambling is only found through this undynamic play. Roguelites could be thrown into this bucket despite the fact that in my view they are the opposite. Take for example a game like Luck Be a Landlord, which has a constant 3 choice upgrade system similar to Vampire Survivors, but also requires a lot of decision making and forethought on what to choose, losing a run is almost entirely within player agency. How do you think a large government entity would perceive a game like that? Personally, I think that they would slap a 'promotes gambling' logo on it, but even if minors played the game (who are the most culpable) the reality is that extended play of it would probably make the less discretion-based system of an actual slot machine significantly less compelling because the play of a slot machine would be automated and have no genuine player input for winning a run.
One last point before we wrap things up. This negation of discoursivity does not just happen in the negative appraisals of our arguments. I want to close this post with what my good friend and critical eye Detchibe had to say about the initial, in actuality quite rushed, insight. I will make sure to leave the full quotation as such in the comments below as the first post, however for brevity there is one sentence in particular I want to harp on: "And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption." I think that while this might not be the intention of the post it speaks to a 'universalizing' diplomatic impulse that I don't think is entirely true. I think this game is actively mentally unhealthy in a specific way that even slightly more cognitively taxing games like 20 Minutes Til Dawn with its active shot aiming isn't. It's not an indictment of failure on your part, but you got there by a system that is actively taking advantage of you. I believe that this impulse while deeply well meaning and appreciated is actually sort of dangerous as it rushes to assuage conflict and disagreement through settlements of harmony. I highlight this not to shit on the absolutely wonderful words of my friend, but to instead expose that thought-terminating cliches are everywhere. One of the most annoying things about me is that I resist them constantly even when they are well meaning :p , but I'm sure I make mistakes on this too so feel free to call it out if you see me doing it.
I don't want the conversation to end, I don't want to 'let bygones be bygones'. This is perhaps the most important issue in terms of gaining a trust and understanding of each other's taste and improving them. You can still like Vampire Survivors after reading all of this, but the point is to be more mindful of recommending it to others. Again, some people like smoking but almost nobody recommends you become a smoker. So to conclude, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game in desktop's clothing, and has a lot of intentionally addictive design traps. So the console a game runs on should not be the sole point of contention for whether its good or not. It's important to be critical of cheap desktop addictive shovelware.
For now however I think I need to stop and digest the scene for a while before saying more, or using other games both positively or negatively for highlighting this, which is what I hope my newfound Court may help do. Fixating forever on one game can be boring and ironically in its own way a waste of time especially for a game with such polarized opinions. Imagine how much more productive this conversation would have been if it was over the mobile game market instead, a game like Candy Crush, which is more clearly delineated as pernicious. I want people to call games like these out of course, but mainly so I don't play them myself. The main reason Vampire Survivors was called out for this was not that it was just some '3 dollar game' but that its one of the most financially successful video games in recent years.
If you have thoughts feel free to leave them below, I'd love to read them
Note: My original post on the game was in reference to more off topic conversation surrounding the harassment by its fans and speculation about its place as a tool for streamers, which was happening to GoufyGoggs, who I was casually dating around the time this had happened as a result of a mutual crush held for a few months, and has recently become my girlfriend. Initially I was going to revamp this post to 'prove' the level of harassment and make people 'bear witness' to the attacks of character and disrespect leveled at her, however I realized that to a large extent such an operation is painful and excessive, and that it takes the bear minimum amount of research into the subreddits or youtube comments surrounding this topic to sympathize, this type of harassment needs not be immortalized in its particulars. I'm not going to quote people misgendering my own girlfriend for other people lol thats ridiculous.
That said, if you have not read the original version of the post, you can read it here (right now it's a google doc but it will be switched to a cohost post asap). The TL;DR of it is conveyed in the 1st link referenced in that post.
Special Thanks to Detchibe and Pangburn for the wonderful peer review and fine tuned grammatical editing on this, without their help I would not be able to write this half as well as I wanted to. To Franz for the well reasoned moral support and understanding. And to my new girlfriend Heather aka GoufyGoggs whose research on this game was a powerful catalyst to my own.
POST SCRIPT EDIT:
Reading this back I realize that I pretty much just dropped the policy proposal point, negating a policy potentiality out of suspicion rather than replacing it. I did that in part because I didn't want to let my heavy handed socialist ideals get too heavily in the way of the critique. I think one of the main reasons people engage in habitual behaviors like this is because of a desire to escape from labor insecurities, often not acknowledging that the therapeutic element is short term reward for long term set backs. This perception is tracked pretty heavily from Addiction by Design where the 'machine zone' is described as a space for escaping insecurities of life generally. I think that the only real policy proposal that would fix that underlying habitual response is by providing better labor security (slashing the 'gig economy' for example) and not promoting cultures of workaholism and burnout. By having a better safety net for people it would prevent anxious self destructive play. Not just for online gaming or gambling, but for other vices to like smoking and alcoholism. I'm probably playing way more of a game than I otherwise would because I don't want to think about my future: getting a job, a home, food, etc. In that sense I can totally understand uncritical play and can't condemn individuals for engaging in it really. The only way to really fix that quite reasonable anxiety is by eliminating it entirely via radical proposals like free housing, food, UBI, etc. The reason I never explicitly stated it in the original piece is because I didn't want to risk over complicating the network of critique there. Only to then simplify it with anti capitalist rhetoric forcing readers to either accept that as true or throw out the entire script. Hammering about labor rights over and over is not the most conducive to open dialogues I'm afraid. Regardless, even if you don't hold my perspective on that point I hope you can see why more general regulation would have to be done with consideration and care.
Please do not read this 40 minute review unless you have an obscene amount of time
CW: Gambling, Invoking Queer status to support an argument, quoting other users at length, terminally online debatelording, Russian Roulette, Exceedingly Dry, Lots of Hypotheticals
Est. Time to read: 40 minutes
Policy
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PART 1: THE GREAT VIP CASINO METAPHOR
Vampire Survivors is a relatively easy one stick shooter, with game design that consists of walking as the form of play and no actual ability to shoot. Instead you are tasked with moving around to avoid contact with the enemies as you pick up collectables. You can also pick up chests that reward the player with random amounts of loot with a long and exciting chest animation. As you play a half hour run, you continuously level up choosing between what to level up through a pool of 3 choices, however once you get to the end of a run you will have exhausted the majority of the options in that pool, meaning that keen players can force specific builds after playing for long enough.
There are performance issues with the game, the game produces 'number go up' gameplay through having the player automatically produce projectile spam, but the game starts to chug along and lag out at the end of a run due to the number of objects on screen careening the game to a halt. It is very odd that most people who play this game don't point this fact out at all because it makes it more nauseating and difficult to look at than it already is. However my impression is the reason this isn't focused on is that runs tend to play themselves out in the last 5 minutes so no amount of lag could prevent your character from winning. The game also looks like a visual skunks fart, with the halloween tier 'spooky' castlevania enemies sticking out like a sore thumb over the rest. That being said, while these issues are very grating aesthetically, my overall issue is with the design psychology, not just that it runs poorly or has a bad upgrade tree.
I think you could summarize my perspective on the design trappings of this game through the 2 following premises:
1. The game is a time waster with very little intervention or challenge against the player, since the only thing you can do besides walk around is choose from an incredibly limited upgrade pool that becomes samey and effectively fixed across runs.
2. The prior is an intentional design decision, along with flashy animations and reward jingles that are meant to mimic a sense of catharsis that you would get from being at a casino and to put you in a similar zen state.
Now that's perfectly fine, but I don't just think this is a bad game: I think it's a malicious psychic vampire of a game, and that calling it out from this perspective is seen as weird and histrionic. The question is why do I find this worthy of such an absurd condemnation? To illustrate properly it may be worth turning our attention to the design inspirations for the game: pachinko parlors and the mobile games market. The dev of Vampire Survivors mentions that his inspiration for the game was a mobile game called ‘Magic Survival,’ which I don't think anybody has played, but it's a carbon copy of that game with a new coat of paint. Same UI layout and everything.
You know what phone games I'm talking about: the maliciously designed pay-to-win grandma trap Candy Crush, the actually made by an Australian casino company Raid Shadow Legends, and infinite runner mobile ad junk like Subway Surfers. I don't think most people would come to the defense of these games, and many more would actively condemn them as seedy and gross. However, because Vampire Survivors is so deeply popular as a PC release, people are comparing it positively to games like The Binding of Issac instead and missing that particular connection point.
Anybody who has played any of the games previously mentioned knows what I mean when I use them as a point of reference, but people still find it uncomfortable to actively talk about why mobile games are like this in the first place. It's in part because the primary way you can get apps on your phone is through the monopolized app stores, which are not optimized with customer service in mind. Instead their store algorithm explicitly promotes free games with ads and microtransactions as much as possible. Following this is an issue of immersion through the lens of Natasha D. Schull’s ‘Addiction by Design’, as being in the 'machine zone' where experiencing play in a fugue zenlike fog is the only thing you care about. Phone games do actually have a bit of a problem in achieving this because of the fact that you usually mess with your phone while doing other things. That being said the most successful games are able to pull off a microcosm of this version, Candy Crush has a sordid history for actually addicting its player base, but instead of sitting in front of a large machine for a half hour and losing your money before finally peeling yourself away, you can play a few rounds of it and games like it whatever adware junk in your pocket at the bus, then in line for the restaurant, and then as you're falling asleep. Etc.
I'll concede something here: a large portion of the hangup on this argument, and how intense the discontent is, seems to be that most mobile games at least try to fuck you over with microtransactions and pay-to-play models, which are considered bad. But this game is 3 dollars you pay all at once and then never have to worry again, how bad can that really be? Surely that's not indicative of gambling or addiction and thus needs to be described via something else.
I want to defer to a rather brilliant analogy that Pangburn came up with during a fantastic discourse on the game’s addictive (or in his view, lack thereof) elements:
"I am strolling around a casino, perhaps nursing a drink, and a floor attendant notices me, beckoning me over to a new wing of the facility. it's a VIP room with a low price point of several dollars to get in filled with the same slot machines as out on the floor. the difference here is that once you have paid you have a lifetime of access to the suite, where you can continue to push the one button to your heart's content. the catch here is that there is no payout and you know for a fact that you'll never roll the jackpot for your first few hours, you must sit there and continue to press the button until your odds rise and rise, converging to a near perfect chance of the triple 7s after multiple dozen hours of play. at this point, you can return to this hall at will to watch the triple 7s appear again and again. this is how vsurv sounds to me. I think this sounds fucking stupid and I have no interest in playing it. " in the comments here
However, he contends that he doesn't have a 'moral issue' with it. He then goes on to say that
"the end state is fixed and you're always aware you will reach it at some point. it's not really ‘gambling’ when the odds are always in your favor, right? which is not to say it can't be addictive in its own right, but I hope this makes my thoughts on the matter clear. "
I don't want to deconstruct this too mercilessly but I do want to point out a few interesting things about the VS scenario and how it distinguishes it from this analogy. Mainly the idea that if you play for long enough you will hit the point of getting 7s and always will get 7s. Here's where I find this slightly misleading: the 'jackpot' of VS play is winning which means in order for the analogy to be accurate it would be something closer to guaranteeing you get 7s after waiting and intently interfacing with the screen for 30 full minutes. Although one could argue that the destruction of enemies is also a 'jackpot' reward system, I feel it's actually comparable more to just visual encouragement data like the bright candy explosions in Candy Crush, or the neon bright machines and loud sound effects of slot machines, rather those smaller moments are not the real 'jackpot' you are in pursuit of. Whereas people who play Binding of Isaac are playing to see a new unique run and how the tear effects synergize, its not just about finishing the game in itself.
At the same time there's the assumption that gambling is merely bad because of the house edge, but this risks over simplifying the process of gambling itself. Just yesterday, I played no money poker for the point of prestige and no money was involved, and as such I find that a genuine interest in playing poker as a game seems to distinguish it from a perception of gambling. However, the idea of risking increasing stakes is still there and can thus lead people to take up higher risk poker. Sports betters start off by watching the sport, then they start betting after warming up a while.
However, let me ask you a question: if I played real money poker and I was the best poker player in the world, is that not still gambling? If I was the best poker player, and I was playing with random people, my odds of winning are probably 90%, maybe even more, so is gambling identified by that 10% risk? Is it identified by the house edge? You can come ahead consistently in poker, people play this game for money after all.
Perhaps the nuance here then is that poker is a genuine game that can also still be described as a vehicle for gambling. If that's the case then honestly maybe any game could be a vehicle for gambling, and it's just about how well that engine is tailored to do so. To come back to the "slots'' example then, here's what GoufyGoggs has to say on it when musing about arcade games in comparison:
"No one wants to play a slot machine where you aren't forced to put your money on the line after all. The reliance on leaving outcomes up to chance fundamentally prevents a creative space from ever forming, they’re inherently destructive as Caillois put it. So what you're left with is just the addictive practices and negative impacts on mental health without any of the tangible benefits. " cited here
Now I feel like it's worth comparing this point to something like Blackjack. Blackjack is an insanely simple 'game' that has to a large degree been solved on what number and below you hit and what number you don't. it's automatic, with the only room for discretion being when you should split or double down. There's no room for a creative space of play to breathe, it's a totally static play experience. Poker is incredibly dynamic. They are both gambling. Even so, another question that might be worth bridging: can Candy Crush be called slot machine gambling? After all, the later levels absolutely have a 'house edge'. I'll leave that question for you, but hopefully you can see on some level it reveals a pedantry over word choice and the contexts we attach them to. That pedantry in part implies a moral disgust with gambling where there isn't with single player game experiences, in spite of the fact the boundary between both is very unstable.
PART 2: GAMBLING IS ACTUALLY AWESOME
This is where I start saying things that really just completely veer off the map from anybody else so far: I don't even dislike gambling, I dislike money, and I dislike people being coerced into situations where they feel they can't stop, and I dislike the games that encourage this. Money is not the sole reason Gambling is good or bad. The idea of playing something for stakes, even with a house edge, can be reapplied to other forms of stakes, like Prestige or an erotic form of stakes like strip poker. Gambling can exist in a world without money and sort of already does through shit like 'spin the bottle'. The reason I'm emphasizing this is that the only real concern is that the play needs to be dynamic enough not to mentally fatigue and lull the person interacting in it. Slots and Blackjack get washed out when you remove money, but not universally. Some people still like being in the zone with Blackjack and I can imagine people getting a compulsion to play on these slot machines without money once a habit has been built. It's not really about the money, it's about the habituation through automated play. On the contrary, what we currently consider gambling can be seen as a vector for genuine expressions of creative humor and identity. For example when playing a best of seven of different games, popular streamer personalities Ludwig and Jerma traded out the idea of playing for money for instead playing to see who else has to wear a silly shirt on stream. The games they all played as well were dynamic, in a way all competitive multiplayer games by design tend to be.
This is deeply funny and engaging version of stakes, and the explicit difference that Detchibe focuses on in their own post,
"The issue is that players are largely uncritical of what they are consuming, why they find it pleasurable, and whether or not it is actually enjoyable. Pleasure and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive, but pleasure is something that happens to you, and enjoyment is something earned by you." source
Being acted upon for pleasure under Detchibe's ruleset can only happen through games that don't pass a degree of dynamic threshold, for example playing at the roulette table, the results strictly only happen to you through random chance, a pleasure, rather than being joy seeking in themselves through a dynamic input that causes the results. In poker you have an incredibly wide array of options: bluffing, folding, playing a weak hand to the bridge, purposefully losing hands in order to win later for intel, etc. This is by design dynamic play. Earlier I mentioned the enjoyment a person can get with 'playing for stakes', but I didn't mention how doing this for an ego and without money involved can obviously be bad in both games and 'gambling'.
Some ways people perform self harm with a game is by playing it for far far longer than they should without taking a break. Meanwhile, gamblers often play without 'taking a break' and in the process losing more money or assets than they expected, this process may produce pleasure for them but not enjoyment. To get dark for a moment, there's nothing about Russian Roulette that makes it a non-game, the results just happen to you with minimal player agency and input. Clinically we could refer to russian roulette as technically a pre-established and static 'game' of chance with no input from the player whatsoever besides rolling the barrel until a certain random point, the results are by this metric technically 'pleasurable' for the living player as the operation of death was not done upon them, but not enjoyable. There's obviously the stakes themselves which are awful, but even if it was being done with a nerf dart the game itself is so static and unrewarding if played many times that the only way to have fun with it and produce more pleasure is by either getting in a tantric zone, or by raising the stakes. For people who play static non microtransaction single player games, those stakes are by time and reward catharsis "I will play today until I get 3 wins", which increases to 4, or 5, etc. Playing a static game like slots is the same. The results are static and not deeply determined by what the player does.
It is my belief that the most 'addictive' games in part can come from playing simply for the reward receptors of having something 'happen upon you' and not engaging in your own branching set of decisions and cognitive inputs, and where it no longer becomes about the dynamic play of the player. To tie this explanation to the Great VIP Casino: A team in WoW start learning how to do boss Raids and they are getting wiped, but in a dynamic and chaotic way where random players are rushing in and dying, its hilarious, but the way to win is actually almost perfectly solved and the results of a win or a loss become increasingly unconcerning and unchallenging. Eventually they get good enough at knowing how to build and prepare for the raid that the odds of success ever increase, yet being prevented from 100% by internet issues, physiological interventions, etc. Eventually the issues of pure success stop, that stops becoming the 'jackpot'. They now know exactly how to pull the enemies etc. Now they are redoing this raid for a .5% rare item drop which they are going to sell or use in arena fights, the new 'jackpot'. The only reason for playing the raid is in order to get this next level of jackpot which is inevitable, but takes much stress and many hours, after the point of vastly diminished dynamic returns, to get. The results are not enjoyable, they are pleasurable, they fulfill a compulsion. This is indistinguishable from the VIP Casino except for the fact that the real 'reward' jackpot for play is much more rare, this seems like a very important distinction except when you recognize that this is the exact type of person who would be compelled into a WoW Raid loop after having spent a week at the great VIP Casino.
Fuck WoW and fuck Blizzard (hot take I know) for doing this, this is how this system operates and it shouldn't need to, there's no reason to limit certain items to such a low drop rate, it should just be a test of basic ability and skill not pure compulsion and time gating. The issue with this version of the events is that it encourages compulsion and encourages a raising of the stakes in at least a few problem players. Some players will never stop playing in the Great VIP Casino or they will seek out a version of the casino now with lower odds and higher stakes, or they will play at the Great VIP Casino for a longer amount of time than last time for the same pleasurable results. For WoW raids, a new boss can come out that now has a .1% chance of dropping that item but maybe it takes quite a bit longer and a few more players with no change in the dynamic set to play, this means it takes more time and labor in order to achieve the same base pleasure. For Vampire Survivors then, this can be seen in 2 different ways, either receiving pleasure from trying to get higher win streaks in the original game. Or through playing Clones where the only change is how long a run takes, or if you need to spend real life money to get further. We are assuming that these 'Knock Offs' provide no enhanced player input and are still 1 stick shooters with small upgrade pools. In this case, either Vampire Survivors is an addicting gateway game for static increased stakes gambling (with time, money, or mental acuity) or its a boring game that sucks to play. The only difference being decided by when the player has the decent sense to 'cash their chips' and leave. There's no way to leave this situation untainted.
From this you could say that I hate this type of gaming more than the umbrella medium of 'gambling' itself as the static and hedonically unrewarding nature of a game would stress you to the point of going further and further in order to activate those same pleasure receptors, eventually to the point of either oblivion, self harm, or non-play. Most players will choose non-play, but because of the existence of the primary 2 potentialities, there needs to be various approaches to mitigate or be aware of the mental trappings of play.
Now to go back to Vampire Survivors for a moment. The issue and stakes purported by the game are obviously not money but time. Your reward for doing well enough in the game is that you get to learn and beat it slightly faster, which is an unengaging form of stakes. Compare this instead to the false equivalence examples I've seen brought up within the idle game genre. Cookie Clicker can obviously ask for large amounts of your passive time, months in fact, which by my time wasting critique may seem damning. That said, there's a significant distinction between those idle games where the goal is to find out more of the lore and world like Universal Paperclips or The Longing and games that are primarily interested in locking off content and completion behind time walls that you either have to pay through or play to compulsion to escape out of like Adventure Capitalist. These malicious design traps can exist in idle games but it's not core to the genre, and in fact Universal Paperclips is a great example of a short idle game that conveys its message and gameplay without taking advantage of the player's time needlessly. This is not a genre issue, this is not a gambling issue, and this is not an 'upgrades in games are bad' issue. This is uniquely a game design issue.
That being said it gets quite complicated talking about the nuances of where that difference can be identified so I'm going to outline some common rebuttals I've seen first:
1. All games, especially those you get good at, are about getting to win-states you have to wait out through increasingly minimal cognitive levels of interfacing.
2. Concerns over how the condemnation is described, ie. calling design malicious, evil, or predatory design practices feeling like loaded moral language.
3. The game can be completed 100% in 30 hours, and many other games like CS: GO, League, etc. eat much more player time and are thus more worthy of condemnation
4. Why refer to it as 'morally bankrupt' etc. rather than just unengaging design or simply just a bad game?
For points 1 and 3, I agree that within the premise of being concerned about the excessive waste of player time you could say that any arcade game being functionally endless is just as bad if not worse. However, I think that while the 'jackpot' of VS gameplay very much is connected to finishing a run, not all games are about the compulsion to finish. For score attack games the concern is just to get further, and for shmups the concern is about also completing the game on one credit, not just completing a run in general (though completing the game also is find). Thus, the implicit challenge of a game is its most salient point of consideration. Run completion should be one of many carrots for play, not the only one. VS has nothing implicit in its system that says you should stop playing when you hit 100% or if you should go for it at all but it has nothing of the opposite either. Instead it presents such catharsis through finishing a run and viewing shallow on-screen destruction that your mind will tune out quickly. The only desire for such completionism is in the player who might want to unlock new characters, but even after doing that getting 100% is not seen as a legitimate overarching nested goal in the way it is for Binding of Isaac, nor would it make the play better if it was.
Time and time again you read what people say and they refer to game as 'addictive' and that they 'dont want to stop playing'. This has to be thought of as an issue that is primarily compounded through static play, as what undynamic play can do is cause the player to treat the repetitive task as simply a way to make time goes by faster, and hibernate the mind in a tantric state. This is best expressed in Cakewalking's post on the game,
"I have 50 hours in Vampire Survivors. I treat it like a time machine. I use it to travel 30 minutes forward in time and feel nothing afterwards." source
The issue I have with this is that trying to time travel forward, considering everyone's time on the earth is limited, seems like quite literally a self-loathing gesture (which is why I refer to it as self-harm earlier). A primary argument for why people would want to do this is to quell anxiety or stress, but then this gets you back to those external stressors faster, whereas most games with a challenge tend to slow people's time down. A more reasonable explanation for it is that it's not a consciously-desired process and is instead being utilized for various other means, but I think the primary symptom that arises from this practice is at the very least low self-esteem. Focusing on only a select few games that speed up time means you have far less to dynamically socialize with others, which trends towards social atrophy. You could say that more dynamic gameplay like the Binding of Issac are equal in this regard, however I think the staticness of a game has a freezing effect on the mind such that if the few games you play are more static than dynamic it's much more likely to make you fall into that social atrophy. This may seem crazy or absurd to point out, but I think it's a valid reason to be upset with art that causes this. Less dynamic games register us as less dynamic people not in the sense of making us literally less interesting as a shallow judgment but in that it limits the scope of speech. Currently I've been obsessed with Undercards, and I recognize that's a game that nobody really knows or cares about. That being said, if given a moment to genuinely express and be excited about the game I could speak about it for hours upon end. But the repetitive and limited scenarios mean that you could probably only squeeze the lemon of discussion out of Vampire Survivors for a few drops if that. Similarly, a Candy Crush player has a lot less to say on their game of choice than a Tetris player. This may seem odd since Tetris is, on the surface, a far simpler game, but Tetris experts can talk about various stacking combinations, tricks, and speak about bonding over their hobby with others. Candy Crush players are isolated, and a lot of the purpose of the design, I feel, is to alienate people by crushing emergent gameplay into simple randomness generation checks that can be surpassed by playing over and over, but also increase your odds and thus lower the lack of pleasure from a loss through spending money. If you don't believe me that this actually happens to some Candy Crush players, don't take it from me, take it from the following study called
"Are you addicted to Candy Crush Saga? An exploratory study linking psychological factors to mobile social game addiction"
In the conclusion on the data, where they query the habits and preferences of play of 400 Candy Crush Saga players, they note that:
"According to DSM-IV’s classic definition of addiction, the present study found that 7.3% of the respondents were addicted to mobile social games. Given that there are 215 million mobile online game users in Mainland China (CNNIC, 2014), 7.3% does not represent a small number of addicts." And that, "With regard to the psychological variables, loneliness and self-control were found to be significant predictors of mobile social game addiction."
Vampire Survivors and Candy Crush play vastly differently of course. Vampire Survivors is a numbing experience with a time set that you are moving to complete and finish, whereas Candy Crush is a short series of individual time limited high stress levels. Candy Crush has you acting with swiftness and high cognitive and anxious response. These games on the surface could not contrast more, but both offer only the illusion of control and of outcome. Your results in Candy Crush are only found through how the next set of candies coming in are generated, it's easy to get to a point in Candy Crush where you fail a level by not being able to match the candies. In Vampire Survivors your results are decided by the random generation of the item pool upon level up, meaning that even if you can go for a specific build some amount of the result is left up to chance. The odds of the loss are of course vastly different, but neither provide the player enough agency to breach the upper limits that might come from bad luck nor are random elements forced to make them change and adapt their style of play to what is on screen. I will admit that this specific point may be perhaps the weakest in this whole post by far, but if I was wrong here and that Candy Crush did have a lot of control and variation in play, that would not be a defense of Vampire Survivors, it would be of Candy Crush. Perhaps the best way to quantify how they are both addicting is by highlighting the low amount of player agency and the endless appeasement of play.
PART 3: THE THOUGHT-TERMINATING DISTRACTION POINTS
With all of this settled, I now want to turn to the points of contention that I consider less relevant to the game in itself. Let's start with point 2. The idea that labeling this predatory or evil design is worth resisting. Woodaba put it best when they referred to this as 'tone policing,'
"No, I'm not terribly convinced by this tone policing, I think "predatory" is a perfectly reasonable word to describe a design philosophy cultivated from the ground up to create and reinforce gambling addictions, given that these mechanisms are literally designed to prey upon people. [...]
I think managing tone and tenor in conversations like this can be worthwhile, I just wasn't convinced by your statement that the tone was inappropriate in this instance." comments here
Ironically, even the value-neutral attempt to use the phrase tone policing is getting tone policed, because in our current political climate a lot of words feel polarizing and loaded. I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how these descriptors to a game of leisure would upset or distress people. The phrase 'predatory' is one that I try not to rely on as right now it's a phrase mainly invoked for the purposes of transphobic grooming accusations and thus is tinged with that moral weight. On the other hand, I actually enjoy words like 'evil' or 'amoral' which have been used as negative descriptors by friends in the past see for example Detchibe recently concluding their review by calling Moriyama Middle School "A pedestal for amorality, not a mirror reflecting it." source , which makes me want to seek out and play the game more, not less. This is a struggle that is often core in my relationships with others. That said, even though my perspective on wording is very odd, I can still fully appreciate what they are actually trying to say and recognize that I'm bringing my own over-conscious linguistic baggage and identification with 'evil' to the table which can distract from the discussion. In a way you could say all moral language like this is distracting and meant to apply needless pathos, but these are speaking trends that are also really difficult to get away from in part because using more loaded language gives us a leg up in the attention economies. This is why all of the most outrageous social media posts are strange moral claims. Frankly nobody even tries half as hard to tone police over ableist remarks like 'stupid' or 'schizo' etc. and especially stuff like the r-slur was so common in gaming circles until about 2 years ago when everyone decided that its a no-no slur. I'm not saying increasing sensitivity to that is a bad thing, merely illustrating that there's far more hypocrisy on word choice than people let on. Nobody sits there and studies over each and every word they speak to make sure it's maximally accurate, because someone can just pick the one word you messed up on and highlight it for why it means you're wrong anyway. Doing so can only really be seen as a pedantic distraction. Language is messy and this is why the sentiment of 'good faith' online is so important.
On that note, Point 4 on moral claims, is one that I think is also a distraction point, as morality in general is a murky subject. However, I'm sympathetic as to why people find this worthy of contention. It feels like an attack, especially considering the fact that if you try to make an argument for or against a game or its developer, it can read like the same sort of political censorship that promotes book burning or banning mature video games. As Pangburn points out, "my first thought is that it affirms china's stringent limit on online gaming by minors, but I don't think me saying that here is going to be very popular on either side of the debate LOL"
However I don't think, taking the example of Candy Crush and the negative effects from its players that this is a defacto bad policy if certain games are regulated or restricted, to quote the paper utilized there that issues of self control and isolation were the largest factors of addiction to the game, following this they point out
"Society should be aware of the threats that mobile social game playing pose to players. Research on vulnerable groups has shown that children and adolescents are more susceptible to the influence of the media than others are (Gentile and Stone, 2005). Therefore, parents should pay close attention to their children, and teachers should monitor their students. "
Now I think that the specific restriction of all online games leaves a lot to be desired, and plays into my concerns I'll reference more in depth in a moment. However the actual doing so is based on objective policy data, but it's important not to conflate this meaning of objective and data with the 'my opinion is right because I said so' version. A good analogy might be how smoking regulations happened in response to the negative results of smoking being scientifically proven, it was first outlawed from kids and then warning labels were given to adults. I believe you can do pretty much the same thing and make a similar argument of regulation of a game like Candy Crush or Vampire Survivors.
For me, it's just about pointing out that it’s worthy of condemnation first, not endorsement. I don't want people endorsing games that create negative habits or, more strictly, waste my time. This is literally no different than, say, expressing that you think a story has damaging elements while not trying to actively ban the book. It's just that instead of a narrative, it is design, something people have less awareness of than they think they do.
As for the issue of policy implications in particular I'm just an internet dork, not a politician, and neither are you probably! This also has nothing to do with the point LOL. However, I'll try to address this best I can. Others have positioned arguments that the ESRB should have discretion in terms of highlighting gambling elements in a game, especially to minors, but that sort of regulatory framework leaves a lot to be desired. You could do that nudity popup disclaimer that steam has for games, but that's not a client capacity that can be universalized unless you get the government involved, which is a hefty conclusion. I don't put a lot of faith in the regulatory networks for making a clear distinction between a 'gambling aesthetic' like say Sonic Adventure's casino level, and 'addictive game design elements'', I feel like the core problem here is that we would need to rely on some sort of state policy procedure in which the government could specifically and objectively identify non dynamic and destructive play and properly regulate it. Aesthetics are always in flux even if they are alluring to the right demographic, but as I've pointed out earlier, what we consider truly to be the worst of gambling is only found through this undynamic play. Roguelites could be thrown into this bucket despite the fact that in my view they are the opposite. Take for example a game like Luck Be a Landlord, which has a constant 3 choice upgrade system similar to Vampire Survivors, but also requires a lot of decision making and forethought on what to choose, losing a run is almost entirely within player agency. How do you think a large government entity would perceive a game like that? Personally, I think that they would slap a 'promotes gambling' logo on it, but even if minors played the game (who are the most culpable) the reality is that extended play of it would probably make the less discretion-based system of an actual slot machine significantly less compelling because the play of a slot machine would be automated and have no genuine player input for winning a run.
One last point before we wrap things up. This negation of discoursivity does not just happen in the negative appraisals of our arguments. I want to close this post with what my good friend and critical eye Detchibe had to say about the initial, in actuality quite rushed, insight. I will make sure to leave the full quotation as such in the comments below as the first post, however for brevity there is one sentence in particular I want to harp on: "And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption." I think that while this might not be the intention of the post it speaks to a 'universalizing' diplomatic impulse that I don't think is entirely true. I think this game is actively mentally unhealthy in a specific way that even slightly more cognitively taxing games like 20 Minutes Til Dawn with its active shot aiming isn't. It's not an indictment of failure on your part, but you got there by a system that is actively taking advantage of you. I believe that this impulse while deeply well meaning and appreciated is actually sort of dangerous as it rushes to assuage conflict and disagreement through settlements of harmony. I highlight this not to shit on the absolutely wonderful words of my friend, but to instead expose that thought-terminating cliches are everywhere. One of the most annoying things about me is that I resist them constantly even when they are well meaning :p , but I'm sure I make mistakes on this too so feel free to call it out if you see me doing it.
I don't want the conversation to end, I don't want to 'let bygones be bygones'. This is perhaps the most important issue in terms of gaining a trust and understanding of each other's taste and improving them. You can still like Vampire Survivors after reading all of this, but the point is to be more mindful of recommending it to others. Again, some people like smoking but almost nobody recommends you become a smoker. So to conclude, Vampire Survivors is a mobile game in desktop's clothing, and has a lot of intentionally addictive design traps. So the console a game runs on should not be the sole point of contention for whether its good or not. It's important to be critical of cheap desktop addictive shovelware.
For now however I think I need to stop and digest the scene for a while before saying more, or using other games both positively or negatively for highlighting this, which is what I hope my newfound Court may help do. Fixating forever on one game can be boring and ironically in its own way a waste of time especially for a game with such polarized opinions. Imagine how much more productive this conversation would have been if it was over the mobile game market instead, a game like Candy Crush, which is more clearly delineated as pernicious. I want people to call games like these out of course, but mainly so I don't play them myself. The main reason Vampire Survivors was called out for this was not that it was just some '3 dollar game' but that its one of the most financially successful video games in recent years.
If you have thoughts feel free to leave them below, I'd love to read them
Note: My original post on the game was in reference to more off topic conversation surrounding the harassment by its fans and speculation about its place as a tool for streamers, which was happening to GoufyGoggs, who I was casually dating around the time this had happened as a result of a mutual crush held for a few months, and has recently become my girlfriend. Initially I was going to revamp this post to 'prove' the level of harassment and make people 'bear witness' to the attacks of character and disrespect leveled at her, however I realized that to a large extent such an operation is painful and excessive, and that it takes the bear minimum amount of research into the subreddits or youtube comments surrounding this topic to sympathize, this type of harassment needs not be immortalized in its particulars. I'm not going to quote people misgendering my own girlfriend for other people lol thats ridiculous.
That said, if you have not read the original version of the post, you can read it here (right now it's a google doc but it will be switched to a cohost post asap). The TL;DR of it is conveyed in the 1st link referenced in that post.
Special Thanks to Detchibe and Pangburn for the wonderful peer review and fine tuned grammatical editing on this, without their help I would not be able to write this half as well as I wanted to. To Franz for the well reasoned moral support and understanding. And to my new girlfriend Heather aka GoufyGoggs whose research on this game was a powerful catalyst to my own.
POST SCRIPT EDIT:
Reading this back I realize that I pretty much just dropped the policy proposal point, negating a policy potentiality out of suspicion rather than replacing it. I did that in part because I didn't want to let my heavy handed socialist ideals get too heavily in the way of the critique. I think one of the main reasons people engage in habitual behaviors like this is because of a desire to escape from labor insecurities, often not acknowledging that the therapeutic element is short term reward for long term set backs. This perception is tracked pretty heavily from Addiction by Design where the 'machine zone' is described as a space for escaping insecurities of life generally. I think that the only real policy proposal that would fix that underlying habitual response is by providing better labor security (slashing the 'gig economy' for example) and not promoting cultures of workaholism and burnout. By having a better safety net for people it would prevent anxious self destructive play. Not just for online gaming or gambling, but for other vices to like smoking and alcoholism. I'm probably playing way more of a game than I otherwise would because I don't want to think about my future: getting a job, a home, food, etc. In that sense I can totally understand uncritical play and can't condemn individuals for engaging in it really. The only way to really fix that quite reasonable anxiety is by eliminating it entirely via radical proposals like free housing, food, UBI, etc. The reason I never explicitly stated it in the original piece is because I didn't want to risk over complicating the network of critique there. Only to then simplify it with anti capitalist rhetoric forcing readers to either accept that as true or throw out the entire script. Hammering about labor rights over and over is not the most conducive to open dialogues I'm afraid. Regardless, even if you don't hold my perspective on that point I hope you can see why more general regulation would have to be done with consideration and care.
13 Comments
This is the best, most articulate, most thorough examination of the issue we'll see on the site, if not entirely. I implore anyone with the slightest interest in the ongoing hullabaloo about VS to please read this. It's daunting but worth it.
this is really fantastic! I'm glad I was able to pitch in, this is definitely the most thorough breakdown of these issues that I've seen thus far
This comment was deleted
Top 3 Backloggd reviews of all time here, history in the making
Nothing to be said, amazing amazing amazing
Nothing to be said, amazing amazing amazing
By the way I think I know why I never got into WoW even pirated
@MalditoMur
Yeah this issue mainly applies to end game WoW tho I think, and its ties to the real money backed marketplace (I know that end game Runescape is the same, most people playing Runescape obsess over this max level ideal and max gold for labor per hour job which just looks like a painful rat trap to me). Most of the rest of WoW is not ran by this specific compulsion and rarity drop repetition network. Most of the game is you running around and talking to people and then bringing a specific item to some other guy for the gnome war efforts or whatever. People often shit on fetch quests but if you ask me at least its the polar opposite of this kind of addictive design. That being said it doesn't mean fetch quests are not boring as hell, but I'd rather things be boring sometimes.
My impression for MMORPG addiction is that, either it applies mainly to this endgame competition and labor extraction for rare drops for basically bolstering the servers in game economy. Or, its because the game itself is so immersive and such a toure de force of worldbuilding that it became the videogame equivalent of binging a really good TV show. Not to mention you can play that game actively and socially with others, which makes me think that instance may be more a generational divide. Not seeing only friends met over a game as 'real friends' etc. Personally, outside of playing on other peoples accounts once or twice, I never got past level 20 in WoW because I didn't know how to pirate the game, but I loved the architectural designs and lush landscapes when I played.
Blizzards whole economy tho came from this sort of pernicious Whaling though. They were one of the first to really hone in on it, by frontloading it with an incredibly deep and immersive game. The only reason people are so pissed off with Diablo Immortal I believe is mainly because the game itself seems not good. Along with, rightfully so, Blizzards tanked corporate reputation due to the sexual assault realities of the companies (I don't think its appropriate to call it allegations anymore...). I know it's meant as an aside and not really anything you intended to spark a discussion about, but I wouldn't pretend I'm not a little bit torn on how to approach games outside this specific matrix, and the foundational 4 factor model I juryrigged, for applying this argument of compulsive play.
The issue here is that when you're talking about 'videogame addiction' its a little weird because you don't literally consume a game, its an audiovisual production that you interface with. So there's no actually existing chemical process with withdraw symptoms that you can point to in the same way as you can Alcohol or Cocaine. Sure, there might be signs of restlessness, but you cant literally test for WoW in somebodies body and its a good thing for that to, or gamers would never have a chance of holding a job (far be it from me to shame the worker for being actually addicted as a failing of character). Thus, judging this stuff is genuinely quite hard to do and has to be approached with a lot of thoughtfulness and caution.
I apologize for using you as a target for bloviating on this Mur XD. I have a lot of pent up thoughts on this and, as a result of not wanting to throw a whole book at the average reader, a lot of thoughts fell to the cutting room floor.
Yeah this issue mainly applies to end game WoW tho I think, and its ties to the real money backed marketplace (I know that end game Runescape is the same, most people playing Runescape obsess over this max level ideal and max gold for labor per hour job which just looks like a painful rat trap to me). Most of the rest of WoW is not ran by this specific compulsion and rarity drop repetition network. Most of the game is you running around and talking to people and then bringing a specific item to some other guy for the gnome war efforts or whatever. People often shit on fetch quests but if you ask me at least its the polar opposite of this kind of addictive design. That being said it doesn't mean fetch quests are not boring as hell, but I'd rather things be boring sometimes.
My impression for MMORPG addiction is that, either it applies mainly to this endgame competition and labor extraction for rare drops for basically bolstering the servers in game economy. Or, its because the game itself is so immersive and such a toure de force of worldbuilding that it became the videogame equivalent of binging a really good TV show. Not to mention you can play that game actively and socially with others, which makes me think that instance may be more a generational divide. Not seeing only friends met over a game as 'real friends' etc. Personally, outside of playing on other peoples accounts once or twice, I never got past level 20 in WoW because I didn't know how to pirate the game, but I loved the architectural designs and lush landscapes when I played.
Blizzards whole economy tho came from this sort of pernicious Whaling though. They were one of the first to really hone in on it, by frontloading it with an incredibly deep and immersive game. The only reason people are so pissed off with Diablo Immortal I believe is mainly because the game itself seems not good. Along with, rightfully so, Blizzards tanked corporate reputation due to the sexual assault realities of the companies (I don't think its appropriate to call it allegations anymore...). I know it's meant as an aside and not really anything you intended to spark a discussion about, but I wouldn't pretend I'm not a little bit torn on how to approach games outside this specific matrix, and the foundational 4 factor model I juryrigged, for applying this argument of compulsive play.
The issue here is that when you're talking about 'videogame addiction' its a little weird because you don't literally consume a game, its an audiovisual production that you interface with. So there's no actually existing chemical process with withdraw symptoms that you can point to in the same way as you can Alcohol or Cocaine. Sure, there might be signs of restlessness, but you cant literally test for WoW in somebodies body and its a good thing for that to, or gamers would never have a chance of holding a job (far be it from me to shame the worker for being actually addicted as a failing of character). Thus, judging this stuff is genuinely quite hard to do and has to be approached with a lot of thoughtfulness and caution.
I apologize for using you as a target for bloviating on this Mur XD. I have a lot of pent up thoughts on this and, as a result of not wanting to throw a whole book at the average reader, a lot of thoughts fell to the cutting room floor.
And yes, thanks everyone for the renewed round of compliments, I appreciate yall a lot <3
You can throw me as many books as you want on me at expense of my accelerated conclusions, I wont mind!
ill be up front in saying that i have not read this entire review, only the few paragraphs around where my own review was cited, so i may be missing context but i just wanted to elaborate on my own review a tad: when i use the word addictive i meant it hyperbolically, it was "addictive" as much as any other game i enjoy playing a lot is, but when i had completed all the content (sparing completing every level on every character, to hell with that) i immediately lost interest. i played other games and did other things during that period and felt no compulsion to play VS in a way id describe as genuinely addictive.
@Schexsse First of all, thank you for acknowledging that and there's no pressure to do so.
"I don't want to do anything less than play it" for some reason my particularly trigger happy mind missed this specific qualifier in what you meant. I'm very sorry for this, and there's no doubt in my mind that many people would have this specific experience of immediate burnout after doing all the tasks. I misunderstood you as one of the people who were still playing anyway. This is a critical error in display and quotation on my part, and I feel bad for highlighting the words of somebody who is new and unpopular to the site in this way as well. I appreciate the qualification and apologize again for that, I'll remove this quotation asap.
"I don't want to do anything less than play it" for some reason my particularly trigger happy mind missed this specific qualifier in what you meant. I'm very sorry for this, and there's no doubt in my mind that many people would have this specific experience of immediate burnout after doing all the tasks. I misunderstood you as one of the people who were still playing anyway. This is a critical error in display and quotation on my part, and I feel bad for highlighting the words of somebody who is new and unpopular to the site in this way as well. I appreciate the qualification and apologize again for that, I'll remove this quotation asap.
I have removed that section, thank you for the clarification.
@Erato_Heti there's no need to apologize, i'm not upset whatsoever. I just wanted to ensure you understood what I meant as best as possible for the sake of your own review because it seems very high effort and well constructed, my own review was just written to be a short, slightly tongue in cheek blurb about my own thoughts on the game and i didn't want a misunderstanding to result in yours being less cohesive. i can very easily understand how you read it that way, especially considering how many other people were saying similar things but were still playing after completing everything.
Yeah, if I get around to it, I'll place your testimony (which is now simply just inappropriate to the construction of the piece) for that more accurate testimony. I appreciate you didn't take it as a personal attack. I will also mention your friend crystal reached out privately with their own criticism on the piece that mentioned this as well. They said that "im not proxying btw they probably dont even want me to say this to you, but i felt like doing it anyway." that's the making of a great friendship, and I'm happy to have such a level headed form of criticism and concern in my early public work. I also checked your reviews, and thus far like your writing. Thanks again and have a great day.
Erato_Heti
1 year ago
"This is, without a doubt, one of the most important and best pieces on games I've read. It is my sincere hope that this reaches some of the people who most need to hear what you have to say here, be it on the time consumption of games; the relationship between streamers, their audiences, and their content; the (in)visibility of transmisogyny; the relationships we have with games beyond the play experience itself; or how these escapes from anxieties only exacerbate them.
To add on to what you've said, part of the issue is that Asmongold's (and the vast majority of streamers/video creators) content, conservative media, and Survivors-likes exist for uncritical consumption. Whoever partakes in this media does so with the expectation they will not have to actively think about externalities and certainly not internally. It's why the right echoes the cries of 'critical race theory is bad' without adding a 'because' after it. It's why Survivors-like players fall back on the same statements of 'the game is a one-time transaction' without constructing an argument beyond that. It's why Asmongold's viewers are so feverishly upset at one person's opinion and have to resort to name-calling, misgendering, and making falsified claims of envy. They have tuned in to be told what to think, not how to think. They have tuned in to be told what is good or bad, not why it is good or bad. And as you and I and countless others have stressed time and again, there isn't anything implicitly wrong with a passive model of consumption when done responsibly and with an awareness that it is oblivious consumption.
You have synthesised everything magnificently with a palpable passion."