I'm an expert. I still got hooked.
Mar. 7th, 2021 11:52 amI don't have many games on my phone. I tend to use it for news, reading, and, yeah, Twitter quite a bit, but I don't Facebook or Insta or Snapchat or whatever, and I haven't had a good reason for Tumblr. But Omaha introduced me to "Boggle with Friends" (absolutely not gonna give you a link) and for the first few days she was kicking my ass.
Then two awful things happened.
The first was that I started to consistently beat Omaha. And it wasn't even close. I went from losing regularly by 10% margins to winning regularly by 100% margins. At the end of every game, whether it was with her or with the game's AI, I would carefully examine the list of words I didn't get and ruthlessly memorize the word and directional patterns that I was weak at. I would write them down on my phone and, during the practice sessions, deliberately search for them, so I could add those patterns to my search behavior. In a few short days I was building high-speed pattern recognition systems explicitly for this game.
I'm a writer and a programmer. Literally my job entails working with words and high-complexity pattern recognition. This game is pure catnip to someone like me.
The other was that I got addicted to the game. I recognized absolutely every dark pattern in the game: how the AI would "lose" to me sometimes, and what algorithm it was using to lose. (I know that it knows every word at the start, since I've written a Boggle solver. The engagement algorithm it was using was a two-phase variant of the SM2 reinforcement learning algorithm.) The pace was always at just the right level to make me think, "Ha, I can beat it again" or "I can't leave knowing that I could beat it next time," while all the while in my backbrain my trie-searching algorithm was telling me clearly that it knew where every goddamned word on the board was already. The way the game had "experience points" that seemed to be tied to the complexity of the words. The way it offered daily prizes, reminder notifications of unfinished games, competition with other humans (ugh, other humans), artificial scarcity of time and game resources. I knew absolutely every trick they were using, would marvel at how they worked it into the game, and yet... it still hooked me.
And it's a pay-to-play, subscription-service based game. It's not like there's new content, either. It's fucking Boggle! I have the board game on my shelf! It doesn't need a subscription. And yet, it was.
Fortunately, I deleted it after only paying $10 for a single round.
The thing is, if I got hooked on it, even while clearly recognizing every dark pattern it was using, I can begin to understand why my last employer worried so much about it's "Responsible and Ethical Gaming Commission." I don't know if that was a real concern or just a mask to keep regulators off their back, but they made a big deal about it, and now I understand why.
Then two awful things happened.
The first was that I started to consistently beat Omaha. And it wasn't even close. I went from losing regularly by 10% margins to winning regularly by 100% margins. At the end of every game, whether it was with her or with the game's AI, I would carefully examine the list of words I didn't get and ruthlessly memorize the word and directional patterns that I was weak at. I would write them down on my phone and, during the practice sessions, deliberately search for them, so I could add those patterns to my search behavior. In a few short days I was building high-speed pattern recognition systems explicitly for this game.
I'm a writer and a programmer. Literally my job entails working with words and high-complexity pattern recognition. This game is pure catnip to someone like me.
The other was that I got addicted to the game. I recognized absolutely every dark pattern in the game: how the AI would "lose" to me sometimes, and what algorithm it was using to lose. (I know that it knows every word at the start, since I've written a Boggle solver. The engagement algorithm it was using was a two-phase variant of the SM2 reinforcement learning algorithm.) The pace was always at just the right level to make me think, "Ha, I can beat it again" or "I can't leave knowing that I could beat it next time," while all the while in my backbrain my trie-searching algorithm was telling me clearly that it knew where every goddamned word on the board was already. The way the game had "experience points" that seemed to be tied to the complexity of the words. The way it offered daily prizes, reminder notifications of unfinished games, competition with other humans (ugh, other humans), artificial scarcity of time and game resources. I knew absolutely every trick they were using, would marvel at how they worked it into the game, and yet... it still hooked me.
And it's a pay-to-play, subscription-service based game. It's not like there's new content, either. It's fucking Boggle! I have the board game on my shelf! It doesn't need a subscription. And yet, it was.
Fortunately, I deleted it after only paying $10 for a single round.
The thing is, if I got hooked on it, even while clearly recognizing every dark pattern it was using, I can begin to understand why my last employer worried so much about it's "Responsible and Ethical Gaming Commission." I don't know if that was a real concern or just a mask to keep regulators off their back, but they made a big deal about it, and now I understand why.
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