Ethics in the Game Industry

Good morning everyone. Um, thank you so very much to be here today at such early hour in the morning um, to uh, talk about ethics. Uh, it's a subject a topic that um, it's becoming really dear to my heart and now I really appreciate that you wake up early to uh, come listen to what I have to have to say. So, my name is Celia Hodent. Um, I have a PhD psychology. So, kind of psychology is my background. And in the past 10 years I've been working in the game industry. I started at Ubisoft over 10 years ago in France cuz I'm a French hence the accent. And uh, I I was working with the editorial team there mostly in the strategic innovation hub. Then I moved to Ubisoft Montreal where I worked uh, at the playtest lab and also worked on various franchises and mostly Rainbow Six. Um,

I moved earlier 20 uh, 12 in San Francisco at LucasArts to work on Star Wars games and after LucasArts closed in 20 13 I moved to Epic Games. Um, so I became director of user experience at Epic. I was um, overseeing um, several projects in terms of a UX and US strategy such as Unreal Engine and um, multiple games and of course Fortnite. Um, and I left Epic at the end of 2017 to become a consultant. So, today I'm a game UX consultant. I work independently. Um, and uh, as you can see I am not an ethicist. Um, so this is just my humble perspective on the topic through a cognitive science lens which is my background and this is what I wanted to share with you today. It's still a very much work in progress. I do not pretend to offer you the right angle to treat the topic. It's a uh complicated topic. It's delicate. Um

so, it's just um uh I I care about it. Um and so, I just wanted to offer you my reflection where I'm at. Uh hopefully it's going to be interesting for you and I'm looking forward to your feedback so we can, you know, start a conversation about this. Okay, so video games generate the most revenues in the entertainment industry today while often having terrible press. Uh some of the games we've worked on or we are working on are accused of making people violent or turn them into uh addicts. It's quite disheartening uh especially since most of of this uh is just fear-mongering with no uh solid scientific grounds. Uh however, as content providers, we have certain ethical responsibilities that we need to discuss more about. So, today we're all going to talk about four main topics. We're going to talk about addiction, loot boxes and gambling, violence,

and dark patterns. Um actually, I'm going to start with dark patterns and I'll talk about violence in the end. Um and for these different elements, um we're going to go through what uh the public is concerned about and uh what science actually says. We're going to debunk some fear-mongering claims um that actually I believe it's it's steering us away from uh addressing what truly is a concern. And from these concerns, we're going to see what we could do about it. Uh notice I'm saying here could, not should. Uh this is again just uh some suggestions of what we uh can talk about. Um this is by no means an exhaustive list. Um and this is not about pointing fingers. I'm going to be very careful to um not be pointing fingers in the game industry. Not because we should not address these concerns, but I think it's too early in my reflection to start

doing that, and I think it's not the moment right now. So, it's more going to be like, "Hey, if you're doing this, this is maybe what's going on with your players." So, it's just again an invitation to think about these things. And again, I'm not an ethicist, and this topic needs much more in-depth expertise than I have to be tackled properly. And of course, the diversity of different of perspective to define you know what what are the moral values I want to defend. But because I have cognitive science background, I can actually debunk some of these things and explain some others, and take it from there. So, this just an invitation. All right, let's start it. So, addiction. We hear a lot about addiction these days, and the most the biggest concern is like video games are addictive. So, you have all these parents that are very worried for the kids, and and

people who suffer from addiction. And in some countries such as South Korea and China, video gaming has been recognized as a disorder, and treatment programs have been established. So, what does science says? The internet gaming disorder was added in 2013 in the DSM-5. So, the DSM-5 is the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, and it's used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders. There was not sufficient evidence to determine whether the condition is a unique mental disorder, or the best criteria to classify it at the time of the DSM-5 was published in 2013. However, it's a recognizing China gaming disorder in a section recommending conditions for further research along with caffeine use disorder and other conditions. Like alcohol, tobacco stimulants,

marijuana and opiate like substance related addictive disorders. Gaming disorder is the only behavioral addiction identified in the DSM-5 as opposed to substance substance use. Um So the DSM-5 notes that gaming must cause significant impairment or distress in several aspects of a person's life. This purpose condition is limited to gaming and does not include problems with general use of the internet, online gaming or use of social media or smartphones. So the purpose symptoms of internet gaming disorder include I'm sorry it's small but preoccupation with gaming, withdrawal syndromes when gaming is taking away like sadness, anxiety or irritability. Tolerance, the need to spend more time gaming to satisfy the urge, inability to reduce playing and successful attempts to quit gaming, giving up other activities, loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities due to gaming, continuing to game despite

problems, deceiving family members or others about the amount of time spent on gaming, the use of gaming to relieve negative moods such as guilt or hopelessness. Risk having jeopardized or lost a job or relationship due to gaming. So under the proposed criteria, a diagnosis of internet gaming disorder would require experiencing five or more of these symptoms within a year. You also might have heard about the um World Health Organization in late 2017 announced that in the upcoming edition, the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases ICD, gaming disorder will be identified as a new disorder. Um So, the problem is that so far um the researchers don't agree. There's no consensus. Um A lot of people are actually saying that there's a lack of rigorous research to back it up uh um to really like create a gaming

disorder. And it's uh creating a moral panic and it can also stigmatize um billions of gamers who have over 2 billion gamers in the world today. Um so, if we identify uh gaming uh as a disorder um like a gaming disorder, then it's we're really creating a specific classification. Uh it can stigmatize uh people and again can create uh treatments or centers to send um um gamers that actually don't have an addiction. They can have a problem with uh with games, but they don't have like a gaming addiction. The problem might be some somewhere else. Um so, that's that's the uh right now what the scientists the researchers are saying. It's not It's really There's no consensus. It's way too early to uh draw these conclusions. And um uh another research uh found that 0.3 to 1% of the general population might qualify for a potential diagnosis of internet gaming disorder. So, it's very

small and we need to distinguish between passionate engagement with video games and a true pathology. Um so, whether the gamer is distressed with a gaming maybe the key factor in distinguishing uh the two. So, this is what this um uh research is um saying. And um and this article by Shibuski and Orban, um they're saying that problematic gaming is best viewed as coping mechanism associated with underlying problems such as anxiety or depression. Um so, if you have a problem with gaming, if you um if you classify to say that you're addicted to gaming, uh the promise um most likely outside of that you have anxiety, depression, they have problems and you escape through gaming. So, this is uh where we at at the moment. That being said, um we do tend to use the term addiction

or addictive all the time and we do that ourselves. Um so, what we could do, uh we could try to avoid using the term addictive um to start to describe fun and engaging games. Um so, if you look at uh games on the on the Apple Store, you find a few games that describing themselves are super addictive as if this was a good thing. Um it's not. It's actually a problem. Some people really suffer of game addiction. Um so, what you want to say is this is a fun and engaging game, not addictive. We should not use that term as if it was a good thing. Words matter. Um using the term addiction instead of engaging is reinforcing a stigma and it's downplaying real addictions. So, um game developers do that. Uh journalists, uh we use that term instead of saying engagement um or gamers also say, "Oh, it's a fun game, super addictive. I love it."

Um try to think about the words that you're using. Addiction is a very problem. Um so, an addictive game is not It's not a good thing. Um other thing I wanted to point out is um children and teenagers um are have low self-control and uh they have a hard time delaying gratification. Granted that adults have problems with that, too, um but uh children um uh even more so. Uh they're not completely mature uh to be able to exert self-control. So, therefore, maybe we should not exploit uh their weakness, and maybe we should um try before all the games are uh rated a um teen or everyone should have mechanics that encourage breaks, especially if you know that if it's specific specifically targeted to children, uh you want to have moments when there's nothing left to do. Like think about Animal Crossing. Uh there's a moment when, you know, you have not much to do but wait

until uh once you've completed all your tasks. Um so, think about um you know, how we can have mechanics that can encourage us encourage breaks, especially if you target kids. Um there's this whole lot of discussion uh these days about attention economy. So, you might have heard of Tristan Harris, uh who's in the uh next Googler, and uh it was uh this is the uh there, and now he started a e- his own thing he wants to talk about and all these mechanics that are made to keep you engaged with a platform, because of course, uh all the platforms on the internet, you know, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, they're what they, you know, they measure uh their revenues through uh the time you spend on the on your website. This is how they can make money. Um and so, this is they're trying to um maximize for that. And this is also what we try to do. We

try to maximize, you know, we need to make uh profit. Uh so, we try to maximize that, make sure uh that people are engaged, but while doing that, and uh it's not necessarily we don't necessarily want to do that. We don't necessarily want to trap people, uh but this is what uh can happen for some people. If you have a mechanic that you have auto play turned um on YouTube, you watch a video, and after the video is over, um you actually have like a few seconds um before you can you know say no no no I don't want to see the next video but they're going to auto play the next video. So sometimes it's cool because it's about what you care about and sometimes it's a completely unrelated subject. Um we do that too and multiplayer games Um some games are rematching you in a in a new game automatically. You don't have to say you know I want to do I want to play another match. It's automatically put you in a new match unless you opt out for it. Another example that's super under fire right now is Snapchat with the snap

streaks. I don't know if you heard of that but on Snapchat if you so you send a message to your friend and your friend has 24 hours to send a message back and you know if every day you send a message to one another then you accumulate like points and then you have streaks and apparently it's creating like for some kids they have a hard time you know not you know stop the streak and if the streak you know stops it's it's you know it's it's hard for them to to handle it and they're currently under fire with this specific mechanic so because it's it's really forcing the kids to keep going and replying and apparently some kids are asking their friends when they're on vacation to sign in on their account to keep the streak going. Um so think about that. We are also using some of these elements. Should we not use that? What's the implication of it? Um so it's one of the things that we can try

try to do is avoid um to start you know punishing disengagement. That would be a good start. If you you have the FOMO like the fear of missing out and if your players are not here their friends might be playing and accumulating XP and and you're like I missed something. So and when they come back they can see the discrepancy and they can see, you know, all the things they have missed. What we can do instead of, you know, guilt-tripping them and say, "Oh, look at what you're missing and your friends are playing and you're not and here's what they did and you didn't." Uh, we can actually try to um, not punish disengagement. Uh, World of Warcraft does that, for example, if you um, stop playing and you take a break, um, when you come back, your XP bar um, is going to have, you know, it's going to go um, it's going to increase twice as fast as if you did not have a break. So, that's allowing you to catch up um, with your with your friends if you took a break. So, think about that sort of things so

that at the very least, your players are not punished for not engaging with your platform. They should not feel trapped uh, into keep playing. And um, most of us, I know, struggle to survive given the competition. Uh, so of course, like the main question is are going to be able to uh, survive this industry if I do free-to-play games, it's extremely difficult. They, you know, we see a lot of us GG's closing, even us GG's who have uh, had a lot of budget. Um, it's extremely hard. So, most of us, we're just trying to survive and make sure that we have good retention so people monetize and we can, you know, keep uh, making games. But um, for those of you, if you have like a a game that's super successful, um, maybe now you can consider uh, collaborating with psychiatrist to find ways to identify and help uh, help struggling gamers and uh, maybe consider working with researchers to have them define gaming disorders. Um, so it's I know it's a hard conversation um, to have um, but there are some problems and maybe we can start looking at it um, before

waiting that uh, we are under fire just like Stampy Cat or or Facebook or whoever uh, to start looking at solutions um, to these uh, issues. All right, so now um, I'm going to talk about loot boxes and uh, gambling. Um, so the main public concern is that loot boxes are like gambling and gambling is not considered like a necessarily good thing. And it's minors are not allowed to gamble in most Muslim countries. And the Netherlands about and Belgium now consider loot boxes as gambling and are thus illegal. Um, the Chinese government considers that the video game industry needs strict control. So you probably heard of that, but last year there was a 10 10-month freeze before China finally accepted to release video games on its territory. As of today, I believe it's a freeze again. China formed a regulatory committee, the online games ethics committee, to oversee the approval of new games on their territory. And so the review can

take a while. So now more regulations are coming up and more and more countries are looking into this. Um, so what does science say? So the definition of gambling, so one of the definition that is the most out there is playing a game for money or anything of value, mostly requiring an an ability to cash out. So think about casinos. Um, but both gambling and casinos and loot box and games and RNG, we can talk about all that, are a form of what we call intermittent rewards with a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Um, heard of the Skinner box? This is it. Um, so I'm going to explain a little bit what it is because not everybody is super clear about what the Skinner box is. Um, so this is behavioral psychology conditioning. And Skinner put rats and pigeons and whatever in boxes and they had to do a certain thing

when there was a stimulus to say, oh, at some point they're going to light a green light and the rat, if the rat presses a lever at that moment, to answer to that stimulus, then is going to get the rat is going to get some food, like a pellet of food. Uh so you have stimulus, the rat has to have the response, and if it's the correct response, the rat is rewarded. If it's not the correct answer, the rat rat can be punished. So this is what the Skinner box is. Um This is how it looks like. Um if you want to shape the behaviors of rats or people. Um if you want to see an increase of a certain behavior, like say the rat is pressing the certain level at a certain time, uh or you want the players to log in to your game a certain time, you're going to uh there's you have to reward that behavior. So you can reward by be that behavior by

giving a carrot. Uh you did the right thing, so you here's your here's your reward, you have the you have a cookie. Or you can reward the behavior by removing something uh that was considered a stick. Um so let's say for the rats, what it what it was doing is uh the rat had electrical shocks uh up until it was pressing the lever. And so if it was the right answer, then the electrical shocks would stop. Which is rewarding, because now no pain anymore. Um So you can either give a reward or remove something that's uh considered as a punishment. And if you want to see a decrease of behavior, you don't want the rat to press the lever, then when the the rat does it, you punish the rat um by um giving a stick, you know, beating it with a stick, so electrical shock. Or if uh your player you don't want them to go in an area that's uh super difficult for them, because they're low level, they try to enter the area that has instant

kill, that's a punishment, and they're like, "Okay, I'm not going to try that again." They understand that this is not a good uh a good the optimum solution. And the same thing, uh can also remove a carrot. So, if pair for example, the rat is not is doing the something that we don't want the rat to see, then the rat is not going to have the food. Like we remove the food from the the rat's cage. For players, if we don't want them to be harassing other players online. And if they do it, well, we can punish them by banning them from the community for a certain time. So, when we do that, we shape behavior and it's not necessarily a bad thing. You know, everything when we design something, it's all about shaping behavior. Video games all bunch of stimuli and the player is going to do some some things that's allowed and actually is is good. You can min-max if you do that. Other behaviors are not that efficient. And so, players through experimentation have figured this out.

But, usually rewards are more effective than punishment if you want to see a behavior increasing. So, I'm going to just like focus on rewards. You have different types of rewards. Rewards can be a continuous or intermittent. With continuous, every time you do the action, you're always rewarded. And it's intermittent when the behavior is sometimes rewarded. So, if you always you open the the chest and every time you open the chest, you have something awesome, that's continuous. If you open the chest sometimes you have something awesome and sometimes you don't you have crap. This is intermittent. Intermittent rewards are more engaging. You have different types of intermittent rewards. It can be based on time. We call that interval. Or it can be based on behavior. It's called a ratio. Both of them can be either fixed or variable. It's fixed when you can anticipate it. It's variable when you don't know when or how it's going to happen. I'm going to give you a few examples is

uh games so I get have better idea. A fixed uh interval is anytime the reward uh is happening at a very precise moment. Um like um um uh daily rewards. Um you know that every morning if you log in, you can have your daily reward. Now you can log in 10 times, um it doesn't matter. You only have the reward once. Maybe it's at 7:00 a.m., you have the new reward, and you know when it's going to happen. So you don't need to log in several times to have it. It's once and for all. So you can anticipate when it's happening. Variable interval is still based on time, but you you can't anticipate it. Uh so an example in games would be rare spawns. You know that at some point they're going to spawn here, uh so you're looking for them. They're here now. Uh I'll see you now. So you know that it's going to happen. It's not based on your behavior. You can just like dance around like and do a little um things or whatever. It's not going to make the rare spawn spawning. Um it's just based on time, but you don't know

when. Ratio is based on behaviors, based on what you do. When it's fixed, uh you have to do a certain number of actions before getting the reward. Uh so typically uh it's um like if you have to kill 10 zombies um to uh get a um uh a um achievement, that's typically a fixed ratio. Cuz you have to do it 10 times before getting the reward. And when it's variable, it's like no matter how many times you do it, like opening a box, uh you're going to be rewarded at some point, but you don't know when. You don't know after how many times you click on it to open it and then get something. So you can't uh really you don't really know it. And that's the variable ratio that it's at the heart of gambling, it's not machines and loot boxes and card packs and all that. Back into Skinner's box and the rat and all that. This is how these rewards and

the impact that they have on behavior. So if you look so you have the fixed ones. So you know when it's going to be predictable. The variable ones you don't know when how it's going to happen. It's not predictable. Interval based on time. Ratio based on behavior. And you you see like the the ones that are fixed. So after you have it because you could predict it you will like oh I'm going to do that. I was going to be at that moment or it's going to be after 10 times. As soon as you have the reward you see there's a decrease in behavior. So you have it and then you stop engaging for a little while until you know you can engage again or you want to have more stuff again. When it's variable you don't see that drop in behavior. It's way more constant. And when you see like interval it's constant but it's not it's not as as intense as ratio. You can see here that the variable ratio ones so loot boxes is where you have the the highest and most steady response rate.

So we know that this is engaging people more. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot of games that that use that. Every time you have a game where you have a throw of dice is using this. Sometimes you going to have a shitty score and sometimes you going to have double sixes and you like woohoo. So it's not again it's not bad and there's a lot of mechanics that use that. It's more questionable when you use that for monetization. So for having people pay engage through their money. And again it's not new. I grew up with card packs. Yeah I was super into the middle ones. But you know like sports pack card packs of course magic. So it's not new. What's this a bit new and of course you know a critical hit. Sorry I have that Critical hit is also uh sometimes, you know, you're going to shoot at enemies and at some point you got you're going to kill them because oh, critical hit, you're awesome. Feels good. And again,

it's a type of variable ratio. So, it's not necessarily a problem. It's actually pretty exciting. Um it's more a problem when it touches monetization. And what's a bit new nowadays is that there um less steps for us to really exert self-control. Um because in one click now we can buy. It's not like as a kid, you wanted to have a new card pack, you maybe have to ask your parents, uh maybe get the money, and then go buy it. So, there's a lot of different steps that uh you have to wait. And today, we don't have all these steps. So, it's harder to actually, you know, exert self-control. And on top of that, we can have a lot of uh different hard currencies that is actually also adding some distance between you and actual money. So, it's hard to really remember that you're actually spending money. And lastly, um there are some uh games where you can actually get something valuable in real life. So, a lot of people are saying, "Yeah, but you loot games, even you know, you buy loot boxes, but it's it doesn't have a value

outside of the game, just inside of the game. So, it's not really a gambling." Except that you have marketplaces uh where sometimes you can sell an item that you got through loot boxes, and then it is like gambling. Um So, again, maybe it's not a problem for adults, uh even though it's hard for us to exert self-control. We're supposed to be able to do that. Uh for kids, it's not as easy. Um so, I don't know if you remember the the marshmallow test where uh kids there they're shown a marshmallow and they're told, "Hey, you need to If you don't touch the marshmallow, I'm going to walk away and let you alone in the room. If you don't touch it for I think it was 15 minutes, uh I'll give you two another marshmallow, and then you can have them both." Um so, the kid had to stay in front of marshmallow, and then the experimenter experimenter would leave the room. The kid was just all alone in front of marshmallows like trying to eat it. It's like I can't. I want that then the second marshmallow. And so it's really hard for kids to exert that self-control. And so loot boxes can be particularly

hard to handle by minors, children and teenagers don't have yet the brain maturity needed to be able to resist the temptation to have self-control. And again, we're not necessarily particularly good at that as adults, but we're better at that as than than kids. So development of self-control needed to resist loot boxes, loss aversion, fear of missing missing out, all these things takes time. Even adolescent brain is too immature to exert control over impulsive drives. Minors are not allowed to gamble in casinos and it's easy to control it because we can ID people. If you go to Vegas or you have to show your ID if you want to apply um And so can we regulate loot boxes for kids? I would say we should. The problem is that how practically how we do that? It's not easy to really ID the people who are playing the games. It's easy to cheat and say, "Oh sure, I'm over 21 or over 18, whatever the age we

define that as as acceptable." So it's more difficult to control that and that's why different countries now made loot box illegal like I said like the Netherlands and Belgium. And the Federal Trade Commission announced this year that they would conduct a public workshop on loot box later this year. It's coming. So we need to be ready. We need to understand why it's a problem and how we want to address it. Maybe before we get regulations on it on us. So what we can do is at the very least we can need to protect minors we can avoid loot boxes when we know that a lot of kids are playing our games or if it's even more so if it's targeted to kids, especially if it's tied to monetization, um of course. And there's another problem. It seems that the child gambling has quadrupled over the past years. So that's from the Gambling Commission in Great Britain with study on 11 to 16 year old

year old children. Uh and apparently um so it's becoming common I promise not just game it's not game they're not look at gambling in games as they look at gambling overall like scratching tickets stuff like that. And apparently kids are engaging with this way more today than before. Uh and there's another problem that there are some gambling ads that appear in children's games. So the very least um make sure that you do not allow for gambling ads on your games that are really targeted to to kids. So they should not be bombarded by these gambling ads and sadly it happens today. Another thing we can do is explore more transparent monetization techniques and maybe avoid variable schedules or reinforcement reinforcement in ratio in monetization. So um again China as is asking to reveal the odds when you

have loot boxes you have to reveal the odds. It's more transparent. It's not really solving the problem because even if you know the odds, first of all like humans don't really understand odds. So that's another problem. But it's not really preventing us from engaging with it. It's more transparent but it's not really solving the problem. Uh you can also so Fortnite in the Save the World mode they had the x-ray on the mine which you can see what you're going to get. So that's that's interesting. Um and also what you really have to think about and maybe could prohibit marketplaces where the box items can be sold. So sometimes, of course, most of the time it's out of your control, but you have to be careful because it's usually like not you don't control it's outside of your system, um but you have to be conscious of that because it's part of the problem. Okay, so now I'm going to talk about

dark patterns. Um And the biggest fear is that can see here and there is that video games manipulate us. Okay, so put a pin on that. I'm just going to um show you a few things and explain few things about dark patterns before. Um I'm going to ask you to do a little game. So if you know the answer, it's a bit cheating, but it's okay. We can participate so. Um You have a bat and a ball and it costs $11 total. The bat costs $10 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Very quickly, do the math. Uh if you're well caffeinated uh or if you sense there was a trap or you knew that before, you're actually very good at math. Uh you might not have fallen into the trap, but most people um when they're asked that question, we don't really think about it because you know we're on a mating mode. We're just like it's at 9:00 a.m. Just like leave me alone. Uh and we just go straight to a shortcut which is saying $1.

Um but if you do the math, this is not adding up. Uh so the ball costs um 50 cents. And um so that's come uh coming from a a um the cognitive reflection test that was made by Shane Frederick. And um so there were three of these, you know, similar questions like that. And it turns out that 83% of MIT students answered wrongly to at least one of these three questions. So it's happened to everyone. It's not saying that you're always going to fall for traps, but you're always going to fall at some point you're going to fall for a trap. Um and that's okay. Um it's not to say that we're not logical beings, but um our brain is very limited. Uh we have a lot of biases, and I don't know if you've heard of uh that book Thinking, Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman, who um has a Nobel Prize in Economics. He's a psychologist, and uh he's uh studied these biases uh and uh uh is part of a a new discipline called uh behavioral

economics. So, it's behavioral psychology, you know, remember Skinner box, all that, applied to economics. And what he says is that we have two systems in our brain, and it's not a physical system. It's it's not you can't pinpoint where it is in our brain. Um they're just like functions in our brain. We have what he calls a system one, which is fast, automatic, effortless. Uh if I say 3 * uh 3 * 6, you're going to get the answer right away because you know that by heart. Uh and if your uh system one is the only awake um this morning, you might have just like said $1 to the previous question just because most of the time we don't want to do math, and we're just like going to get to a fast answer. System two is slow, controlled, and effortful. It is a system that you need to activate when you have to do more complex uh uh calculation, or you have to really think about something. So, if I tell you what's 12 * 31, uh then you know that you can have a quick answer for that.

You're going to have to calculate, so it's activating system two. It's costly. Uh the brain is consuming a lot of our energy uh comparatively to its uh size. Um and so, most of the time we're running on economy mode, and we're not going to do the math, and we're not going to apply control and effortful um uh computation uh when we and in everyday problems, we're just going to go straight uh to the point most of the time. So, we rely mostly on system one, but the problem is that this system is biased because it's not careful and it's going to go straight to shortcuts. And most of the time, you know, it's it's allowed us to survive predators because we don't have you know to think about is this really a lion? I'm not sure. We have you know to run away otherwise we wouldn't be here today talking about cognitive biases. Um but it is with our complex environments, we still have the same brain as back in the savanna, but our environment is is more complex and we can fall for biases more

and more often. So, it's it's an issue and if your system two is not awake and is not like, "Hey, be careful. There's a trap here. You should like actually really think about it." We're not aware of it. And so, we fall for biases, fall for these biases without really being fully aware aware of that. And that's that's okay. I mean, the brain is extremely good at very quickly making sense of the world with little information. Again, that helped us survive predators. But because of that, you know, we're going to make mistake I know it's easy one. But we're going to make mistakes because sometimes, you know, the easy answer is not the correct answer. Um So, again, all these mistakes the brain make are insignificant trade-offs in the scale of evolution. However, we need to be aware of the limitations of these biases to avoid being manipulated ourselves and also fair society. Um so, we know the brain has

limitations. I'm not going to cover all that. This is my usual spiel. But when we consider UX user experience when we build a product, we have to be mindful of these limitations so we can offer the experience we intended. So, we look at how the brain is processes information, how we learn, and starts with perception, um, and then we're going to memorize what we perceived and processed. This is how we learn. If we don't memorize, we don't learn. And this process is influenced by many factors, including attention. This is really crucial. If you don't pay attention, it's hard for you to remember. Um, so, I'm not going to go through that today, um, but we know that perception is subjective. What I perceive is not going to necessarily what you're going to perceive. It's, uh, perception is a construct of the mind. Therefore, it's heavily, um, biased depending on your background, your prior knowledge, your expectations, um, your culture. Attention is scarce. We are We can't multitask. We're terrible at doing many

things. And memory is fallible. So, we forget a lot of stuff and for what we remember is it's not accurate and sometimes we even have false memories. So, we have all these limitations and we have a bunch of cognitive and social biases. Uh, I'm not going to go through all of this. It's just to make you realize like we have biases and we know they exist. Um, and this is This is going to sway people and this is how we get manipulated. It's just because we don't pay attention to everything because we can't. Um, and therefore, here's an example of what a dark pattern is. It's to exploit these little, for example, because we don't pay attention, we see the big yellow button. We We believe that, yeah, I just, you know, checked out. I want to check out. I want to keep going. Uh, but we might not necessarily read all the little text because we're we're, um, uh, we're in a hurry and we don't realize that we're signing up for Amazon Prime. If you want to opt out, you actually need to click on the tiny little link, uh, that you can't really see well unless you really pay attention.

Uh, so, this is an example of a dark pattern. Uh, this is when the your, uh, what you're trying to do, like, um, engage people more with your platform, uh, is going against the experience that the user your user wants, just like check out and they don't necessarily want to sign up and maybe they're going to sign up by mistake. Um another example that I like um it's pretty creative. It's faking that you have a hair on your phone. So you're going to swipe up to get rid of it and thus you go to the shopping screen. Um yeah, it's it's pretty creative. Um so it's taking again it's taking advantage of a problem with attention and we don't you know we don't process things very well. Um if you're interested into dark patterns, there's a very an excellent website called darkpatterns.org that explain what dark patterns are and give a lot of examples. Um so here's an example of one of these cognitive biases that can lead to dark

patterns. Um that's from Dan Ariely is another prominent figure in behavioral economics. And he sold subscription for the the economist and there were three options. You could subscribe for a year only through web so online only or you could have the print subscription only. So it was web $59, print it was $125 and you could have the print and web for the same price $125. So he wondered why you know why who would ever pick the middle option because it's obviously not as good as the rest. And so he was at MIT and he did a research with the students there and asked them which one would you pick. And surely enough most people would pick the print and web subscription option and no one would pick the print subscription only. So why do you have that option if no one wants it? What happens if you remove that option?

Uh so that's what he did and he asked more students to answer like among these two options which one did you pick? In that case most people choose the cheapest option. Um so this is called the decoy effect. Um when when we use that all the time and again in monetization, this is what we do when we show the different options to buy hard currencies. Most of the time we do that. We have a decoy to make another option looks look more interesting. Um So decoy effect is in the monetization and sometimes like I think dark pattern should be should be should we be more attention to that to have been more attention to that. But the problem is that whether or not it is a dark pattern is not obvious. Um because it's a big gray area. Like look at this you know when if you if you want to delete your character in a while So that with that said it's a normal screenshot. Back in the day if you wanted to delete your character, it's not just like a confirmation box

saying "Are you sure you want to delete that character that you spent hours and and weeks and months developing?" I was actually asking you to type delete. And then today I believe they ask you to type in the name of the character to make sure that you really want to delete that specific character. Uh so we could say "Hey, it's a dark pattern. They prevent me you know they guilt-trip me and granted the character is not crying." That would be more guilt-tripping. Like "Oh no, you don't want to kill me. Don't go." That would be guilt-tripping. It's not the case here. I would argue this is actually a case of good UX because it's what we call error prevention. We want to make sure because you know you put a lot of effort in that and want to make sure you you not deleting it by mistake. So where's the line? And it's not it's not obvious, but it's for us to try to think you know talk about these things and try to decide where's the line and what what we should do or not do. So what can we do? We can maybe avoid dark patterns for our

kids um and maybe reconsider in all the games, but again kids children and teenagers are more sensitive to all these tricks. So there's guilt tripping we just talked about it. There's um So knowing how human behavior can be influenced up until now and knowing the acute sensitivity of children, consider this. A game targeted to kids in which a character cries if the child dismisses and not purchases. It's not hypothetical. It's actually happening in some games. These are real examples. So consider what it's doing to the kids. Is it ethical or not? Is it dopamine or not? I'll leave that to you, but think about that. So that's called guilt tripping. Loss aversion. So losing a streak for example, the Snapchat example is example loss aversion. We We have all that. We don't want to lose it. And so it's consecutive days of playing also in games. Um Also, if you have a free-to-play game

and you start playing you don't have to pay, but all of a sudden you're like, "Hey, if you want to keep your character, now you need to play or otherwise you're going to lose all that stuff that you that you accumulated." So all that is loss aversion. The fear missing out. You know, you didn't you missed out. Look at all the things you missed out and all you know what your friends did and what you didn't do. We talked about that a little bit. Again, for children it can be way more distressing and harder to handle. Pay-to-win. So we So usually it's it's a good practice anyway like players hated but you know, we don't you don't want to make players pay to be able to actually progress in the game and succeed or make them pay to remove frictions. Like if you're playing and all of a sudden you're interrupted and there's an ad or whatever. For us it's like already annoying. For kids it's like they they have a hard time handling these things. So like think about all that. Last one, the social obligation. Like,

"Hey, you really want to progress in the game? Well, now you need to have friends playing with you and you need to do things together and and now they need to send you missions and now you need to send them things to do as well. So, that can also put players in the social obligation like, do you want me to send you like, if I don't play my friends not going to have the thing that they need. So, think about all that and especially again for kids, that's it's hard to handle and it's not by any means it's not exhaustive list but this is just a few examples of what you need to think about. Um, last one is violence. Um, so of course you've heard the headline, video games make us violent. It's a it's a hard topic to talk about especially with the recent horrible events. Um, and a lot of people are concerned uh, about that and given that we have two plus billion gamers, um, I mean, if it was creating making us aggressive, we would have like a big big

problem. Um, but so far we have no conclusive evidence that violent video games encourage aggressive behavior. Which is the good news but the problem is still have fear mongering is still coming back. Oh, it's because of video games. So, no, so far we can't say that there's no evidence that we can say that and the problem is that when we focus on these big things like fear mongering, like addiction and violence, we don't talk about the things that are in the gray areas that it could actually be problematic because we're talking about the big things that making people panic when actually there's no need to panic for these big things because they don't really there's no evidence that this is happening. Um, however, again, children and teens can be affected by violent content. It can be hard for them to handle it. That's why we have ratings like ESRB or PEGI in Europe. Um, the problem is again it's hard to control who is going to play our games.

And, um, even back when we had like physical copies, we did not ID, uh, children when they were, um, buying a game that was not made for them. And today it's even more difficult because most of it is just, uh, uh, through digital. So, how do we deal with that? Should be Should it be just the responsibility of of parents? Um, maybe, but parents don't necessarily know how to, um, do the, uh, parental control on their consoles even though like all the consoles allow for it. Uh, so they might need, uh, help to, uh, be educated about that. Uh, but we also we might think about you know, what content we put in if again if we know that our game is is very uh, successful for in with our children, you know, how is this content going to affect them? It's going to cause us some distress. Um, how going to How they going to handle it? And, uh, above all that, you know, violent video games may not be associated with aggression, but that doesn't mean that their content is not

problematic. Um, we are responsible for the content when we put out there. And again, remember uh, that the notions of free will and rational decisions are at best quite suspicious. Uh, we are swayed by environment and so we are influenced, uh, by society and and uh, you know, what we see and experience mostly unconsciously. Uh, and that's why we still have big problems with racism and and sexism and we having hard time getting out of it because it's mostly unconscious and it's reinforced every day with little things that we don't think, you know, is important, but because it's repeating every day every day and every day, uh, then now we unconsciously have certain stereotypes and now we're biased and we don't even realize it. Uh, so this is how stereotypes and discrimination strive. They are shaped partly by environment, by our culture, by society, by ads, um and also by video games because they're part of the culture. They're not a specific thing that's uh out of it. And they're not I'm

not saying that's all in video games. It's in everything. Therefore, also in video games. Um one of example of this um biases is the uh availability availability heuristic. What comes to mind quickly uh is going to be a stereotype like, you know, if you think about a very dangerous uh animal and you think, "Oh, you know, like a shark." And they kill us and like when you look at the data, actually they're not, you know, they the chance of you to be killed by a shark is very very small. Not to say that some people are not killed by sharks. It happens, but it's very very small. Mosquitoes kill way way more people than sharks, but it's not the first animal that pops in our mind. So, that's what we call the availability uh heuristic. Um And for example, you're going to more like to remember uh women like being emotional and crying uh uh that all the many times that they did not. And um because the women are supposed to be the emotional ones, and we don't necessarily think about all the times that a male um a male colleague um

was uh yelling at their colleagues, which is also being emotional and not being able to handle the emotions well, but for some reason, this is not what pops to mind. So, it's This is where we are at. We're not again, we have to get out of the guilt. Um we just have to face it. We are biased. And if we want to get out of it, we need to um think about how the environment is designed and how it's making us fall for these biases. Um this is what we call choice architecture. Like the design's going to encourage certain behaviors and discourage uh other behaviors or even won't allow certain behaviors. Um an example uh This is again uh let's say a hypothetical example cuz it's not about pointing fingers and it's not even I'm not even saying that this is a problem. But if you have a game where you can go see a prostitute uh to uh regen health and then you can kill the prostitute to uh gain the your money back.

I mean, it's not necessarily a problem. It's not unethical. It's just you're min-maxing. This is what you're doing in the game. This is you're maximizing for what you need to do. Uh so, it's not necessarily what options are in the game that necessarily pose problems. It's what It's the options that are not in the game. Cuz in these hypothetical game, um can you make a durable relationship with other prostitute and maybe have another way to min-max? I don't think so. Uh so, the other way you can do it is to perpetuate violence on women, which is again uh perpetuating uh um um biases and discrimination. So, think about what your game is allowing. Um we love systems. We love that players, you know, can uh can take the systems and do whatever they want to do with it. This is what makes a game fun. But you have rules, and these rules are um encouraging players to do certain things and discouraging them to to not do certain things because they're not helping them to min-max

uh or to achieve their goals. Um if you want to have more uh examples of that, I really recommend you to read the book The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart. That's really interesting. Uh so, think about your game as this. You know, what are you what behavior are you uh favoring and what are you um punishing? And um what is it normalizing in the name of fun? Is it okay to have fun, you know, uh raping women? What does it say, especially in our society today? You know, what is it uh enforcing and what is it normalizing? Um and uh what is it saying that oh, it's okay to have fun with that. Um So, you know, is it again, think about casual sexism or is it's not a problem if you had a character and a few characters in your game that are sexy whether it's a women or men characters. It's a problem if only the women characters are sexy all the women

characters are sexy cuz then, you know, you're reinforcing that image that women are just a sexual object. All right, so what can we do? Be mindful that despite the ESRB ratings, minors might get access to violent games and feel distressed by them. They might see your trailer, E3, whatever, even if they're not supposed to see it. So, we have to keep that in mind. I know it's hard to control. I Again, I'm not saying, "Oh my god, no violence ever." This is really not what I'm saying. Just keep that in mind. The children are going to have access to that content. And we're responsible for the content of our games. Consider if your game is it perpetuating discrimination or worse, you know, glorifying harmful behaviors. Do you want that? If you do, then that's a whole different story, but if this is not what you want to do, like keep in mind that indirectly, unconsciously, maybe this is what's happening. Protect your players from antisocial

behaviors because also your players are going to have a bad experiences with other players in winning your systems. So, antisocial behavior, toxicity is a very big concern. We need to think about that. I highly recommend you to look into the Fair Play Alliance. They're having a bunch of They're having their summit today, I believe, next door. So, look at what they're doing. They exchange it's an org across many different studios, like big studios, and they share best practices, and we they think think all these things. So, participate in that. And be conscious that people with bad intentions will use your game and social platforms to harm others. Do you want to wait until you have a big problem such as Facebook is facing now? Um now our games can be used as a social platform. It's happening. And I can tell you that um our secret services are looking at what's happening and and the games just like they're looking at what's happening on Twitter and Facebook

um because some terrorists uh of course they're using these uh these uh platforms to recruit or to um and some people are just using it to uh spread the hate. So, it's happening. It's going to happen. It's going to be increasingly more of a problem. How are we going to deal with it? Um cuz we're going to have to deal with it at some point. Um but again, you know, it's this is beyond the design. This is this is not by design. It's we we know that's not necessarily our fault, but okay, it's happening. So, what do we do now? Um and I just want to leave you with that. There's no such thing as neutral design. This is from uh Thaler and Sunstein from the book Nudge. Um and uh um if think about that. If you believe that video games can be educational, they can help people, be a force for good, and positively uh positively change the world, well, we also need to acknowledge that they can negatively affect our society. Um so, we need to face it. Um we need to understand how

this happens. And if we care, um try to see how we can um do to prevent that to happen. Thank you so so much uh for your attention. IT'S A VERY SENSITIVE AND delicate topic. I hope um that uh you found it interesting. Please give me your feedback. Let's start a conversation. Like I said, it's just I just wanted to uh share with you my thoughts on that. Nowhere near to a completed deep thought about it. But please, you know, even after the session, just connect and let me know what you think and what's missing and what you care about. And I have 1 minute for questions. Yes, do you want to ask a question? Uh Have you heard of of a person named Raman Shakazad? He's the one who posts a lot of articles

about the free-to-play and connecting it with psychology and whole lots of things such as consumer-friendly F2P. Yes. Raman Shakazad? Yeah, I think I've seen a few things. I don't exactly remember. So what's your question? Uh do you know him? No, not personally. I don't. Have you looked into any of his articles? Uh yeah, but I remember maybe seeing one of these articles, but it's not uh for what I remember, maybe I need back at it. It's not very different from what we're talking about uh behavioral psychology and all these elements that are just laid out here. Because when I looked at your when I looked at the ethics in gaming, it reminds me a lot of those articles. You should read more into it and maybe contact him, too. Sure, absolutely. Uh there's a lot of people talking about ethics. Um and I did read a bunch of it. Yes.

Uh hi. I just wanted to clarify something from one of your earlier slides. Sure. Uh when you said that about 0.3 to 1% of the general population uh could potentially be diagnosed with a gaming disorder. By general population, do you mean people who play games or the population of the world? Andrew Przybylski, are you here? Yes. The world. The world. Just I figured just make it clear. I think the UK, Germany, and Canada. Okay, so say that again so I can put in the mic. The countries that you are you were going United Kingdom United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Germany. All right. Do we have still time for questions? Just let me know. No, okay. The signs like no, stop. Okay, well, thank you so much again. I'm going to stay here to answer your questions. And again, like I said, I'm not I'm not saying that I have all the answers. I I read a lot of stuff, but I didn't read

all the things for sure. But this is more an invitation to start talking about this more. And I know that people do talk about it and this is great. So, let's keep moving. Thank you so much and have a great GPC.