10 Most Desperate Ways Video Games Got You To Play
3. That Sweet, Sweet Loot
The mere whisper of the word "loot" is enough to make millions of players' ears prick up and pay attention, so ubiquitous is the presence of Glistening Things for them to hoover up after defeating an enemy.
While finding currency or new weapons and armour is nothing new for video games, we've come a long way from the comparatively quaint days of Diablo's loot hunt.
Loot is commonplace across game genres these days, as publishers have discovered that few things get players' dopamine receptors firing like a shiny purple pick-up.
While loot appears in many great games, some are so singularly focused around their collection that it feels tantamount to shining a laser pointer at a cat. We're the cat in this analogy, obviously.
Loot can be weaponised more nefariously in games that feature loot boxes, where players are encouraged to develop a gamblers' mindset to RNG elements. This is particularly troubling when players are able to spend real money obtaining or unlocking more loot boxes.
No loot-driven game can survive for long unless it can offer up fun cosmetics and meaningful upgrades, but even so, these games are typically designed around manipulating human behaviour first and foremost.
They are industriously committed to maximising player "engagement" in order to fill their coffers, and it doesn't get much more desperate than that when you're apparently making "art."