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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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It wasn't like a switch got flipped, no one would keep playing.
They'd make a tiny segment super hard so you'd have to drop a couple bucks to get past it. Go back to easy for a little. Then hit another hard part.
It's basically the whole reason for boss fights.
Once games started developing storylines, plots, etc. it was like that. It was an intentional strategy developed to keep you playing. But early developers weren't thinking that far ahead. The idea was to give you a couple of easy levels so you feel you got your 5 minutes worth of entertainment worth, then start punishing you at level 3 or 4 so you'd lose and the next person would play.
And some were made by simple oversight. Space invaders' increasing difficulty was solely the result of hardware limitations of the time that just happened to result in the exact difficulty spikes they were looking for. As a programmer, I could, for example, set level 1 vs. an opponent that was slow as festering dog shit, but be lazy and just double his speed with every level. As long as the player's speed stays the same, it would become nearly impossible to win in a couple of levels.
Either way, the results were the same: 25 cents for about 5 minutes worth of entertainment. That was the goal of the day. As you mentioned, they fine tuned it by the mid 80s with games like Mario and the like. but those early games were meant to get you off the cabinet as quickly as possible so soneone else could pop in their quarter.
Exactly, and long term people would stop playing because they always get stuck about the same time.
It's like how humans respond to rewards, a steady consistent reward is kind of motivating, it's why we go to work in the morning
But what works a shit ton better is sporadic rewards that have a tiny tiny chance of paying off.
That's why people get addicted to slot machines and not working at McDonald's. If a slot machine paid out 75 cents for every dollar everytime, no one would play.
Have them win $7.50 every tenth time they put a dollar in tho, and people will flush their entire lives away chasing that 1/10 of a time they "win".
So if you really want to exploit gamers, you can't steadily increase difficulty. Linearly or exponentially, it doesn't matter. To hook people they need those "wins" and they'll keep dropping quarters or spinning loot boxes.
In coin operated video games, that's when things get easy
A better example with Space Invaders is once they beat a level, they get to the next one and it's slow again due to the amount of enemies on the screen. Letting the player get that easy time again hooks them. If the next level they were all as fast as the last one from last level, it wouldn't have been as addictive