dice

Why Is Everyone Losing Their Minds Over Loot Crates?

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Bank 1238322 1920 Why Is Everyone Losing Their Minds Over Loot Crates

If you had not noticed, loot crates have been making some waves in the gaming world of late. Bonus containers awarded at the end of a game, these boxes deliver mystery rewards to the player when they finish. Most games use them to give the player “vanity” items, such as new clothes or gestures, but some use them in less welcome ways.

Recently EA and DICE drew serious hear from gamers when it transpired that all progression in Battlefront 2, the latest Star Wars blockbuster game, was managed through loot crates. At the end of each game, the player would “randomly” be rewarded with items and scrap in a loot crate. Scrap could be used to purchase new upgrades, whilst other items and heroes are bought with the in-game credit currency. This currency is awarded to the player through hours of play and through loot crates. A third type of currency can be purchased directly with cash, which can then be converted to loot crates. Get that? Basically, you can hope that luck brings you new items, time brings you more money or you can just buy stuff with real money.

There are a few places where people start to get a bit upset. The first is the amount of time it would originally have taken to unlock heroes by playing the game straight. One Redditor estimated the average player would take about 40 hours to unlock Luke or Vader.

The next bit is a little more complex. Gambling. You see, buying a loot crate does not guarantee that you get what you want, the content is random. The gambling commision in the UK and several other EU states and Hawaii are now investigating if this constitutes real gambling or not. Pay money, randomly get a reward that may or may not be valuable. The argument is that you always get a reward, even if it is not worth much – so is therefore not gambling, but not everyone is convinced.

Another issue is that many feel paying £50 or more should entitle you to the whole game and a fair chance of winning. Whilst it may be common in free to play games on mobile devices, they cost nothing up front. Console games are expensive and it is a bit of a cheek expecting people to then pay more to be able to win!

This leads us to the core gamification lesson here. Fairness. If people feel that the system is not fair and that they do not have a fair chance of winning, they will revolt. EA and DICE have already had to suspend the microtransactions and reduce the time needed to unlock heroes (by 75%!!). Oh and don’t rip people off. That’s another big lesson!

Who knows what the future holds for Loot Crates. I for one hope that they have now jumped the shark and will go back to just being about non-game affecting vanity items, but sadly with the greed shown by many companies, this may still be some way off.

What do you think?

Some further reading on loot crates and gambling 🙂

Unleash your creativity with Story Cubes

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If you follow me on Twitter, it is unlikely that you will have missed the fact that I love a toy called Rory’s Story Cubes.

Rory’s Story Cubes

For those who don’t know, Story Cubes are sets of dice with unique icons on each face. The basic idea is to roll a set of 9 dice (made up from the various core packs and expansion packs) and then use the sequence of icons to create a story. It can be played alone or as a group and to be honest it is absolutely wonderful!

I have used them as a tool for helping my own creativity, I have used them as part of workshops to loosen up a few minds and of course I have used them for fun and play.

Cubes and Cards

 

Fun and story telling is where the crux of this blog is heading. I recently tweeted a photograph of me playing with the Story Cubes on a map I had printed for my eldest daughter. You see, at our house there has been something of a television ban. There have been some moments of extreme lack of imagination and willingness to play, because T.V. is easier and less effort!

We had played with Story Cubes in the past, but at times my eldest (7) can be a little literal. She would see a foot and that was all it was. So I decided to try and help by giving the story a bit of a setting and a theme with a map. Actually the map is from Kingdom Rush and I just added a hexagonal grid onto it.

Fantasy Cubes Map

Rather than just rolling the dice and making up a story, the dice are rolled onto the map and the initial story is set up based on where the dice fall and what icons are showing. Starting from the left most icon, once person begins with “Once upon a time” and something related to the first icon. The next player chooses a dice that is close to the first one and so on. Usually one cube becomes the hero and one a bad guy. As the story evolves, dice that have been used can be re-rolled to create new story objects, incidental characters, spells, quest icons and so on.

The reason my daughter likes this is because the story flows and becomes much more game-like, almost becoming an RPG. I like it because for at least 20 minutes she is happy with the T.V. off!

If you want to try this for yourself, here is a PDF of the map I use, but you can always just drawn one with the kids (or the grown ups!!).

I would love to see what you all come up with in the comments, share your maps, your rule ideas and new ways you play!

Randomness, Serendipity and Gamification

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Recently I have been trying to write a few games, just for fun, with my daughter. There area  couple of card games and I am trying to make a single player board game.

Making a game with a 7 year old is an interesting experience. I got asked to go into her room as she had a new game she wanted to play. She had made a game board with LEGO. You had to get from one end to the other, with certain bricks having modifier effects on the game (move faster, move slower etc). She said I could go first, so I asked “how do we decide how many spaces to move?”. I expected a dice or something, but no. Her answer was “just pick a number between one and ten”!

I was baffled, but did as I was told. I chose the biggest ten, assuming she would do the same, as this was the quickest way to win. However, she chose seven – she genuinely randomly chose a number in her head!

It was at this point I began to realise just how important randomness is to enjoying games. I couldn’t just choose random numbers, it made no sense to me as I could win by just choosing the biggest or the “right number”. Of course, I let her win, but still! If you have my sort of brain, where you like logic, you analyse the situation and work out the best solution – i.e. how to get to the win state fastest. Now, if there had been a dice added, that would change the dynamic. Rather than being able to choose the best route, you would have to work out based on the random number you had been assigned by the dice.

This got me thinking about randomness in general and how it is or could be applied to normally predictable things. So I built a random story builder. It has about 15 books in it from Project Gutenberg and randomly chooses paragraphs from the books and puts them on the screen. Of course most of the outcome is rubbish, but every now and then you get a great combination of a Grimm fairy tale, Dantes Divine Comedy and Frankenstein that makes you chuckle. It has no practical use (except as a more interesting version of Lorem Ipsum), but it is a bit of random fun.

Another example of this sort of fun is Rory’s Story Cubes. These are a series of dice with icons on them. You role the dice and have to build a story using the icons to inspire you. I play this with my daughter all the time. I also use them to try and inspire new ideas when my mind is drawing a blank. The random nature of the dice means that you have to remove all of your pre programmed ideas of structure and go with the flow.

Steve Jobs, it turns out, was a great believer in serendipity. This is the idea that random happenings can lead to great and unexpected outcomes. He built the offices at Pixar studios with central toilets, ensuring that people from all over the company would randomly run into each other. Marissa Mayer famously banned working from home, citing (among other things) that incidental meetings around the office lead to new insights that would not happen otherwise. On the site, I have a link called “Page Roulette” which will just take you to a random page. You may like it, you may not – but it is fun to find out just because it is a journey into the unknown. I love the “random article” button on Wikipedia for this exact reason!

In gamification, we are no strangers to randomness, I have spoken about random reward schedules (and their potential dangers) in the past. But this is generally relegated to just surprises than changing something that is usually totally predictable into something that isn’t.

When planning your user journey, think of ways to take people out of the predictable linear from time to time. Give Free Spirit Explorers something to look forward to! When building your systems, think how you can create moments of serendipity, where ideas and people may randomly collide to create wonderful new innovations.

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