What game is that in? I hadn’t heard that. Christ.
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I don’t really care whether this specific form of evil is realistic; the more immediate problem is that there are people who want it to be. And in particular, the kind of people who want it – not “criminals” or “terrorists”, but the people who our society officially holds in the highest regard, i.e. Wealth Creators.
Because, you know, as long as “inventing new forms of heroin” is a respectable career, that’s going to cause problems. It doesn’t really matter whether this week’s specific new form of heroin is a hit.
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The CEO of Activision promised it’d never be actually implemented in a game, they just wanted it in their patent portfolio. Yeah right. Here’s an article on it.
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Not known to be in any game (yet). Just a patent they filed.
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I have 0 doubt the second they reckon they can get away with it… The XP bar in D2 which lies about what you’re earning while you grind speaks to their overall intent. This is why I went back to D1–they were incompetent fools who couldn’t get balance right, and created a worthwhile ecosystem for achievement despite their best efforts.
Damn you, came here to post exactly this!
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It is useless snake oil, but also a condemnation of how sales weasels think there is a market for this sort of antisocial bile.
I think of it as “this is pure evil from the sales weasels, we’re lucky that it’s just snake oil.”
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A sales presentation with a default google slides theme? Really? For people selling their ability to sell, they’re really phoning it in.
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I like the little note-to-self below that, reminding the author to ask someone with a working knowledge of human beings whether it’s appropriate to make jokes.
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I play a Wizard of Oz puzzle game in the Candy Crush style of wanting to sell you boosts and power ups. (I bought a set once just to give them some money for the free game because I enjoy it quite a lot and wanted to feel like I paid for it.)
Recently the “One hour of infinite lives” has been popping up EXACTLY when I least want it to. Either when I should be getting up out of bed, or just about to go to sleep. Now I’m suspicious if they knew I was in bed and wanted to string me along to play more.
I’ve NEVER gotten the hour of infinite lives when I would actually want to take advantage of it.
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If they’re as competent at their actual business as they apparently are at creating engaging business presentations, we have little to worry about.
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Yeah I think you’re putting too negative a spin on things here boingboing, I heard this app just uses AI to make you a better communicator
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That’s why it’s accepted. You aren’t paying for an advantage, it’s available to everyone and there are ongoing efforts to make sure the game is balanced.
How many people (and mainly kids) keep playing stupid games where you have to keep grinding “crystals”, “gold”, “mana” what not - or buy them with real money? I guess you haven’t seen many mobile games. The entire “freemium” model is based on exactly this - selling you junk to milk you of cash and to make you play more at the same time.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be about selling aimbots or other game-breaking things. Even though even that has been and will be tried again - these mechanisms are rejected by the Western players but are pretty common e.g. in the Korean market.
It is the same as selling drugs to both make money and keep you addicted - it just doesn’t kill you that fast and is (still) legal.
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Uhhh, that’s bad.
I wonder how the author would feel if someone programmed an autonomous car to run them over. AI can’t commit murder, right? I am sure debating the semantic difference whether it was the car or the programmer would be a good way to pass the time while being collected from the tarmac into a body bag … facepalm
You are underestimating human nature. How many people play things like Farmwille or one of the many Zynga games? Which are exactly this - just a way to make you spend more time in the game all the while making it clear that you have to actually open the wallet and buy this or that token or gizmo to be able to meaningfully continue playing …
And 90% of mobile games - the entire “freemium” market, basically.
And a very good example of it. They’re running out of conventional things to monetize.
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Well people already pay for aimbots for all kinds of games, so it’s pretty readily apparent that some people are willing to tolerate it.
The thing about these deep advertising/manipulating systems is that they are going to be subject to the same diminishing returns as every other form of advertising. They can plumb the depths of the human psyche to look for new ways of manipulating people, but sooner or later they’ll stop being effective because people will get used to the attempts at manipulation and they’ll start ignoring it like they do almost all the advertising that hits them.
Sure, there will always be people that are susceptible to these kinds of things, especially the sorts of people who are prone to things like gambling addictions, so this bullshit will probably never completely go away, it just won’t become the norm as people right now believe. There was a time when pop-up ads were considered effective advertising, but people grew to hate them to the point in which they’re almost completely pointless. The industry switched to embedded ads, which resulted in ad blockers. Then they embraced social media and started making ads look like content and content look like ads, then they started using AI tools to make that advertising increasingly targeted.
People are already hitting their tolerance limit on micro-transactions, and that’s why we’re seeing what we’re seeing here. They’re trying to come up with “the next thing,” but each generation of next big thing always dies off, and the length of those generations is getting shorter and shorter. Just look at how long it took for newspaper ads to go from being one of the most effective forms of advertising to one of the least and compare that to how long internet advertising fads last.
It’s not just advertising though, it’s capitalism in general. The fundamental flaw with capitalism is that it presupposes that there are an infinite number of things to monetize–some new invention, or technology, or resource–while simultaneously assigning value to those things through scarcity. So very simply, it depends on there being an infinite number of finite things, which is literally impossible. Because of that, once capitalism hits a certain point, it starts having to subdivide existing things in order to break them into new revenue streams. Microtransactions are a perfect example of that, but so are things like SaaS licensing models–they’re ways of squeezing more money out of existing things because there’s nothing sufficiently new to keep the money flowing. Another example is artificial scarcity, which we see being used all over the place in order to pressure people into making impulse purchases of goods they perceive to be hard to get. How many people do you think saw just one Nintendo Switch or SNES Mini sitting on the shelf at the store and bought it because they knew it was hard to find one? How many stores only put a couple of them on the shelf at any given time to help reinforce that notion?
Another perfect example is cryptocurrency. I’m sure this is far from a popular opinion, but cryptocurrencies exist basically because they a way of creating incorporeal scarcity. Bitcoin isn’t backed by anything, it has no intrinsic value–but it’s got an intrinsic scarcity, and that’s the point. People treat it like it’s a currency, but it’s more like a stock, only unlike a stock it doesn’t represent ownership of anything other than a pattern of bits. I’m not calling into question the potential utility of cryptocurrencies as a whole, but I am pointing out the fact that they are absolutely a symptom of late-stage capitalism just like all of this creepy marketing spy nonsense–we’re running out of commodities so now we’re inventing imaginary ones (like Bitcoin) and making things like body movements into “valuable” information.
Sooner or later though, it all runs out. The power behind all of this AI-backed advertising will probably fade within a decade, and will likely be replaced with other increasingly specific, increasingly creepy technologies until advertising itself becomes a useless endeavor.
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