Internal video game economies at the very least need regulation, and at the absolute best should seek to emulate the communistic economy of player- and developer-created content that the Little Big Planet video game series perfected.
The Chinese government made headlines last year when it planned to ban loot boxes among other cheap tactics used by the gaming industry to garner money because it was effectively gambling — which it no doubt is.
The Chinese Communist Party’s now-scrapped regulation of these predatory business tactics by game companies was a great idea because of the observable negative habits that loot box gambling at a young age instills in children.
But a deeper issue needs addressing. Internal game economies typically have no competition, meaning supply and demand can be artificially created by the title owner through restrictive access ploys and major inflation on digital commodities. Oftentimes the psychological tricks to get money from players go hand-in-hand with the ability to manipulate an internal game economy in any way the game company wants.
Before exploring these tactics in detail, let’s get some definitions down.
A loot box is a digital commodity within a video game and is used in many major titles including the Call of Duty series, Fifa, Clash of Clans and many more. While different games have different avenues for unlocking loot boxes, the defining feature of them is that you pay — almost always with real money somewhere in the process — for a dice roll of some sort on whether you get certain exclusive digital items in a game out of a pool of items. There are also often different rarity ratings attached to loot-box items which determine the degree of the item’s desirability and the likelihood of obtaining it.
Most of the time these loot box items are simply cosmetic, being things like skins, gamertag calling cards, gun charms and so on. What can be especially frustrating for players, however, is when loot boxes include game-changing items in a competitive multiplayer game, as it gives an advantage to players willing to burn more cash which the gaming community colloquially calls “pay-to-win.”
For example, backlash against the loot-box items that gave an advantage to players who obtained them in the Call of Duty series caused Activision in 2019 to make all items that have an impact on game balance in that year’s release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, only earnable through gameplay. This meant that for the first time in five years, the game no longer had pay-to-win mechanics behind its loot box system.
While good for the sake of fairness, just removing pay-to-win loot-box items doesn’t solve the predatory nature of these lucrative tactics. Purely cosmetic items in games still often enrich a player’s sense of identity and status, especially the latter when it comes to owning rarer items. Therefore, pay-to-win items or not, the presence of loot boxes pull gamers into a scheme where they spend excessive amounts of real money to eventually land the item they want or one that is seen as rare.
And with a burgeoning literature showing that loot box use at a young age predicts gambling issues later in life, the practice should be banned for both gameplay-changing items and cosmetic items alike.
This would be in the purview of government legislation which would have to stipulate something like: Because of the detrimental effects of gambling — especially on children — on top of the ease of market manipulation (because in-game economies have no competitors, as I mentioned earlier) and psychometric ploys to induce FOMO and get more in-game buys on digital items (Fortnite being a major perpetrator of both of these practices), loot boxes should be banned and price controls set on certain inflated items.
One way governments could implement price controls on in-game commodities is by categorizing similar classes of in-game commodities across a spectrum of games, say weapon skins, and setting a price on that class of items at the lower end of what companies are charging for them.
One might object that companies have different expenses for making weapon skins and therefore setting a price floor would mean some companies with higher labour costs choose not to make weapon skins anymore. And while this is a possibility, major game companies underpaying developers is an endemic issue in the industry which immediately makes this worry somewhat dubious considering it’s the major companies that often have the most predatory market manipulation tactics with their in-game products.
Furthermore, many games today make most of their revenue through in-game purchases which can keep them maintained for years after release, often meaning they’re just cash cows being milked to complete atrophy. Floating on in-game purchase revenues can lead to minimal maintenance to the base game and little pressure to create anything new, which is the story behind why Grand Theft Auto Online is still getting new content 10 years later, much to the rightful dismay of some fans.
However, while major game companies, or smaller ones with aspirations to become corporate giants, are going to need regulation to keep their predatory practices for in-game purchases curbed, there have been game companies that employed low-cost or virtually free exchanges of novel player- and developer-created items.
My favourite example of this comes from the much-beloved PlayStation-exclusive Little Big Planet series developed by Media Molecule.
The Little Big Planet games are 3D, from-the-side perspective platformer games set in dreamlike worlds with an overarching antiquarian, arts-and-crafts-y theme. In the main stories for the games, the iconic player-controlled Sackboy, who is a cartoon-proportioned little humanoid puppet made of stitching material, navigates a typical hero plot with a main bad guy waiting at the end of the game. Interestingly, players could earn the materials and items used in the main-story levels by capturing them in bubbles which are sometimes hidden but usually out in the open as a reward for progressing through the game. Once procured through the story, players could then go to their “moon” in the game’s quasi menu called “the pod” and create their own levels using these bubble objects, be they materials, mechanisms, stickers or other items.
Players could either create a level and publish it for other players to play or spend time in their moon with their friends and mess around with the items they had obtained in a blank-slate level of their own.
From this, the series developed a rich community of player level-creators, so much so that Media Molecule would give a special stamp to especially high-quality published levels. And this online portion of the game was free besides obviously purchasing the base game.
But what made the non-commoditized aspect of the series even more unique and in stark contrast to the now highly prevalent predatory practices in the industry today best represented by loot boxes, is that player-created items and levels were exchangeable so long as the object creator put it into an earnable bubble in their published level somewhere.
This function created a phenomenon of levels being published by players purely as giveaways for the objects they created, especially intricately engineered items like mechs, nuclear bombs, suspension cars, clever useless machines — or just about anything else a person could think up. These levels were created by players who wanted to share their inventions with other players to enjoy on their own moon or potentially use when creating their own levels.
And again, this entire dynamic had no monetization barriers at all. The online component of these games was roughly founded on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
While the LBP games had some relatively cheap in-game microtransactions for copyrighted skins from collaborations with other media franchises, there was never a change to the free aspect of online play. Across the series’ three titles, once you purchased the base game, you had access to an online community free of commoditization and founded on mutual aid along with the pure want to share one’s original inventions.
Some games, like the wildly popular first-person shooter CS:GO, will source player-created content, but often to be sold in their in-game store where they take a cut. And while this system does remunerate the labour of the creator, a price tag bars people who can’t afford to spend money on these items from experiencing these original creations.
Now consider again those game companies that use loot box mechanics and other psychologically manipulative tactics due to their ability to manipulate both market supply and demand with their in-game economies. If the main perpetrators of those practices instead took a hint from the Little Big Planet model, gaming could not only be less harmful to people’s minds and wallets in the aggregate but could also instill basic social virtues in an overwhelmingly young and therefore impressionable demographic. Virtues, mind you, that everyone sane agrees are important; namely, sharing, invention for the sake of itself and expression free of class distinction.
