Came across this in the middle of a long article on Garfield (who's the creator of Magic: The Gathering). He wrote it on Facebook, so while I posted the link, you have to have an account to read it, so I've transcribed it¹ below. It's from 2016, but it still seems pretty current.

Everything that follows is Garfield's essay

Manifesto: a written statement that describes the policies, goals, and opinions of a person or group

I believe that in recent years, while looking for revenue models that work for electronic games, game designers and publishers have stumbled upon some formulae that work only because they abuse segments of their player population. Games can have addictive properties – and these abusive games are created – intentionally or not – to exploit players who are subject to certain addictive behavior.

One reason it has been possible for this to happen is that the resulting product is inexpensive, or free for most players, since most of the burden of cost has been put upon the players who become addicted to the game.

I am going to refer to these games as skinnerware. Skinnerware has a large overlap with freemium games, but not all freemium games are skinnerware, and skinnerware exists that isn’t freemium.

The distinguishing feature of skinnerware is that purchases are set up to trigger an addictive response in vulnerable players, and they are open ended in nature – the players can pay an essentially unlimited amount to get the reward they are after. Not all people are vulnerable to skinnerware, though they will probably be more susceptible at difficult times in their lives. This describes slot machines as well – but outside gambling games, companies being able to set up a direct conduit from an addict’s bank account are pretty rare before this era.

There are two key elements to a payment system that will make me suspicious that a game is skinnerware:

This is not a hypothetical problem. It is well known in the industry how most of the money from successful freemium games is generated by ‘whales’. Without naming anyone – I have talked to employees who tracked down some of these whales for their company. Who were the players that were spending tens of thousands of dollars because they couldn’t wait for their energy bar to recharge – or they needed more power ups? It was people who couldn’t afford to be spending that sort of money, often people on fixed income. My understanding is that – to the company’s credit – they understood this was not right and looked into ways to mitigate it. Fixing it is a daunting task, however, because without these players the games would generally be considered failures – and shifting the burden to non-addicted players is tough since they can more easily switch games than an addicted player.

Some people I have shared this story with have wondered how many players are unable to afford the games they are hooked on – as if this were a measure of how bad the situation is. This is not only about those players who can’t afford it – that is just the easiest place to see a problem. A gambling addict doesn’t suddenly acquire the problem when they run out of money. Skinnerware can generally be played for free if one has patience, or is willing to switch to a different, nearly identical game. I believe that nearly every whale is being abused regardless of whether or not they can afford what they are paying.

There are two reasons I can think of that we, as game players, should be concerned about this:

It is wrong. Imagine a world where bars don’t charge for the first two drinks a day but charge crazy fees for subsequent drinks. This would be using a sickness, alcoholism, to subsidize moderate drinking for everyone else. Distributing the cost more equitably doesn’t cure alcoholism, but it does probably reduce it since less people would put themselves in a position to be exploited. Also, if they are afflicted, they are not also immediately financially crippled.

It will lead to worse games. Ultimately games are designed for the people who are paying for them. Design decisions that make the game reach more addictive players, or exploit existing players a little more will be considered even if they make the game play a little worse. When they are used successfully they will encourage more such changes. Will this lead to a world where all games are like slot machines – Skinner boxes designed to maximize addictive behavior? Probably not entirely – though I think games are looking more and more like that. Games rely too much on a social network of players to entirely drive out all the non-addictive players. But the design certainly won’t be optimal for those remaining non-addictive players – we can expect the design to only be ‘good enough’.

If you are playing a game for next to nothing – or free – and you find out people are spending thousands, or tens of thousands, or in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars – there may be a problem. When talking to people in the industry who accept this practice I often hear something along the lines of “People spend what it is worth to them”. The more I think about this tautological definition of value the less I am satisfied with it. I invite you to do the unpopular thing of trying to judge the value of something without leaning on this tautology. If you hear someone has spent $10,000 on a Match-3 game, for example, is that really the value to them or is something else going on? Personally, I believe in almost every case it is a publisher that has created an addict and then managed to stand between them and their addiction in an ongoing manner.

I want to emphasize:

Paying for games is OK: Games cost money to make and if they are worth playing the community of players should be paying for them.

Free play is OK: There have always been players who play for free. This is deeply entrenched in the paper industry – for example – where generally only one of your friends has to have a particular game. Some portion of the free players go on to promote, purchase, or just provide community for the paying player.

A publisher can and should be able to charge whatever they like: If a publisher wants to charge $1000 for the game they can go right ahead – it just shouldn’t be structured to prey only on people with compulsive disorders or who are at a vulnerable time in their life.

One possible solution for publishers who claim their games don’t rely on exposing addictive personalities to open ended spending, or who wish to end it, is to put a cap on player expenditure – after which a player “gets everything.” This could be a one-time cap or a monthly cap – and it could be set wherever the publisher wants provided it is visible to the player.

With this in place we as players could more easily see what is going on. We would know that a Match-3 game with a cap of $30 was likely less abusive than one that set a cap at $3000 a month.

A company like Apple enforcing a visible cap could really limit exploitation of addiction.

There are many things these days which players might find themselves in a position to pay for within a game. It is often easy by their nature to determine which are likely to be abusive.

Power Ups in a Single Player Game: There is no reason for the sale of power ups in a single player game except for its effectiveness in exploiting addictive personalities. Players get a rush when they complete levels of a game, and then the levels become more difficult and to recreate that hit the player must spend money, or wait a very long time. For non-addictive players buying power ups doesn’t even make sense, in general it would be undermining the very reason they are playing – for a challenge or to get into a meditative state.

Energy Bar: One should always be wary when a game says you can’t play for a little while. Saying you can’t play until you pay – perhaps by watching an ad – makes sense. To just wait is breaking the usual pact between a game publisher and its free players – who are helping the game in ways other than just spending money. No one profits from the player being forced to stop playing for a little while. It is structured this way only to set up an addictive cycle for players susceptible to that behavior. Some developers have claimed that their energy bar is there because the game is intended to be played in short bursts. If this is true why do they allow players to pay to get more play time? Shouldn’t the people paying get the intended experience?

Speed Ups: Many games will charge money to make something happen faster – like completing the construction of a building. This can be considered similar to an energy bar – it is structured to delay gratification for players and if the player has the correct addictive personality and has been primed in the correct way – they will pay again and again for that hit.

Cosmetics: Cosmetic items are items that are not a part of the underlying game. These in some ways fall out of my regular metrics for identifying abuse. I think it is possible to have a game that has ‘fashion’ which is fairly open ended and not abusive. Usually I use my own sense of what the value of the game element is to guide what my understanding of the level of abuse – but cosmetics are different. Some game players are going to value the cosmetics more than others, while all game players share at least rudimentary idea of the value of something like a power up. For that reason you can have a pricey cosmetic system in a game which has a high value to some percentage of a game playing population and no value to another without necessarily being an abuse. Of course, the way cosmetic items are delivered can itself be a separate game which is exploitive of addictive behavior. A slot machine a player pays for which gives random cosmetics has more of a chance of being abusive than random prizes while playing or a simple store.

Advantage in Multiplayer Games: Paying for things that give an advantage in a competitive game is something that I believe can be done in a way that is not abusive – but one has to be careful. At its worst – it clearly has the potential to fall into a cycle that is abusive to the addictive player. If a player gets a positive feeling from “growing in power” and can pay for that experience with no endpoint in sight they can fall into a bad addictive cycle.

Incidentally – it is the multiplayer games with power purchase that reach the $100K+ player payments I mentioned above, so I would classify this as the most dangerous revenue model to the vulnerable player.

Power Ups: It is hard to imagine a competitive game selling disposable power ups not being abusive to an addictive player.

Leveling: Many games allow the players to level their characters or their tools. Technically I believe this could be done in a non-exploitive way, if the cost to level weren’t open ended (or progressively more expensive making them effectively open ended). For example, if free players had a 10% disadvantage to paying players and a player could only pay one time to level – that would be a capped and probably well distributed cost to the community. In practice, leveling in a multiplayer game appears to be almost always effectively open ended and positioned to exploit addictive players.

Access to Tools: Paying for cards or characters feels like it is the opposite of leveling – in the sense that technically it can be exploitive but in practice often has an effective cap which is reached when a player gets all the cards or characters they feel they need to compete. If one wanted to create an exploitive game in this area one could make an essentially endless string of cards with bigger numbers – but – games like Hearthstone, or League of Legends, have a limited number of cards and characters that are kept in some semblance of balance. As best as I can tell in these games competitive players generally spend hundreds of dollars on a regular basis – which might be pricey to some but it is not open ended and seems to be pretty well understood by the players. Payment beyond this point serves no in game function – you can only buy so much power and then you are in a fair game.

In general, if players can always pay to give themselves an advantage over other players there is an abusive open ended loop being created. If there is a fixed expenditure beyond which another player can’t out-buy you – that is more like a buy-in to the top level game.

I believe it is time to send a message to game designers and publishers. As a game player I will not play or promote games that I believe are subsidizing free or inexpensive play with exploitation of addictive players. As a game designer I will no longer work with publishers that are trying to make my designs into skinnerware.

If other people joined me what could we accomplish? Unfortunately – that is not clear. Since most of us are not the target of skinnerware, we provide little if any money to the companies that produce it, and boycotting a service you don’t pay for has no clear purpose. Where we might be able to make a difference is the social acceptance of these games. The more friends casually recommend them to each other, the more parents allow their children to be programmed by these manipulative tools, the easier time the publishers will have finding their ‘whales’. Our condemnation could also lend strength to the voices within the industry that want to see things done differently.

Ultimately I don’t think skinnerware as a business can be killed but perhaps it can be limited. We may not be the victims of this disease but we don’t have to be a vector.