Yeah, "predatory" is such a weird thing to call this game. I played it for a few tens of hours over a couple weeks, in-between all the other extremely diverse games I play, and it allowed me to shut my brain down at night, listen to some podcasts, catch up on some bluray commentaries I'd been meaning to get to, and unwind while my baby was asleep. How exactly was I being preyed upon? How did this game fool me and take advantage of me? I love playing games for lots of reasons - intellectual stimulation, cultural enrichment, exploring different cultures or viewpoints, sheer challenge, exhilaration, historical exploration, enjoying a great story, reveling in the shittiness of some kusoge, or, yes, even just some totally mindless and shallow entertainment when I want or need to unwind. It's okay! There's room for all of that! We're adults and we can make choices for ourselves!

good review

The "predatory" argument is very clearly being made on the basis that the game openly replicates and uses the mechanisms of the gambling industry that are designed to produce addiction on the part of its players in order to create compulsive play. Now, if you don't think addiction is in and of itself a bad thing, that the mechanisms that produce these behaviours are only bad when there's a monetization element, then that's a perspective you can have, sure. But that's not a perspective shared by the people making these arguments, clearly. You don't have to agree with them but I'm finding the lack of engagement with the actual substance of the argument being made incredibly tedious, especially when it's being made on such terms as "ugh people are being so weird about this game" which strikes me as particularly insensitive given how users of this site have been victims of harassment campaigns by Vampire Survivors fans.

The problem described is not about your time being a waste for playing it -as in you enjoying your time-, but about the game being so exclusively designed on all fronts to keep you playing on abhorrently reductive and addiction-inducing level design. Which is not something new and many games have been guilty about it, but they weren't made with neuroscience on their hand. Diablo 2 is one stinker that comes to mind inmediately, but at least that game has actual player agency beyond moving a bit to the right.

Its gameplay loop is extremely refined to a point it's one-step-behind ludopatic, one button, one destination. I personally always try to avoid these kind of experiences because of that very made-to-addict design philosophy and yes, I reject a lot of videogames for it and addiction comes in many flavors too - heck one of my friends had an intense Monster Hunter addiction that happily left behind. FIFA LoL and all that shit has been beaten to death, everyone knows those games are robbing you and people clearly do not care about it, just like people do not care about VS having intensely "therapeutic" design.

As Woodaba points out, you and many clearly don't see a problem with hyperaddictive gameplay loops that require pure mental flinch rather than player input, and I unite to the sentiment: that's okay. You are entitled to like and defend Vampire Survivors in discourse. But the argument has been reduced to semantics and not actually understanding where it comes from - offcourse people can waste their time in what they want but that doesn't change facts, VS is a concerningly addictive game with a concerningly addictive and overreduced mobile gamblo aesthetic. That concern however is not shared. Goufy was pedantic about it -let's not act like Asmongold was on a high horse, unlovable piece of shit that one punching down- but it sure didn't deserve to be entangled in such a shit scenario.

We have a different appreciation for enjoyment anyway. For me, the act of leisure is inherently mind-escaping and, while I do understand were the sentiment comes from, I just don't comprehend why people choose to reduce what they like to just turning their brains off and that being a positive to point out. Everything enjoyment serves to escape reality to me, it's not a pro to media. It's default. "Shallow" entertainment is never that shallow to begin with, we just refuse to give it a fair chance to stand against the "masterpieces" because it's not the golden crop. There's a reason why you like that stuff beyond making serotonin - I like shit zombie movies for a reason. Just say you like VS for the addicting factor, it's valid, don't sweat it. It's not elitist or pedantic, it's living a meaningful interaction with what you love, even if silly. But that's me.

@Woodaba Okay, here's the engagement: I understand that it's addictive and designed to be addictive. So is nearly every video game for the last 50 years. Wringing one's hands about it to this degree when there isn't money involved or some kind of epidemic of people losing their jobs or lives or something as a result of nonstop playing is silly.

I have to imagine at some level there's just a desire to say something so silly. Where someone can simply reduce an argument down to "addictive huh? So is every video game in the past 50 years" and then "yeahhh well what about actually money-intensive addicting games or actually ruining people's lives" with the exact same kind of confidence as someone yelling from the mountain "you know there's no ethical consumption ever!!" This is why this medium is doomed by a gamer audience with such repulsive stupid rhetoric

@DJ very true

@LunaEndlessWitch I feel like this chain of comments has been pretty civil about voicing our thoughts on VS so I'm not sure why you feel the need to say "gamer audience with such repulsive stupid rhetoric"?

Cheddar's point is sound - all games are addictive, and many to far greater extents than VS. They then utilize this addictive quality to extract more money from you. VS may or may not be more addictive than other games (I don't think there's any real way to quantify that) but it has NO WAY of utilizing that quality beyond your time. And regardless of the money question, I'm not even sure there really is anything quantitative for the claim of it being hyperaddictive. Is people going "oh man I played 5 hours of VS tonight, that was crazy" really any different from "I played 5 hours of God of War Ragnarok tonight, that was crazy"? I'll accept that VS is definitely more mind-numbing to play in chunks but just as a participant in games culture I see friends talk about their gaming sessions all the time and it doesn't seem to me (again, to me) that VS's fanbase playtimes are really any different. But, again, I said there's really no way to quantify it so I'll admit the latter point is just opinion.

I think if VS did have MTX (or some connection to crypto or something) then I would agree wholeheartedly. But the claim that it's more offensive than any other game also lacking MTX just by virtue of its design is not enough for me to agree.

It's not even some endless runner or something. It's a three dollar game that you can 100% in like thirty hours and then there's nothing left to do. Literally what is the harm here.

@zapken you can tell they just wanted to throw a bad faith argument so I wouldn't worry about them.

I think it is on-its-face ridiculous to equate most games released for the past 50 years, with a game that has obnoxious slot machine animations whenever you pick up a mundane item.

@Zelfie have you literally ever played an arcade game

Arcade games do not comprise most of the games released for the past 50 years

in defense of zapken, he and I discussed this topic quite a bit before he put this together, and he's coming at this in good faith. I wanted to clarify my thoughts on the matter since I put this on a lot of people's timelines via liking it.

where the original argument from goufygoggs originates is purely from a game design perspective, which is to be expected given her endless talent for analyzing game structures. I think virtually everyone can agree that vsurv is a shallow game; zapken spends a paragraph here shitting on it, and goufygoggs and detchibe both provide different perspectives on where exactly this game fails conceptually.

gg goes further by attaching a moral failing to the creation and design of the game. she asserts that both the progression and audiovisual components, derived from the world of gambling, make this game purposefully effective at compelling people to play it. this is tied to the idea of gambling addiction, which seeks to extract wealth from vulnerable people via using these sensory tools to compel further betting. another now-deleted BL review corroborating this view simultaneously claims that the idea of video game addiction existing is "laughable". how can one fit that view with one that states that vsurv is itself addictive without monetized assets, or assuming that gambling addiction exists at all? "addiction" as the term we use for both derives from the way that both video games and gambling drive a dopamine drip-feed in our brains that make us crave more, similar to how compulsive behavior has been established in other domains such as eating, social media, and sex. there's no chemical dependency here and yet there's undeniably a push within most of us to engorge ourselves on these pleasures, with some people being unwilling to assert self-control in such a way that they need therapeutic assistance to wrench themselves from the cycle. this is not a "people need to learn self-control" statement but an admission that the same elements that make these activities pleasurable in the first place becomes dangerous in excess and potentially mentally and materially damaging.

but again, our enjoyment of these games specifically draws from the dopamine/mental pleasure we receive from engaging with them. I think vsurv looks stupid and I have no intention of playing it. however, I do frequently listen to podcasts, and recently I have become enraptured in playing picross again. picross puzzles (and nonagrams as a whole) have only one solution, can be easily algorithmically solved, and as a whole depend on a rigid set of unchanging rules that require no physical dexterity to implement. yet I still find exercising these set of rules I have self-taught invigorating, especially when I am mentally processing some other task in the background. I sometimes (well... often) have trouble stopping myself from solving puzzles even after the podcast finishes. where do we delineate between this compulsion loop and that of vsurv? especially considering that each picross game contains a limited number of puzzles, and thus I must buy another if I want to continue playing on my switch. let's also consider works from tetsuya mizuguchi such as lumines and tetris effect, which masterfully use sensory elements to elicit response from basic input and visually stimulate the player as they continually play. besides being less nakedly drawn from the world of gacha games and slot machines in their aesthetics, they present the same quandry of explicitly showering the player in visual reward for basic play. arcade games in their heyday suffer from the same form of wealth extraction via cutting-edge visuals and snappy gameplay luring young people into expending a theoretically limitless amount of change in pursuit of progress in the game, which on its face seems more predatory than vsurv and its one-time price tag (and it's also free on itch.io? or was?).

the reason we give these games a pass in the discourse is they (the good ones anyway) are "well-designed" and are potentially engaging from a systems analysis perspective. mur alludes to this in their comment by comparing vsurv to diablo 2 before admitting that diablo 2 at least provides some player agency. I could begin to spin off rhetorical questions about where this arbitrary quality threshold is that separates a game from predatory status to actually being worthy of analysis, but this is a fool's errand because I already established that we agree on vsurv's total lack of design chops. it's a shitty game, and thus there's no fig leaf that hides its obvious compulsion loop. through goufygoggs' design-focused lens I mentioned earlier, it makes sense that this is a kind of artistic affront since it is a total design failure in the abstract, critical sense. this is only one critical lens and obviously others exist (the variety of people in this thread with different personal review styles attests to that), but I think it clarifies at least this aspect of the critique levied at the game.

however, there is an additional aspect that gg and others have established as the key reason for why the game is predatory, and that is because it is in particular a "time-waster". my interpretation of their title for this stems from the aforementioned critical lens establishing that it is of poor quality and poor taste to the extent that it saps the player's time in the same way as material wealth from a gambler. this is the main point of contention in this discourse from my point of view. it's also highly subjective. whether one feels like they are personally enriched by an experience consuming content is very personally driven. in some ways I personally use this site as a way to attone for this, to manufacture a purpose to play a game that otherwise would "waste my time" by attaching a review that I myself have created to it. I have at times seen gaming in the absolute sense (not a particular game) as a leech on my time and well-being in lieu of me performing creative tasks such as programming a game or writing music. at other times I have seen gaming as "more enriching" than other time-wasters such as endlessly scrolling twitter or discord or the activity feed of this very site. after all, we often can't create without some spark; many of us first tried coding a game by making a pong clone, or learned how to play guitar through a tab of one of our favorite songs. there is a tension between those points of view that unquestionably exists.

that's why I personally see the rationale behind the push to call vsurv predatory, but I don't think that it's true in a general sense. at the end of the day, whether we attempt to ascribe higher value to it, I also think gaming is meant to be pleasurable; in moderation, I'm happy to admit that I use gaming to waste time when I'm in-between other tasks or not interested in enrichment. to highlight vsurv specifically for its compulsory qualities begs some uncomfortable questions about other favorite games that I'm not sure can be recitified outside of an objectivist lens that attributes quality metrics to games in a way that will never match everyone's preferences. thus to sum it up, I think the morality argument around it is what is driving much of the disagreement here. it's much easier to decry gambling when it materially entraps its victims or even monetized video games like mentioned in the above review, specifically gacha games (which really are forms of barely disguised gambling). to argue that "wasting" someone's time playing a game is equivalent to the monetary ruin gambling can bring is tricky; did sinking 40+ hours into PICROSS S GENESIS & Master System entail me being exploited, or did I choose to bring on the time investment?

which is not touch upon the material consequences of video game addiction (detrimental to health, atrophying social relationships, actual repeated monetary expense within certain games) but I'm willing to leave those outside of the bounds of this discussion.

also the asmongold stuff is an entirely separate issue, the way his community organized around spewing hate and harassing gg simply for voicing her opinion is absurd. no one should have to go through that kind of traumatic experience for posting a video such as that.

also apologies for fucking up everyone's feed with the massive comment lol

> you and many clearly don't see a problem with hyperaddictive gameplay loops that require pure mental flinch rather than player input

apologies to all because this seems like a bad time to chime in but, how big does the player's decision space have to get before intentionally addictive mechanics start being permissible

like gut instinct is that this game is predatory but I primarily find it problematic because it has no other real quality than number go up

lol ok well if I had refreshed before posting I would've seen pangburn's comment and left it alone

@pangburn appreciate the care put into this comment but i really do think it misses, intentionally or otherwise, the game's direct roots in the gambling industry. tetsuya mizuguchi is not a slot machine designer, and sudoku wasn't built from a system solely designed to induce unhealthy behaviours in humans. this is not just a game designed to be enjoyable to play, it is not just a game designed with a compelling repeating loop in mind, it is a game where, as openly admitted by the developer, a slot machine designer themself, the exact same system of feedback and pacing used by slot machines not just to feed existing gambling addictions, but to create them where they did not exist previously, is replicated verbatim, but without the component of asking you to feed in a coin for every spin of the wheel.

now, i think i would disagree with goufy and maldito on their assessment of the "idle game" and i do think there is value in a game that does not ask much of the player in terms of input or thought. i don't think there's necessarily anything morally wrong with, like, giving yourself so much money in simcity that you can't lose and just watching your city grow with minimal interaction. but the argument of the defense here is that there is functionally zero difference between every other game that affects a compulsive gameplay loop and vampire survivors and i find that spurious at best. maybe you think i'm drawing an arbitrary distinction, maybe you genuinely do think that the gambling industry's efforts to literally create gambling addictions would be fine if, like vampire survivors, they simply ask for a few dollars up-front.

my problem with vampire survivors is not that it gives nothing back, not that it merely kills time. my problem is that i am worried about what people are letting into their heads. i read addiction by design earlier this year, i read how the gambling industry literally reshapes the minds of it's victims. i admit, the reason i commented originally was seeing DJSCheddar quote, basically, word for word, the gambling industry's defense for itself: "We're adults and we can make choices for ourselves!". addiction by design in a general sense horrified me, in particular, it's later chapters' discussion about how the mechanisms of addiction cultivated in the casino industry are being insidiously applied to workplaces and environments where you would not necessarily expect to find such things. so to see that specific wording appear here got me to raise my eyebrows! i simply don't think this is as simple as "oh well, we all want pleasure, and all pleasure is basically the same" as is being articulated here, and i think the equivalency being drawn here that it's all the same and vampire survivors is no different from super mario bros. is, wilfully or otherwise, ignorant of the material realities of the design techniques vs uses.

again, if you genuinely think that all of this is completely fine as long as no money is being spent, then maybe this is all fine. but i think an articulation of the argument against vampire survivors without making any mention of it's design lineage feels incomplete, even dishonest. and if you do think it's fine, then i would ask you to consider the growing body of research in the world that indicates that people - particularly children and young people - that play games incorporating gambling aesthetics and loot boxes (even if they never actually spend money on these things) are more likely to become problem gamblers, and consider again where the harm might come from.

in short, TL;DR: VS being a "waste of time" is irrelevant: the point at which being compelled by play crosses over into concerning territory is when a slot machine designer uses their knowledge of how to create and feed gambling addictions in the design of their video game, and i think it is worthwhile to distinguish between that and it the mechanisms of feedback that make it feel good when super mario jumps on a goomba or watching a pokemon's health bar go down when you hit it with a move it is weak to. there is in fact a difference and i do not accept that to condemn vampire survivors means we must, in turn, condemn every single video game ever. there exists a world around vampire survivors and the context that world provides changes our perspective on it. if you truly think there is nothing wrong with being addicted in a vacuum, that's fine, but I would also add that this is an attitude that is actively cultivated by the casino industry. why do you think every gambling site advertises that the first few plays are free?

Okay. So do you think that maybe it would be useful to tone the rhetoric threat level down from "PREDATORY" to "potentially irresponsible"? Because that's quite a bit different (and more reasonable).

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.

Lol, tone policing. Okay, well, asked and answered!

you literally did not comment on the substance of the argument and instead just said "do you think it would be useful to tone down the rhetoric threat level"? that is the dictionary definition of tone policing? i didn't even say it to be mean or rude anything, 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

I dislike writing long comments on here (and am not good at it) so often I hope that much of my response to lengthy stuff is implicit. I hoped to communicate with that question that I understood your argument and would probably agree to the point where I would call it potentially irresponsible. You don't agree that that's strong enough, and that's fine. We're not gonna agree on this.

Ill just come to give this review a heart because it spawned really interesting conversational points and I'm all for it! Backloggd being great again

@DJSCheddar that's fine! appreciate the explanation of your intent as i did not gather that from your original comment. genuinely did not come here to convince people one way or another about vampire survivors, made my comments to address what I felt was a misrepresentation of the arguments against the game.

@Woodaba I haven't read Addiction by Design, but I do remember a particular part goufygoggs described in one of her videos about the "machine state" or "machine zone" or something along those lines. that's a state where the world begins to fade away and instead of act of engaging with the machine becomes the sole and dominating sensory input, correct? at the same time I think of mizuguchi and his team at enhance creating the game Tetris Effect, a game named after the phenomenon of people's brains being rewritten to repeatedly create falling block patterns of their own. the state of creating a game so engaging that it continues playing itself in your brain even after completion... where the field of blocks becomes predominant within the player's mind and they become fully enveloped in the sensory experience surrounding it. the flow state, if you will.

to me, the former (originating in the gambling industry) and the latter (originating in the gaming industry) are the same phenomenon, approached from two different disciplines but rooted in the same exploitation of our mental pathways. I'm 100% objecting to the idea that these are different, and I'm pointing out that we praise the design patterns of one while denouncing the other. to me this is an essential contradiction at the heart of the debate that is uncomfortable to confront but necessary to contend with. I think the mental discursive navigation here (the quality delineation I mentioned earlier) is what allows us to impugn one but not the other, not to mention the explicit gambling iconography that you've brought up as a key distinguishing element between the two. again, my critical lens is very systems-oriented, and to me underneath the aesthetic aspect I find it hard to differentiate the two. but how much one weighs these aspects against each other is personal and will influence how they feel about the debate.

if analogism is our tool of choice here, let me present mine: 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 once 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. at the same time however, I don't really have a moral quandry with it. you're getting to press the button for free and see the little aniamtions play with no incentive to pump more money in. there is no potential of a life-changing event in the process that lures you in for repeated plays. 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 believe I'm being "ignorant of the material realities" here because I made it very clear what the material outcomes of video game addiction are, and I don't believe that aesthetic differences in design between one made by a famous developer and one made by a former gambling industry employer are "material". from my perspective the outcome is the same in terms of how they affect the brain. I do think elements of coercive appeal have both made their way from gambling into video games directly as well as being developed independently in the gaming industry as I signalled earlier in this response. I guess what may not be getting across in my prior response is that I do think games "induce unhealthy behaviors in humans." gambling preys on this sunk cost fallacy concept of potentially getting "the big score", and gaming preys on human power fantasies and the desire to escape from reality; perhaps both share that latter point. games do have the ability of self-reflection that makes them more approachable in this regard (drakengard etc. etc.) and they at least also offer a safe way for us to indulge certain fantasies that are unsafe in person such as driving a very fast car or engaging in a firefight or drawing a picture of Dynamite Headdy from monochromatic pixels (er, maybe not that last one). perhaps that's my rationalization for pissing away a lot of time on games, but it does get into the view of games as works of art that we champion on this site. and unfortunately even if I didn't believe that I would still continue drinking that garbage.

now your discussion of the effects of gambling iconography on young adults/children (let's say minors... I still think I'm a young adult) is very compelling. that's not a line of reasoning I had considered and it explicitly makes a case for why the actual aesthetics makes a distinct difference in how it affects the player versus the systems-oriented view I espoused earlier. this is something I'll have to let percolate in my mind coming off of this discussion... 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. it also leads me to thoughts of games like yakuza or red dead redemption that explicitly contain real-life gambling within them with in-game money. stateside we denote these with a "gambling" warning on the back of the box, and that could be a solution in this particular instance to denote the occurance of it in vsurv if 1) I were to believe that the ESRB actually has any sway over the selection of games given to children or 2) if anyone would even see that shit on steam without scrolling past (much less a child being able to download and play it freely from itch). I don't think for adults the argument holds as much water; I know plenty of people who have penny poker or mahjong groups for fake or negligible money who are not driven to truly gamble by simple exposure, but I agree that per whatever studies you're citing this is potentially the case for minors. I suppose there's also the stain of the old "do video games provoke child violence?" argument that has been debunked but I'm going to set that aside because my gut instinct is to agree with you on this particular discussion point.

@Pangburn forgive the slightly truncated nature of this response but it is quite late on my end and i'd just like to note a few things to close out my end of the convo, as like I said I'm not really here to sway people for or against VS, I have as many friends who enjoy it greatly as are ambivalent or disliking of it.

I do actually agree with you in a certain way wrt the first point you bring up, that The Flow State is something that both Vampire Survivors and other mainstream games like Tetris Effect are trying to tap into. This may or may not surprise you but I find Flow to be an incredibly suspect concept and I would caution against any game designers attempting to replicate it uncritically. Flow as articulated originally by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is primarily a mechanism for exploitation that sees the rewiring of the human brain to work against its better impulses to increase productivity and focus as a universal good, and has proven hugely influential in workplaces around the world in order to manipulate workers. Csikszentmihalyi's Flow is a bad fucking book, even going so far as to use The Holocaust as a positive example of efficiency (yes, really), and its continued influence on game design is an indictment on the entire industry as far as I am concerned. so we're actually on a similar wavelength that these are similar concepts...I just think they are both bad while you (and forgive me if this is a misinterpretation) consider them more value-neutral.

(though i will say, tetris effect (the game) is about exploring the concept of tetris effect (the concept) through the lens of humanism to make an argument about the connectedness of humanity in spite of the many differences we have. as sceptical as i am about humanism as a philosophy and the lens of the tetris effect, i don't think it would be controversial to say that this is a very different intent than a pachislot machine)

the other point i want to touch on is that you seem to be arguing that vampire survivors only emulates the aesthetics of a slot machine. by the designer's own words, this is not true: the play experience, the fundamental design of the game is also, to paraphrase the designer, the "automatic" application of these design trends. I think a fundamental disagreement that we have that we are unlikely to find common ground in it seems, is that i think there's a fundamental difference between how a video game like super mario bros. is designed and how a slot machine is designed. there is crossover, and some games will get there closer than others, and some games are practically indistinguishable in their design intent, but fundamentally, the material concerns that surround a slot machine are different from that of super mario bros., and the designer being open about the design of the former being applied 1:1 to vampire survivors is worthy of distinction. i do not think, as you are arguing, that vampire survivors has merely adopted the aesthetic of the slot machine, i think it is reproducing a design philosophy designed to produce and amplify addiction, and i think that design philosophy is different from many games. not all games, to be clear, but many, and i don't think i would find any argument that doesn't note this difference in context agreeable. i think we both agree that all games in some way alter the functioning of the brain, as the brain is something that will inevitably react to the stimuli that a video game provides. what i think we disagree on is whether the game's direct design lineage from the casino makes it different from a game like tetris: i think it does, and that's a concern, while you (again, apologies if this is a misinterpretation) don't, and therefore don't see VS as more objectionable than any other game.

just one final quick point, i'm glad that you have many adult friends who have a healthy relationship with games of chance, but i would like to make clear that this is not the case for many other adults, and i would caution against characterising adults as perfectly rational actors for whom this kind of thing will simply not do anything to whatsoever.