Boom Beach is eating my soul...

I'm not convinced that so called 'free to play' games should be legal, though I guess there's no rule in the world that stops bright folk playing us for saps.

I've been addicted to 'Boom Beach' since the day I bought my Samsung Note. It's supposedly a strategy game in which you build a small army which you can use to conquer islands overrun by computer generated force or forces controlled by other players. What's become obvious over the time I've been playing it is that there's actually very little strategy other than the psychological strategy of the creators who have a deep knowledge of what motivates human beings.



I've been playing it for months and I'm now at level 46, my HQ at level 16. That will mean nothing to you unless you play 'Boom Beach' but, to put that into context, the highest players in the world are around level 60+. What's more significant is that I've played it without spending a penny.

Money is a big element in the game. I read somewhere recently that 'Boom Beach' earns the makers hundreds of thousands of dollars each and every day. The money comes from players buying 'diamonds' which are the most powerful currency in the game. You'll notice that all these supposedly 'free-to-play' games require a virtual currency. In some games it's gems and in others it's coins. In 'Boom Beach' it's diamonds and diamonds allow you speed things up because without diamonds, everything takes an eternity to complete.

That delay is a powerful motivation. The psychology of delayed gratification is a strong one, as the best writers often prove. If you've ever read 'Lord of the Rings', you'll notice that Tolkien interleaves three narratives through the final half of the book. It's a brilliant technique which means that he can delay the gratification of giving you a vital piece of plot for the next but two chapters. He does this at the end of nearly every chapter, meaning you're always left on a hook.

The same is true of these games. As you level up, you feel more motivated to carry on and yet the goals become harder to achieve. Or, that is, harder to achieve without paying. In the course of a week, I can earn about 100 free diamonds by simply playing the game. However, I could buy diamonds which cost £3.99 for 500 or £79.99 for 14,000. I don't, of course, but lots of people do. 14,000 diamonds would allow me to level up my base (the game's single most important unit) at least three more times. As it currently stands, I'd probably have to play it for 140 weeks to get that far. That's nearly three years.

Without buying diamonds, you get stuck like I'm currently stuck. Every day, I try to get my resources (wood, stone, metal) to a level where I can upgrade my base. Every day, I'm raided by players and I lose all my resources. I often wonder how many of those players have paid the £79.99. It's been going on for months now and I'm at the point where I wonder why I keep going.

The reason I keep going, I suppose, is because I've already invested time into the game. Once somebody is locked in a pattern of behaviour, it's hard for them to break out of it. I'm locked into a pattern of behaviour. I need to quit now and spend that time reading a book or going for a walk because I should realise that at an elevated level, the mathematics of the game have already been carefully modelled by very bright people who also understand human psychology. The game, like so many others of the same type, is bright and cheerful and you feel like you're having fun playing it. Yet it's also unbeatable. There is no goal other than the goal of making me return to it and (had I cash) encouraging me to pay money for a completely virtual reward. More than that, it reveals how easy it is to manipulate people, break their free will and turn them into drones. Deep down, the whole culture of these games is very sinister. It reveals the mean truth of consumerism. The system tempts us, flatters us, sweetens us, courts us, romances us, but in the end, it only really wants to consume us entirely.

 

When The Animals Start Crossing Over

I went to punch the man at the Tesco cheese counter in his mush this morning. When I say ‘went’, I don’t mean I set out intending to assault the poor man over his best cheddar. I mean I arrived at the delicatessen and for one strange twisted moment I thought he was a Japanese raccoon dog.

That was the moment I realised I’ve been playing too much ‘Animal Crossing’ on the 3DS. It wasn’t the carpal tunnel syndrome I’ve been suffering after days spent using the small controls in my big clumsy paws. It wasn’t even that fact that I’ve been doing all my shopping thinking in terms of bells. But the moment the small rotund man in the apron turned to me and I saw the sallow lie of his eyes, his slightly upturned snout, I felt like I was looking at Tom Nook himself. As you can probably guess, he’s not my favourite person at the moment. I’m into Nook the Crook for a cool quarter of a mill and he won’t speak to me until I’ve settled the debt.

I find these moments when computer games cross over into the real world happening to me more often than they used to. In the early days of gaming, it was hard to associate the real world with anything you experienced in the virtual. I don’t remember having these weird experiences back when 3D objects were jagged white lines and sprites just vague blocks of colour. It was first person shooters that started to warp my perceptions of the everyday. I first noticed the phenomenon after long sessions playing ‘Doom’. Walking past any industrial yard or road works, if I saw a pile of barrels I would mentally reach for my shotgun to blow them up. It happened again after playing too much ‘Burnout Revenge’. I couldn’t be in a car moving at high speed without the urge to use the crash barriers as a way of keeping me on the road whilst cornering. As for the urge to stick the nose of the car into anybody foolish enough to get in my way, well the temptation is almost too much to resist. The ‘Grand Theft Auto’ games were a long hard struggle to stay out of prison given my constant urges to car jack and ‘Portal 2’ was one long battle to avoid jumping from high places.

More recently, these moments have been happening all the time. Just yesterda

y I saw a butterfly. I’ve never chased a butterfly in my life but I gasped and skipped after it once I realised it was one that Blathers hasn’t got in his collection. Luckily, after a couple of steps, sense prevailed and I tried to look disinterested but, by then, it was too late. Everybody in the rugby scrum knew I had a passion for butterflies and I might never live that down.

‘Animal Crossing’ in 3D is a game that’s intended to ingrate seamlessly with your life but I’m not sure it should be this seamless. I wake up first thing in the morning thinking my debt woes are behind me because I have 200,000 bells in the bank. Can’t make that credit card payment this month? I’ll just spend my morn

ing fishing and I’ll sell the Hammerhead Shark I know I’m sure to catch. I’m also disappointed to learn that the next door cat won’t give me something for the old wardrobe I’m trying to offload in exchange for a pear wardrobe.

As games mature, it becomes easier to confuse the separation between your real and imaginary life. As excited as I am by the prospect of Oculus Rift hitting the mainstream, there’s something about fully immersing myself into those worlds that worries me. Gaming is a powerful drug and wrapping your senses entirely in a fictional experience is something for which the human species has yet to properly adapt. ‘Animal Crossing’ might be very similar to the game on the original DS but 3D adds that degree of reality which makes a huge difference. It’s the difference between imagining and

believing.

I used to mock the friend who first introduced me to ‘Animal Crossing’ simply because she would write real letters to the characters in the game. ‘You know, the computing power in a DS means that it can’t actually process and understand your real language,’ I would say. ‘Those long letters are just meaningless gabble to the game engine. Just hit a load of keys randomly and it will think it makes sense.’

‘No, that’s not right,’ she would protest and I would laugh.

Only, I don’t laugh now. Not since I told Bill the Duck to finish every conversation with his new catchphrase ‘arses’. The word has spread like a virus through the entire village and there are now ‘arses’ everywhere. It was a hard lesson to learn and I now know



I should never have misjudged the cleverness of Nintendo engineers. Now I’m playing the game with proper intent. I know it’s morally wrong to make a duck say ‘arses’, both in this world and that word. That’s assuming I can even tell the difference anymore and I’m not sure I can. Arses.

This was a piece I wrote very quickly in response to a job advert for video game related articles for a start-up games magazine. I never heard a thing, which probably tells me something about the article or the start-up games magazine.