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Time to get Judgemental

(This is a ranty post and because I actively dislike the entire field I have not done a lot of very specific research here. If this bothers you, go somewhere else.

Likewise, if you read this post and catch yourself thinking "but I like playing incremental games and I don't think this makes me a bad person!": This post is not for you. As always the problem lies with the producer and less with the consumer of the goods, so please just move on.)

It feels like a very tired thing to talk about these days, the strange close connection between the parts of Indiegames that are the most prominent and dominant in terms of setting the current game design paradigms and how similar they all are to the methods and aesthetics used by the gambling industry.

A lot of writing has already been done, and people seem to generally accept the concept that yes, there's a specific set of games that heavily draw on systems and aesthetics taken from gambling to deploy them in their videogames, but then it stops and the excuses start rolling in. Chief among those is the argument that while a game might deploy similar methods of mental manipulation, it's somehow fine, because people aren't also losing money while being entrapped.

Sure you play with the aesthetics, and try very hard to ensnare human beings into an experience that eats their time and leaves them with a kind of empty pleasantness at best, but at least you're not preying on them even more, which somehow makes it okay?

I don't know, but the last time I checked, most videogames of this ilk are sold for money, and going by the mountain of "this one person spent three Months making Card Murderer and is now a Millionaire" stories, I feel like "relatively high chance of making a profit" seems to be the most prevalent reason why so many people have decided to jump on this particular bandwagon.

I get that gambling seems to be culturally on the rise as well right now, but I really don't think that this many people have suddenly realized that they're really into the slot machine aesthetic.

These games are made, because they make money. The aesthetics and methods of gambling are deployed, because they keep players "engaged" for longer. And because platforms like Steam do like it, when people are "engaged", and because gambling gives you a set of tools that can easily be deployed, you go back to it, over and over again. Worst of it all, this stuff then extends further into genres that previously were left untouched by it.

I played around 7 hours of Citizen Sleeper, all accumulated within a span of two days somewhere in the Summer of 2023. Aside from looking at it briefly for other reasons, I haven't touched the game since, because I realized how the constant push to play another in-game day, just to see if you can trigger another event, made me feel horrible. Honestly, I can't remember much of the story (though I did like it I think?), but I do remember the dice mechanics and the clocks and all the different meters you could fill. The drip-feeding of decisions and resources to manage, the limited actions you had each day, the fact that you couldn't quit out of the game and save your progress at any time (at least it didn't feel like it).

Citizen Sleeper doesn't look like an incremental game, or Balatro or whatever else might be out there these days (I try not to look, it makes me sad), but it had enough of that type of stuff in it, that I started resenting it.

In a way, because of the layer of abstraction, it's much harder to leverage "this game deploys gambling-like systems to entrap players" against it critically.

Yet, even though I feel a bit silly for saying it, I do believe that Citizen Sleeper uses gambling-like systems to entrap players. Whether or not that decision was made consciously is a different question entirely that I cannot answer.

However, Citizen Sleeper is a good example to show just how wide this stuff has spread, even just a few years ago and how we just kept doing it more and more. Aside from the occasional "boy isn't it strange how there are a lot of indiegames out there that look suspiciously like slot machines?" essay, nothing happens.

Instead, those who are the most efficient at this type of skillful manipulation are celebrated.

I do my best to stay away from these games and the people who make them, but every now and then I stumble over one and every single time I end up being disgusted.

I find these games disgusting, and I find the people disgusting who willingly deploy these systems. You don't get a free pass, if your specific flavour of gambling-like is a satire of real gambling.

It is very easy to make a satiric videogame, because all you have to do is wink at the camera every now and then, while indulging in the same awful shit as your peers.

I can't stand any of this and I think everyone would be better off, if it would all disappear.

It's 2026 and there are platforms out there that let you basically bet on anything you want, and yet a videogame being "addictive" is still used as a marker of quality. I'm tired of it all and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

I hope there is a reckoning at some point. This goes for a lot of things that are happening right now, but I really, really hope that one day in the not so far future we look back at the current crop of very popular indiegames and think: "Wow this all was pretty awful, huh?"