Gaming

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From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

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Not counting games that were unfun because of bugs, what’s the most unfun video game that you’ve played and what made it unfun? (kbin.cafe)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's a big question though

What's the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and "normal" gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?

Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?

Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.

Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game... Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more "proper", games?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.

A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player's time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.