I love video games. I have since the first time I dug out my dad’s old Atari 2600 and played space invaders. I probably wouldn’t have had the career I do now if not for video games. In fact, I will sometimes tell this story at job interviews, because of how important it was for the trajectory of my career. Sometime in the mid-1990s I saw a friend running Doom on their 386 and it was over. We’d had an NES and I saved up and bought a SEGA Gensis, but consoles couldn’t do ANYTHIING as cool as what I’d just seen in Doom. This led to me begging my parents to get a new computer. We had an IBM clone 8088 from the mid-1980s that could do some light word processing and play the very first versions of Where in the USA is Carmen San Diego, but it couldn’t run Doom. What pushed it over the edge was my father got addicted to using the Internet at work and he wanted to be able to use that at home on the weekends. So, Christmas of 1996 we finally got a modern PC plus an account with a local ISP and an Internet connection running at 33.6 Bps. I’d spent the next three years tinkering with and upgrading that PC to run all kinds of games from Doom, to Quake, to Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, the latter of which would introduce me to the world of multiplayer games online via the MS Internet Gaming Zone. This was a VERY different time to be online. We didn’t have voice chat. Pretty much anyone could be behind a screenname. Games were also VERY different. Outside of the PC, games didn’t get any updates or patches. When 1.0 shipped that was it forever because that was the ROM that got burned onto a cartridge. Most games were linear and action oriented, with some exceptions like the Lucas Arts and Sierra puzzle/adventure games that owed a strong lineage to text adventures like Zork. I built my first PC as I got ready to leave for college. It was a pretty good gaming PC and I skipped way too much class playing games. But it also led me to become somewhat obsessed with PC hardware and software. I eventually landed a job working in the computer lab and after I graduated those skills translated to a job working on the help desk for a healthcare company.
The Dark Forest Part 3: Video Games have Changed
I have a one-year-old son and I’ve been thinking about how his experience of video games will be very different from mine. Not to be all old man shaking fist at cloud, but I am not convinced this difference will be a good thing. Why? Because video games have changed radically thanks to shifting economic forces that have led to squeezing profits out of games in a way that has fundamentally reshaped the way they are made and the way that they are played. Video games, unfortunately, are as much a part of the Dark Forest and as other type of modern technology.
I think it started 19 years ago when Bethesda introduced the first paid downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. PC games traditionally had been very open and easily modified by the community of players. Bethesda had a business idea, though, to offer a purely cosmetic item for your in-game horse for $3. They saw it as a potential revenue stream on top of the purchase price of the game. The community laughed at them and moved on, but the handwriting was on the wall. From that point forward games became harder to modify, with exceptions, and more and more content was gated behind the downloadable content pay wall. Most of the time the DLC was cosmetic or maybe added a new level to the game, although several massively multiple player games would offer huge expansions that were almost a whole game’s worth of content by themselves. Overtime this wasn’t enough, and it evolved into “loot boxes” which meant you paid money for the opportunity to spin a digital wheel and HOPE that you got the item you had wanted. This essentially amounts to gambling and children can do it. Some European countries and China have recognized it as gambling and banned the practice. With the rise of mobile gaming on smart phones we then started to get “Gacha” games coming over from Japan. This style of game combined loot boxes with live services to entice people to keep playing. But the most recent evolution has been the movement towards the “Forever” game or as I like to call them, Games as a Service (GaaS). This combined all the addictive properties of loot boxes, live services, “freemium” and the subscription fees model to keep people trapped in a persistent treadmill that becomes extremely difficult to get off of. The whole idea of the Forever games is that you won’t need to ever play anything else. Fortnite and Robolox are examples of these Forever games, and they are squarely aimed at children. From the business perspective, the goal is recurring revenue by entrenching your player base so they never stop playing. Why sell a game once when you can sell it once and then extract more profit from the buyer in the form of a never-ending revolving door of new content of questionable value? Some developers have even resorted to the use of so called “dark patterns” which is a method for manipulating the player into do something they may not willingly otherwise do and that may be against their best interests. They exploit cognitive bias to drive user engagement and retain attention. These strategies are starting to draw the attention of Federal Regulators. In 2023 the FTC required Epic, the maker of Fortnite, to pay $245 million to consumer to settle charges they used dark patterns to manipulate children into making purchases in the game.* Unfortunately most game developers are seemingly prowling around the Dark Forest, like most other companies, looking for someone to devour.
So what do we do? The simplest answer is don’t let your kids play video games. But like most things in life, the simplest answer is often the incorrect one. The right answers are usually hard ones that come at the cost of the investment of our time and effort. In this case I think it we must meaningfully engage with our kids and video games. Although I do think a good first step is not to let our kids have access to freemium model or GaaS style games like Roblox and Fortnite. This is going to be incredibly difficult due to their popularity. But Minecraft is equally as popular and doesn’t have to be nearly as exploitative. The next step is to learn about games, if you aren’t a gamer. In the old days kids would just ask for a game for holiday or birthday gift, and we would buy it without a thought. Now you need to spend time researching a game and engaging with your kids to understand why they are interested in it. You may need to find a way to redirect them to a game that’s more appropriate, but you can’t do that without know what to redirect them to. Also, go old school. The platformers we grew up with like Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog are still good games but have also given birth to successive generations of platformers that are just as amazing. Games like Fez, Celeste, and Shovel Knight, mix puzzle and problem solving with jumping and moving. Celeste is especially good because it offers lots of options for tuning the difficulty and accessibility options. If you really want to play it safe, Nintendo is still incredibly popular and always a safe option. They have largely resisted the move towards freemium, GaaS and microtransactions. They do lock their library of classic games behind a subscription service, which is a bummer. They are also adding voice and video support for their latest console/handheld the Switch 2, so that will require more monitoring. Gaming on smartphones and tablets in largely a very different animal. I honestly just stay away from that all together. However, Apple Arcade is a great subscription service that offers a lot of games without the distraction of ads. The games on the service usually aren’t the type to keep you on a treadmill, but still do your research. Finally, don’t give in to moral panics. There is a long tradition of blaming games for societal or behavior problems. It’s a simple answer, which, in this case, means it’s wrong. Things like the Dungeons and Dragons** moral panic of my childhood or the rush to blame violent games for school shootings have no basis in fact.*** Don’t form your opinions about video games based on a Facebook post made by crunchy Karen down the street. But seriously, why is anyone even still on Facebook? Well, I guess you could get some cheap used game on Marketplace.
If you want to go deeper on this topic or are just looking for a good resource, the longtime games journalist Patrick Klepek has an excellent newsletter/blog called Crossplay where he is entirely devoted to the subject of kids and games. It’s linked below and I highly recommend it.
If you want to catch up on my Dark Forest series, you can find them here and here.
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