The box & the other: Three speculative points on lootboxized culture
What freemium games have in common with Instagram, TikTok and neoliberalism
Abridged version of my part of co-written position paper from Beyond the Gaming conference at Academy of Fine Arts.
Yesterday, I rushed home after work, with a single goal in mind - to finish a timed challenge quests during the last day of Apex Legends seasonal event, to get the last 400 points ot obtain the very last, limited weapon skin, for an assault rifle I don’t necessarily like or use that much (they’ve nerfed it). I made it 8 minutes until the end. Immediately after the Spellbound challenge ended, new one sprung up, with another 5000 points to farm. Such is the nature of games as a service, feedback loop approach to game design as defined by engagement rates.
A few speculative points.
First: lootboxization of media experience. Ever since the first pay-to-win randomized lootboxes appeared in the game Maple Story, their steady march have deeply penetrated the game culture. Much has been written about the obvious parallels between randomized (often cosmetic) boxes and gambling (shoutout Game Study Buddies podcast), the incomputable odds in intricate drop systems of so-called gacha games, and predatory business tactics of newest Diablo Immortal. But these things don’t exist in a vacuum. The randomized experience loop is ever present. Direct RSS feeds were replaced by algorithmically curated selection of content and every time you pull down to refresh in Instagram, you get a new set of maybe finally the coolest posts. TikTok For you (now copied by Twitter) represents the pinnacle of decoupling our content consumption from the outdated logics of consumer-producer relations (following/followers), instead presenting never ending stream of pre-selected videos where each swipe down represents a new chance at something really great. A little roulette akin to Tinder swiping preying on our affinity for what if instinct. Maybe a lot of our media experience - even the game ones - behave this way. Take solo queuing for a multiplayer game like LOL/Dota 2 or battle royale. The odds of getting a great experience are small, most likely you’ll end up frustrated or even better, tilted, a gamer jargon for a state of frustration that one seeks to remedy by just one another game and that one, that will finally be the one (to break losing streak or getting a team full of Russian kids with no teamplay). One godlike games per 10 trashy ones. Roll of a dice with your time. Might as well farm some skins on the side.
Second: we seem to crave the other’s presence even when we don’t need it or, more precisely and without moral judgment, haven’t needed it. Case in point in this new logics of game libidinality - Genshin Impact, open world RPG that is free, but riddled with gacha monetization mechanics. But it is also a laboratory of all the engagement-first practices that we see more and more even in premium titles. Numerous currencies. Daily quests. Daily expeditions. Daily reputation quests. Adventure rank. Experience rank. Exploration rewards. Seasonal quests. Story quests. Daily dungeons. Dungeon cooldown resetting items. And much more I probably missed. Skyrim had one quest log and that was it. Breath of the Wild too. The newest iteration of open world RPG does not need (for the core game experience) any of these polished excel sheets full of incentives presented to players, but nevertheless is absolutely full of them. A paradigm shift. Do we need the oversight or is it beneficial for the sales department of MiHoYo studio behind Genshin Impact? Both, hard to untangle this ouroboroian knot. Before, we bought the CD and played the game on our own terms. If we want to really get the most out of Genshin Impact (most in terms of in-game accumulation), you have to actively keep track of so many systems, make the game the integral part of your everyday life, everyday routine, subjecting yourself to the ever present knowledge of some virtual task, point collection bar, questline, item cooldown, seasonal event. Did we get so used to the neoliberal oversight that we can’t even play anymore without a machine holding its gaze over our waking hours?
Third: In a way it is a perfect neoliberalization of gameplay. Elden Ring was praised for the simplicity of its accumulation model where the currency you get and the things you unlock adhere to the old model of RPG/more general game mechanics. Kill enemies to gather currency and items and buy better items, finish a quest to unlock some new content like areas, endings, storylines. Easy. In Genshin Impact, the open world is overlaid by at least two additional matrices, one of extra-diegetic tasks related mostly to monetization (gacha preys upon collector’s fetish impulse, here represented by cute anime characters) and another of multiple interlocking systems that you can maximize. No single currency (runes as in Elden Ring) to track your progress, economic standing, the career, no (mostly) universal property that (most of) the game content all centers too. Multiplicity is the point, the multiple demands that different systems make, utilizing every aspect of gameplay and the game world. No more gathering to cook in-game meals or craft recipes. Every such activity has an accompanying quest/achievement/explorer feat tied to them. After all, who would do something just like that? Neoliberal drive to monetize and make every part of our life useful and economically profitable runs through the veins of current game mechanics paradigm and other digital worlds where we perform for the algorithms (taking photos of our foods, conferences, artworks, pets, family members, offices and anything and everything) in an effort to raise the number of accumulated likes, the standing on the attention market. Every part of our life and minute of our day is a potential content to be posted and aligned with our outward-facing persona that can land us a better job, new exhibition, new viral TikTok that can make us into an influencer superstar so we can alleviate some of the precariousness of our existence under capitalism (perhaps finally start saving up for a mortgage).
Update: ever sine writing this, I learnt you can level up your in-game battle pass with special edition Monster drinks. How does drinking it compare to buying levels straight for money? What if you add vodka? Tough questions.
I love Cruelty Squad, by the way.