Pushing Buttons: My First Week in the Gaming Industry

I was American and I spoke English. Apparently these were the only “credentials” I needed to enter the gaming industry. It was the spring of 2014 and I was making the first career change of my life. My new job? Localization Specialist at one of China’s biggest browser game companies. They had already expanded to Southeast Asia, and now they had their sights set on the massive markets of North America and Europe.

After a brief onboarding, I was assigned my first task: Play this game for one week and write a report detailing how you feel about it. What a great start! I was now getting paid to do something I would volunteer to do? Awesome. So I followed the link, registered an account, and then opened the game. League of Angels?? Okay, well, by this point League of Legends had been out for a little while, so I assumed this was a Chinese knock off of Riot’s famous MOBA. I had no idea what I was really getting myself into.

League of Angels

After living in World of Warcraft’s Azeroth for practically the entirety of my undergraduate degree, I was a bit skeptical about this game that supposedly ran inside your browser without proper client software. And I was right to be skeptical—this wasn’t anything like a true MMORPG. In fact, this wasn’t anything at all like any game I had ever played before. It was absolutely terrifying.

But before I get to the terrifying part, let me dispense some basic facts about this “game”. League of Angels was a fully browser-based “MMORPG” developed by 游族. Youzu, or later known as Yoozoo, had also launched a “gaming platform” called GT Arcade. On this platform you could play League of Angels, recharge, talk in the forums, get customer support, etc. When typing this, I checked if this platform still exists. It does. And now there are apparently 3 League of Angels titles.

But anyways, let’s move on. Let me explain to you why this was one of the most terrifying gaming experiences of my life.

A League of Its Own

I had played other browser games on Kongregate before. Fun games. Games that I would not mind telling my friends about. I probably spent over 100 hours on SAS Zombie Assault. So the fact that League of Angels was a browser game didn’t really make me suspicious of anything in particular. I didn’t really know what to expect.

I remember the first battle. It was a 2d view, set up like any typical boss battle on an SNES game. Our side versus theirs. It’s time to fight! I started pressing the WASD keys. Nothing happened. Okay, so maybe it’s mouse only. I started clicking. Nothing. Then I hit the spacebar a few times in a row. Nothing. But I was winning? What was happening? So I asked the guy sitting next to me “Hey! How do I control my angels?” Then he said: “You don’t. It fights for you.”

What? It fights for me? At this point, I had played war sims where battles or fights were calculated, but that didn’t violate my expectations. After all, the core gameplay was diplomacy, building armies, and managing your economy. But this game?

I was certainly confused, but I wasn’t feeling negative yet. Maybe this game just wasn’t for me.

Do You Play It, or Does It Play You?

If the battles weren’t playable, then I wondered, what was the part of the game that you played? Surely there was something. Yeah, I did click on some buttons to level up my angels. And sure, there was a (shallow) story that I clicked and progressed through. But there absolutely must be something I was missing. The longer I looked, however, the more evident it became that I indeed was not missing anything. That was it. I had experienced the entire gameplay loop already. There was nothing left to do.

So if there wasn’t actually anything to “play” in this game, then what was its reason for existing? Coming from a “hardcore” gaming background, this “thing” felt completely foreign to me. After a few more hours of gameplay, however, I was finally starting to see what this was.

It Plays You: A Stack of “User Exploits”

League of Angels wasn’t really a game. It was basically a collection of hooks, traps, pits, and tricks to get you to spend money. You might ask “If it was that bad, why would anyone spend money on it?” And the answer is: Because some people just couldn’t help it. League of Angels abused people in the same ways modern social media takes advantage of our psychological adaptations.

So what are these psychological adaptations that I’m talking about? Here are a few that I saw this game take advantage of:

1. Variable Reward Schedules: The unpredictable timing and size of rewards keep the brain checking and expecting far more than a guaranteed reward would.

2. Loss Aversion / FOMO: Humans tend to focus more strongly on what they stand to lose compared with what they might gain.

3. Sunk Cost Fallacy: The resulting behavior of loss aversion. You continue to do something that is irrational or hold onto something to avoid wasting time, effort, or resources that you already spent.

4. Social Proof / Status Signaling: We’re naturally concerned with our status or our “place” in a given social hierarchy.

5. Supernormal Stimuli: This refers to exaggerated versions of natural stimuli that trigger a stronger response than the real thing. (Hypersexualized content, immediate social status or validation)

Now keep that list in mind as we take a look at some of the mechanics LoA used to keep people playing and spending. Most modern mobile games employ these tactics too.

1. The Angel Gacha: The game’s most desirable characters (angels) were primarily obtained through randomized “summons”. Normal summons would only get you rare or epic angels, while advanced summons would get you legendary or mythic ones.

On top of these summons, there was also a wheel that only opened when you bought a specific reward pack. This wheel was spun using a premium currency, and the rewards never repeated. This meant that players would spin the wheel up to eight times to guarantee they got every angel in that particular pool.

This exact structure now has a name. It’s called a pity system, and every gacha game you’ve heard of now has one.

2. VIP Ladder: Since this game didn’t really have anything to do, the main focus was competing on leaderboards. LoA ran a 10 tier VIP system, and every dollar you spend in the game contributes toward your rank (in addition to VIP purchases).

Most importantly, VIP status isn’t cemented once bought. VIP stats expired after 30 days, meaning players had to renew this if they wanted to keep their status. Higher VIP levels, of course, gave players extra attempts for all gameplay modes and allowed them to “blitz” or skip through daily dungeons faster.

This came across as a very greedy move. I had run into leaderboards before. But expiring statuses? It was too blunt for me. It was asking for more money too directly.

3. The Lucky Tree: Blessing this lucky tree would give you coins, diamonds, and other items. These individual rewards would then be stacked with server-wide rewards. The more times your entire server blessed the tree, the more rewards everyone would get.

And here again, the daily attempts would be severely restrained unless you paid. VIP4 or above players would get another free attempt.

In the end, this mechanic was literally just clicking on a tree. That’s it. You logged in, and clicked on this tree once a day. This seemed ridiculous to me. Nobody would consider this fun, but everyone was doing it anyway.

4. Daily Login and Recharge Rewards: These are standard practices in almost every mobile game these days. Players are rewarded for simply logging in, or logging in for 7 days in a row. Rewards would escalate as the streak continued.

For first time recharges, any player spending any amount of money would get a reward, regardless of the amount of money they spent.

5. World Bosses, PvP Rankings, and Cross-server Events: These were designed to keep players logging on consistently. All of these events were timed and recurring. They were built to make sure there was always some reason you should log in.

6. Random Mini Games: LoA included tons of random mini games. There was a Bejeweled or Candy Crush styled match game. There were wheel of fortune style wheels, egg-cracking events, etc. I think at one point they had also added a Farmville type clone where you had to invite your friends to water your garden for you.

These mini games, while making up for the lack of any actual core gameplay, also pushed players to spend in-game currencies for more moves, attempts, or spins.

7. The Angels Themselves: “League of Angels” doesn’t necessarily mean only female angels—but apparently that is the only version the developers cared to include. And almost all of these angels were highly sexualized.

8. The Classic Paywall: The early game is intentionally frictionless. You kill every enemy with ease. You get S ratings on battles. You level up extremely quickly and unlock features in quick succession.

Then, around Level 30, progression slows dramatically. Right around when the player had invested enough time in the game, they’re hit with a barrier that uses the sunk-cost fallacy to get them to recharge.

You can imagine how foolish I felt when I told my colleague that the developers had really messed up the pacing because player progression had suddenly and inexplicably slowed to a crawl. I had never even heard of a paywall before.

Things to Come: Mobile Gaming

So I finished my assignment. I played the game for a week and reported my impressions to my boss. But the very next week, something funny happened. I caught myself logging into the game on Monday. Why? There was absolutely no reason why. I just wanted to get my daily rewards.

And that’s when I realized that these kinds of mechanics weren’t going to go away. They were powerful. Although I had seen through them for what they were, I knew these Chinese browser games were on to something.

Going forward, developers of free to play mobile games everywhere started to employ these tactics—not as crude or shameless as in League of Angels, but used in games all the same.

Gacha mechanics are still visible in a lot of anime/manga themed games. The VIP systems of 2014 are essentially the battle passes of today. Login rewards are now standard across mobile games. The lucky tree still exists, too. In Hay Day you literally tap trees for a chance to get more resources. So none of these mechanics have actually disappeared, developers have just gotten much more savvy at dressing them up.

So there I was, a complete newbie in the game industry bamboozled by this strange, new type of game design that left me feeling a bit scandalized. The assignment lasted one week, but the quirky, seemingly pointless mechanics I experienced were soon to become standard practice in the new era of mobile games to come.