This is all hardly surprising. “Flappy Bird” made a lot of money but its income is paltry compared to the unthinkable profit of other similarly simplistic games on the market at the moment. “Candy Crush Saga” is and has been for some time, the most astonishing example of the triumph of the (comparatively) small-budget, mobile game. This game’s developers – the U.K.-based King – were at one point reportedly pulling in over $3.5 million a day from a 2D game where you push sweets about. That’s far over 50 times what “Flappy Bird” was doing (BGR 2014). And he thought his game was worryingly addictive. So what happened?
The Rise of Casual Gaming
Today’s gaming market has split into what is loosely referred to as casual and hardcore gaming – definitions that have further sub-divided and merged into a wide plethora of different gaming styles. This has led to a diversifying in the ways that people play; changes that even the game design industry struggles to keep up with. Most notably, these changes are created by the rise of mobile gaming and the free-to-play model.
Definition: Mobile Gaming
All gaming that is carried out on a portable device. While this primarily refers to smartphones and tablets, it can also include handhelds such as the PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS. Mobile gaming offers a far higher level of access to gamers and is best suited to short bursts of play. Consequently games designed for these platforms tend to favour more frivolous, snack-able formats.
To clarify the language here: hardcore gaming is typically on a console or a PC, involves playing for several hours, sometimes days at a time, and normally centres on some kind of killing/violence/carnage in a fantasy or military setting. This is still largely the domain of men, with only around a fifth of such games being played by women (Williams 2009). Hardcore games include the likes of “Call of Duty”, “Skyrim” and “Titanfall” and are, certainly historically, a realm dominated by the Triple A titles.
Casual games, on the other hand, are typically played on mobile devices or through internet browsers. These are frequently disposable, colourful games that centre on nurturing, building and decorating as well as puzzle and quiz games. “Farmville”, “Clash of Clans” and “Candy Crush Saga” are all arguably examples of this broad style of game. Recent reports suggest that women have taken the lead in this market, playing marginally more than men (Sky News 2013). A telltale sign of casual gamers is that they can spend hours playing such games and still not self-identify as gamers. To them, a couple of minutes here and there pushing sweets in “Candy Crush” doesn’t equate to being a gamer, even when a couple of minutes here and there totals more than a fifth of their waking hours.
Mobiles have, in an incredibly short space of time, completely changed the experience of being either in a city or on public transport. Mobile gaming forms an important part of that shift. Phones are out in force wherever you go, and a great many of those screens are busy housing some form of video game. My gamer’s eye is always caught by the distinctive green expanse of someone tending to their clan in “Clash of Clans” or the ponderous swipes of a sweet pusher.
In The Fix, a somewhat melodramatic ‘we’re-all-doomed’ discussion on addiction by Telegraph writer Damian Thompson, is the astute observation that a crucial ingredient for addiction is access – and phones are all about access. You can push sweets on the toilet, under the meeting table, in bed, over your lover’s shoulder, even in a real sweet shop. Thompson argues that our evolutionary impulses to seek out rewarding behaviour backfire on us badly in situations where there is no limit to the supply of rewards. He cites the use of gin in 18th-century England, heroin use in Vietnam and sugary foods in modern, Western society, all instances where we are missing a natural ceiling to how much ‘goodness’ we can get and are subsequently going all out in getting far too much for us to handle (Thompson 2013).
By this reckoning, mobile gaming will be off the charts. As of yet, there is evidence that mobile gaming is hugely popular, but little to say that it is, as yet, proving dangerously addictive – two very different things as we will discuss later. At the same time, the reports of people sinking vast quantities of money and time into seemingly cute and innocuous mobile games are slowly trickling in to form a new, bigger picture of gaming addiction (Rogers 2014).
There are a couple of developments in the world of mobile gaming that are particularly cruel in their appeal to potential addicts, namely appointment gameplay and the free-to-play business model. Both of these are already eliciting vast amounts of time and cash from the public and, given the propensity for video games to become the object of addiction, it is important that we make ourselves aware of the potential that this more recent form of gaming has to consume our lives.
Appointment Gameplay
Casual (and thereby most mobile) games typically follow the appointment model of gameplay. This simply means that there is a real-time delay between the action and the reward, the classic example from “Farmville” being that once you have planted your seeds (action), you need to wait a few minutes, sometimes a few hours, before you are able to return and harvest your crops (reward). This style of gameplay is prolific on mobiles and sets up gamers for a new and accessible trap within which they can find themselves addicted.
As with most successful games, the appointment system is anything but ‘instant gratification’. In fact, it is, by design, the opposite. I’ve noticed that you can often spot an academic, non-gamer talking about games by their frequent references to concepts such as ‘instant gratification’ and ‘constant rewards’ – it doesn’t take long playing any successful game (beyond the tutorials which are always full of rewards) to realise that games, certainly at a more dedicated level, are predominantly about failure and denial (Juul 2013). In appointment-based games you are forced to wait; playing “Clash of Clans” I frequently had to wait days, sometimes even weeks for certain rewards to filter through. In addition, you are regularly denied the option to continue playing after you have performed a certain number of other actions, ranging from laughably trivial to downright invasively difficult.
Many people I encountered in the world of game design hate the appointment gaming model with a passion, seeing it as the anathema of good gaming. Much of the hatred is that this withdrawal of gameplay from the user is seen as a move solely designed to force people into choosing between paying and waiting. In my opinion and experience, this model of design is inherently attractive to a certain type of player. Whether there is a payment scheme or not, they are going find considerable enjoyment in this system.
Because appointment dynamics work around brief periods of gameplay followed by longer periods of waiting, it makes an excellent fit with mobile players. When I was designing these types of games our audience was primarily seen to be female, Japanese commuters in their late 30s and early 40s. This demographic was considered to be spending much of their time either travelling through urban environments or working hard in high-powered, demanding and/or oppressive jobs. Appointment gaming on their mobile phones offered them a way to turn the hiatuses in their day into colourful, rewarding bursts of gaming. The knock-on effect being that they could spend the next stretch of work/travelling/meetings covertly looking forward to their next ‘visit’ to the game when they could pick up their rewards. They might feed their baby cow before an important meeting, knowing that by the time said meeting had ended, they could check in to see it fully grown and rewarding them with a pail of milk.
This is a stark example of a form of gameplay that is becoming increasingly common, particularly with the rise of always-on, always-connected portable devices such as tablets and smart phones. Increasingly we are offered a way