The Psychology Argument Is Dishonest. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, October 18, 2019, 18:31 (1652 days ago) @ cheapLEY
edited by Ragashingo, Friday, October 18, 2019, 18:42

You can argue about people needing better impulse control all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that these practices are predatory and literally designed to exploit those types of people. They hired literal psychologists to help design this shit. It’s design is not accidental. The fact that anyone would defend it as fine because they’re just a business trying to make money and people should be more responsible is honestly as troubling as the store’s issues are.

Are you referring to "Bungie Used Behavioral Psychology to Make Destiny Appealing" from 2015 or something else?

Because I can't find anything related to Eververse or an online store in there. It's all about making a game that players will want to play. And it's hardly as nefarious as you and a few others have made it out to be...

One of the key quotes is this:

What is being offered here is not a blueprint for perfect games, it is a primer to some of the basic ways people react to different patterns of rewards. Every computer game is implicitly asking its players to react in certain ways. Psychology can offer a framework and a vocabulary for understanding what we are already telling our players.

That is, games already had motivations and drawbacks long before Bungie hired someone to write them a paper and long before they implemented some buttons in play tests for players to let them know which parts of the game they liked and didn't like.

I'd kinda forgotten about this and was sorta taking it at face value that the psychology argument was valid. Now, having read through all of this again, I think your psychology argument is crap in general, and it specifically had nothing to do with Eververse in the first place.