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Showing posts with label Online gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Online gaming. Show all posts

Sunday 14 August 2016

The tyranny of Pokemon Go, more addictive than other games


It's repetitive. The 'game play' is puerile. But it does cast a spell on players.


Malaysia, a plague has just arrived in your land and, if the rest of the world is any indication, it will infect every corner of your society. I’m talking of course about the infectious tyranny that is Pokemon Go. Really.

This is a game with very little in actual game play. You throw Pokeballs at Pokemon that spawn seemingly all over your neighbourhood, on your friends, and even in your own home. You capture them to fight other Pokemon, then you wash, rinse, repeat.

The battle aspect comes down to swiping right and tapping your screen a bunch of times. It’s not exactly the most nuanced or skilled or even fun game play in the world but yet, Pokemon Go has taken over the world.

I didn’t quite understand it until it arrived in Hong Kong, but suddenly on the street people were face down in their phones even more so than usual. And whenever I snuck a look there was a little critter bouncing around on their screens that they were trying to capture by tossing Pokeballs at it.

Silly. Ridiculous. So of course, yours truly had to try it.

And of course, yours truly got addicted just like everyone else.

Really, the game should be called Pokecrack or something a little more indicative of its addictive nature. Walking the dog at night, I seek out the local gyms – Pokemon Go locations where you can train or battle other Pokemon, but only at certain locations in the city – see, that’s why it’s got the “Go” in its name, this isn’t a game you can play from home – and at all these locations, even at midnight, I find people milling around in their pyjamas outside, with their faces stuck to their phones. Me included.

I went to a bar to meet a friend the other day and of course we started hunting Pokemon while there, which quite a few others were already doing. On the way out to the pay the bill the barkeep invited us back on Saturday because they would be “buying lures all day to attract more Pokemon”. Yes, Pokemon is now a way to attract people to your business.

Pikachu, I choose you.

But why is this game so addictive? I just said the game play was infantile. So simple that it boggles the mind. And it is. But everything in Pokemon Go centres on the rewards of new and exotic Pokemon and levelling up.

Basically it’s a game that hinges on the Random Reward Schedule.

The Random Reward Schedule is a tenet of behavioural psychology. It’s a form of reinforcement. Reinforcement, of course, “strengthens an organism’s future behaviour whenever that behaviour is preceded by a specific antecedent stimulus”. That’s a mouthful.

Basically, what it’s saying is that you will continue to do a thing if you get positive feedback.

This all goes back to the research of B.F. Skinner, who noted that the variable reward schedule or the random reward schedule resulted in the most compulsive and addictive behaviour in mice. Basically, mice were trained to press a lever that would dispense treats.

The mice that were rewarded with a treat every time were less inclined to keep pressing the lever, than the mice that were rewarded with a large treat at random intervals. The idea being that when a mouse thinks there could be a nice reward just around the corner, it will keep performing the same action.

The same goes for humans.

In Pokemon Go you’re constantly checking for Pokemon appearing in your vicinity. Most times they are common ones like Pidgeys or Caterpies, but every once in a while, you find something exciting like a Vaporean or an Electabuzz. And yes, I know how nerdy this sounds right now. Those rare and exotic Pokemon are just like large treats to a mouse.

The random reward schedule is linked to the Hook Model which is a technique employed by social media and mobile game designers and, of course the designers of Pokemon Go. Its mission – the name gives it away – is to hook you.

It goes beyond simple reinforcement of behaviour; it’s all about creating habits so that we’ll continue doing something the designers want us to do. In this case, it’s to continue searching for Pokemon and hopefully spend a few of our hard-earned dollars for gear that will help us do just that.

Pokemon Go also employs another aspect of the model, and that is our need to hunt. In the evolutionary sense, we are hunters, hunting for food in the wild. Pokemon Go employs a tracking system to find those rare and exotic Pokemon so that we are literally hunting down little virtual critters. All. Day. Long.

But we’re not hunting for sustenance, now we’re just hunting for the sake of hunting. Our genetic urges are misfiring all over Pokemon Go.

And knowing that I’m being manipulated on the most fundamental level by this game, I’m still checking my phone periodically to see if any rare Pokemon have showed up. And it’s not even fun.

So what to do, now that Pokemon Go has come for … to us? It really depends. It does make you walk more, and it can make your daily commutes a little more enjoyable (depending on your definition of enjoyable) – but if you don’t like having your face stuck in your phone, then you’re better off treating Pokemon Go like drugs, and not even trying it.

 By Jason Godfrey -

Catch Jason Godfrey on The LINK on Life Inspired HD (Astro Ch 728).

More addictive than other games


CATCHING virtual critters on Pokémon GO has a tendency to be more addictive than other online games.

Experts say the risk of being addicted to the highly-popular game is increased because it is a feast for the senses.

This is especially since it is an augmented reality game, which requires players to have a live direct or indirect view of their physical surroundings.

“The risk of addiction is increased as there are multiple sensory bombardments that sustain playing Pokémon GO.

“Such sensory bombardments are continuous, leading to pleasure and satisfaction highs once players level up in the game and are motivated to continue,” explains Universiti Sains Malaysia criminologist and psychologist Dr Geshina Ayu Mat Saat.

She says this can be dangerous as it makes individuals dependent on the game for pleasure or happiness and some people may confuse the two.

“It could also lead to despair when the game is concluded, when they experience problems, or when a level objective could not be met.

“These are similar responses that an addict experiences. Normal functioning is disrupted, the least being in terms of sleeping and eating patterns,” Dr Geshina says.

Other aspects that could be affected are family interaction, work-life balance, carrying out responsibilities and daily tasks.

Dr Geshina finds that there are pros and cons to playing the game.

“On one hand, players will get more physical exercise, apply problem-solving skills, and have some social interaction when they meet other players in real life,” she says.

But on the other hand, too much focus on their phones may narrow their perception, leading to selective attention on the immediate environment to fulfil the needs of the game rather than a genuine appreciation of the outdoors.

“Social interaction may be limited to brusque questions of where the characters are, rather than polite or pleasant queries to initiate meaningful conversation,” says Dr Geshina.

She also notes that there is also a possibility that players, especially children, will be unable to separate between reality and the game as it blurs the lines and makes players a living game avatar.

Malaysian Mental Health Association deputy president and consultant psychiatrist Datuk Dr Andrew Mohanraj Chandrasekaran says people are generally eager to embrace new technology and will surely warm up to augmented reality games like Pokémon GO.

Describing the game as “taking it one step further”, he says one positive point of the game is that it can motivate people to get out more and connect with others with common interests.

“This is particularly relevant to people with introverted personalities and those suffering from depression.”

Dr Andrew, however, points out that the game can be a double-edged sword and could also work negatively in making people more engrossed in their phones.

“Ultimately, technology must be embraced for the right purpose – be it for recreational, therapeutic or competitive purposes.

“Technology can also be harmful, destroy interpersonal relationship, affect social cohesion, blur the lines between appropriate and inappropriate behaviour and cause confusion between reality and the virtual world.

“Knowing how to embrace technology in a balanced manner is the answer,” he says.

Sources:  The Star/Asia News Network

Sunday 21 April 2013

Life like video games?

Video games may be considered adolescent, but imagine if our lives were like video games where you constantly get rewarded for small accomplishments? Great, no?

ALWAYS looking to validate my gaming addiction, I checked out TED talks – everyone’s go-to source for out-of-the-box, forward-thinking smart talk to drop at dinner parties – to see if I could find any ammunition.

As usual TED talks didn’t disappoint.

A speaker named Jane McGonigal, an American game designer (and a woman as well, meaning she gets her choice of gaming geeks), not only argues that video games are good, but goes as far as to advocate spending more hours playing video games because that will make the world a better place.

That’s definitely an argument that I can get behind.

McGonigal argues that games like World Of Warcraft encourage users to tackle seemingly insurmountable tasks, and not only do players accept these epic mission but they work hard to achieve it. She then hits us with the crazy-sounding stat that collectively we have (some of us more than others) spent 5.93 million years playing World Of Warcraft.

Did you know that homo sapiens have spent a total of 5.93 million years alone playing World of Warcraft? Makes you wonder what Darwin would have thought of this feat

McGonigal then puts that in perspective by saying 5.93 million years ago, humans stood on two legs for the first time.

Playing video games for the same amount of time that it takes a species of primate to go from dwelling in trees and dining on insects to building metal mega-cities and flirting with space travel really does put things into perspective. Yeah, suddenly that seems like a heck of a lot of wasted time on gaming.

But McGonigal is undaunted, saying the amount of time a person spends on video games by the time they are 20 years old is 10,000 hours, the same amount of time that that person will have spent in school – and also, incidentally, the same amount of time author Malcolm Gladwell cites as necessary for someone to become really good at something. To quote rapper Macklemore, who was basically quoting Gladwell, “The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint; the greats were great because they painted a lot.”

Well, McGonigal is saying we’re playing a lot of games, but what is it exactly that we’re getting good at?

She’s not quite sure but she knows gamers are Super Empowered Hopeful Individuals. Yeah, SEHI is the acronym for that. That doesn’t really roll off the tongue.

She then goes on to conclude, somewhat uninspiringly, that if we could only create educational games we could start to harness some of the millions of years we’ve wasted on games.

Yeah. Except McGonigal forgot that educational games are pretty much terrible across the board.

It may seem like I’m denigrating McGonigal’s talk but what I really found interesting was the idea that we are in a period of mass exodus into gaming. There are 500 million gamers in the world, and this number is only growing.

McGonigal talks a bit on why games are so inviting, basically saying that it’s because reality sucks. She’s right.

In games, at any moment you could gain any number of seemingly random achievements.

Your characters can gain in skills any time. Maybe you’re attacking zombies, and suddenly get a +1 strength. Jumping over barrels, +1 agility. Read a science book, +1 science. Basically video games give us a ton of positive feedback. What if life was like that, McGonigal quips. The crowd laughs.

But seriously, what if life was like that?

What if when I submitted this article, I received the 60th Article Submitted but only 4th prior to the Official Deadline Achievement? What if we could get the Constant Bus Rider achievement for taking the bus for the 100th time? What if at work we didn’t get rewarded for huge seemingly unachievable goals but for small daily completed tasks?

Wouldn’t it feel great to field a call from an irate customer, hang up, and get the 50th Complainer Customer Achievement? At least it’d put a positive spin on an experience that is otherwise fairly unpleasant.

With smartphones and their ability to track our movements and activities, it’s not very far-fetched to think that this sort of reward system could become possible sometime in the near future, while employers would probably be able to implement some sort of reward system right now. Not that I want this kind of reward system to be used by corporations to manipulate people into work, but it’s sort of inevitable, isn’t it?

It works so well in video games to hook people.

The entire idea of “gamifying” life may sound nuts but if we’ve spent 5.93 million years playing video games, games are doing something right. Maybe it’s time for life to imitate art.

And if this idea sounds like something that would come from a Super Empowered Hopeful Individual, then maybe McGonigal is on to something.

Big Smile No Teeth
By JASON GODFREY
> Jason Godfrey can be seen hosting The Link on Life Inspired (Astro B.yond Ch 728). Write to him at star2@thestar.com.my.

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Monday 18 February 2013

Malaysia's MOL (Money Online) going big globally, aims for US$1bil revenue


GANESH Kumar Bangah turned 23 in true techpreneur style. He listed a company, entered the Malaysian Book of Records as the youngest chief executive officer of a public-listed company, and pocketed his first RM1mil.

That was in 2002. Just a few years earlier, he had merely been an ambitious engineering undergraduate. He had been managing cybercafs and peddling a proprietary cybercaf management system, having developed it with a business partner.

“We started out selling the software but decided during the dotcom bubble to give it away for free in return for control of the first screen that people viewed so we could offer eyeballs,” Bangah recounts. Their plan was to sell advertising space on that prime landing page.

Call it guts or luck, he even got Vincent Tan, founder of the Berjaya Corp conglomerate and one of Malaysia's richest men, to bankroll his little start-up called Money Online or MOL. “Tan was one of the early movers who recognised the potential of the Internet and was investing in businesses in the industry, ” says Bangah.

With a financial backer onboard, Bangah dropped out of university to focus on the business. Within a year, he had signed up 15,000 cybercafs from around the world. It should have been a shoo-in success, but monetising the Internet in Asia in the early 2000s was not easy.

Internet penetration in Malaysia at the time was just 15% of the total population, a mere 3.7 million. And in pre-Google AdWords days, online advertising was a tough idea to sell.

So Bangah switched his focus to the online payment business instead. Rather than give the software away for free, the cybercafs were asked to pre-buy a certain amount of MOLPoints, which they could resell to their customers. These points could be used to transact safely online.

Unfortunately, e-commerce was just catching on, and consumers still preferred the comfort and certainty of shopping the bricks-and-mortar way. Bangah decided if there wasn't a market for his points, he would create a demand for them by selling prepaid airtime reload coupons online and making it a currency of choice for online gaming.

“There was a game from (South) Korea that was very popular with gamers at the cybercafs. It was free to play but I had a hunch they would soon start charging,” he recalls. “So I went to the game publisher and secured the exclusive rights for the game in South-East Asia.”

It was an astute call that gave Bangah his much-needed break and set MOL on course to being one of Asia's largest end-to-end content, distribution, e-commerce and payment networks today. His MOL Global group comprises MOLPoints, an Internet wallet for purchasing game credits, content and services; MOLReload, which facilitates the distribution of prepaid airtime; and MOLPay, an e-commerce payment solution gateway.

Online gaming remains his sweet spot with sale of MOLPoints, predominantly for gaming credits, accounting for more than 80% of profits. “We control about 70% of the market in Malaysia and about 40% of the region,” says Bangah. He estimates that MOL is also among the top five leaders in the game payment industry globally.

“MOLPay is our fastest growing business even though it accounts for only 20% of revenue now,” he says.

MOL handles over 60 million transactions annually with a payment volume of over US$500mil (RM1.55bil). This strength comes from having a complete payment universe: Content and distribution channels plus online and offline payment options.

“In the case of online gaming and content, it is a chicken-and-egg situation. Content partners will sign up with you only if you have channels, and channel partners will do so if you have content. So our success comes from having both,” Bangah explains.

It is a position he continues to strengthen by continually signing up new content publishers, which at last count, stand at over 500.

This is complemented by MOL's links with more than 1,000 payment partners worldwide. These comprise over 680,000 physical retail payment channels across 80 countries, 88 online banks in nine countries, and major international payment systems.

In 2009, Bangah scored another coup when MOL acquired Friendster for an undisclosed amount. While the pioneer social networking site may have lost much of its luster with the entry of Facebook, MySpace and other similar sites, it still had a huge Asian following of over 100 million members.

Bangah is quick to clarify that buying Friendster was not about mounting a challenge against Facebook. “Friendster is a global brand while MOL was then primarily a Malaysian brand. Owning it has helped the MOL branding and opened doors for us to big players,” he says.

“We also bought it for its community. We thought that if we could convert 1% to 2% of Friendster's members into MOL members, it would be quite substantial. And we have done that our membership now stands at two million.”

Then, of course, there were the patents Friendster owned, which MOL subsequently sold to Facebook in a cash-plus-stocks deal, reportedly valued at US$40mil. Bangah declines to comment on this citing a non-disclosure agreement.

Bangah has since turned Friendster into an online social gaming and discovery portal, a move that hopes to build up MOL's revenue from online gaming.

Since the acquisition of Friendster, that revenue has already tripled.

Now his plan is to go global with MOL. Having built strong footholds in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, the group is expanding into Vietnam, Turkey, the United States, Brazil and Australia.

The last two years saw the group buying several online content distributors and payment service providers to realise this ambition: Zest Interactive in Thailand; LoadCentral in the Philippines; Ocash in Australia; and Rixty in the United States.

As far as Bangah is concerned, he has barely skimmed the surface. His target is to become a company with US$1bil in revenue.

“As long as online gaming grows, we in the platform business will grow.” - China Daily  By ELAINE TAN