Leaving the Casino
Or, how to deal with our gacha game of bargains
A friend-of-a-friend of mine plays Genshin Impact, an expansive open-world RPG that includes an in-game gacha mechanic where the player can spend real-world money to enter a lottery to gain new, powerful playable characters. My friend-of-a-friend is also, self-described, a cheap person, and refuses to spend money in-game. Instead, she gives the game her time—while the lottery system is mostly powered by real USD, the player can also win a few free lottery tickets just by loading up Genshin Impact every day and playing. The day we met illustrates the pitfalls of investing time, not money, into gacha games: I wanted to visit the zoo with my friend, and my friend told me that this friend-of-a-friend had to come along with us because she needed some sunshine, some fresh air, and an excuse to walk around Madison. Turns out, she had spent her Saturday playing Genshin Impact for eleven hours straight.
On the other side of things, there’s Gene Park’s brilliantly penned essay on his experience with Genshin Impact. Within a few weeks, he had spent $130 dollars playing the lottery for more powerful characters.
Neither of these actions are, in themselves, bad. Spending $130 dollars on entertainment is not exorbitant, though it would net you two newly released AAA video games, and spending 11 hours on a video game is an indulgence I certainly have enjoyed. The problem isn’t the numbers, but rather that these actions were at least somewhat involuntary. For my friend-of-a-friend, the nudge of a walk in the zoo was needed to prevent another day of grinding—she accompanied us because she told my friend that she needed an excuse to leave the house—and for Park the opening words of his essay say it all: “Before I knew it, I was $130 poorer.” In fact, he decided “to publish this article to keep [him]self accountable.”
So, as with most gambling, surviving a gacha game with wallet and vitamin D levels intact requires self-accountability strategies, leveraging social connections to get you off the couch, and for many, well, the need to leave the casino.
In Park, I found a kindred spirit: I too am publishing to hold myself accountable to a greater good—that’s the reason for this blog! But I also found something intellectually deeper. As noted in an earlier post, the use of variable rewards in modern day online shopping reminds me a lot of a gacha game. Reading Park’s essay reminded me of the genuine thrill I feel before purchasing some silly bauble that I never use. Maybe Genshin Impact isn’t, as once thought, the largest gacha game of all time: in fact, it’s just a mini-game in the gacha that makes all gachas, the entirety of shopping as we now know it.
The Gacha Game as Itself
But if I use gacha as a metaphor for all shopping, we should unpack what a gacha game is, or what I mean by a gacha game, and then map it onto the average consumer experience.
I would say a gacha game must have the following three elements: a skill set to master, variable rewards, and an aspect of collection.
Collection: Gacha games tend to center themselves around a core collectible, normally characters for the player to play as. A glance at this ranking of the 10 Best Gacha Games should show that the perceived value of a Gacha game is in its library of collectibles; the number of available characters in each game is a vital statistic for a potential consumer to know, and is featured in most of the blurbs of the aforementioned article, the same way that the hours in a game’s main quest would be for players of AAA games. Park’s essay also shows how gacha games can create an emotional connection between the player and an individual collectible. It is Venti’s rich character design and backstory that leads Park to spend $70 in pursuit of him. This explains why so many established IPs have entered into the gacha market, like Final Fantasy (which has seven entries in the genre): if Park could be wooed into paying such prices for a character he had never met before, imagine how much money someone would pay for Cloud Strife, Goku, their friendly neighborhood Spiderman?
Requiring Mastery: To not simply be a slot machine, there must be gameplay, normally oriented around these collectibles, that is compelling and fun. Furthermore, doing well in gameplay often leads to free, or discounted, chances to win a collectible. Final Fantasy’s entries provide a great example: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius plays just like a SNES entry in the fabled series, with the added gacha element introducing special combat units to be collected via lottery. In order to get these units, the character must expend a currency called “lapis” to enter into the lottery. Since lapis can be collected by winning in-game expeditions, the player can ostensibly get good at Brave Exvius and pay for the lottery that way; however, lapis is available for purchase using real world dollars. Furthermore, there are a number of units that are added to the party as the story advances, like in a regular Final Fantasy game. Therefore, you can either become a champion at all things Exvius, hone your skills, and thereby collect new characters, spending eleven hours a weekend like my friend-of-a-friend, or you can spend some money. But, the point is, a Gacha game needs to be a game, not just a slot machine, and the more that the game relates back to the collection mechanic the better.
Variable Rewards: The gacha game, by definition, has to have some kind of lottery system, with the act of participating in this lottery termed a “draw”/“pull.” Gacha is named after those little toy machines where you can put in a quarter to get a random bauble, like what you’d see at a gas station. The loosest definition of a gacha game would be any game that features such a pull system requiring real world money, so one could see the first two elements of this schema as optional. However, since all video games have some level of learning curve, the second facet holds for the majority of gacha games. And, since the point of gacha machines in the first place was to hold plastic figurines that a kid could collect, I think the first facet also holds. The nexus of mastery and lotteries often creates a trade-off between spending money and spending time in a gacha game: in Exvius, there is lapis to be collected by sinking time into winning quests, but players will often find that there isn’t quite enough free pulls available to get the characters of their dream without serious grinding, meaning that spending money becomes an attractive alternative. (That, after all, is how the gacha maker profits).
Now, as with any emerging genre, the definition of a gacha game is nebulous and evolving. But, Brave Exvius and Genshin Impact are two of the most popular games of the genre, and I would argue that the features above are their unifying characteristics. (Well… Both are anime-inspired high-fantasy games, but given that Marvel has entered the gacha business, that clearly is not the unity that defines a gacha game.) It’s a good enough definition, and furthermore, it’s a definition that works well in the context of discussing my larger aim, which is shopping writ large, and so it will be my definition used in this essay.
The Gacha Game as Shopping
Collecting things in a game with variable rewards that requires some sort of skill, the nexus of these last two features creating an inherent trade-off between time and money, is what our Black-Friday-limited-edition-Amazon-lightning-deals-Singles-Day shopping environment is all about!
Collection: This part is the most literal analogue. When you shop, you get something. But there are ways that our modern shopping experience further relies on collectability. There are Day-One editions of video games that are only available for a limited time post-release. There are movies and mascots that power merchandising empires, and our desire to purchase everything with the picture’s name on it has created some highly lucrative ones. We want everything to do with what we love and we want to own it before it goes back into the Disney Vault. Marketers know this. Retailers oblige. We succumb.
Requiring Mastery: Shopping, like Genshin Impact, is fun, and it’s the sort of fun that appeals to fans of RPGs like myself. To make an informed purchase, you need to be aware of the specifications of the product, you need to read through the reviews, you need to know which coupons are applicable and for how long. Strategy guides exist for video games, and gacha games as well, and shopping likewise has numerous manuals to help you be a better shopper. The experts in the field, the Extreme Couponers, had a show that lasted five seasons. We brag about finding a deal, because it’s a skill worth bragging about.
Variable Rewards: Deals inherently make the outcome of shopping variable: you either get the video game for $60, or for $17, and this is at some level randomized. No one knows for sure when the next Steam sale will occur, but PC Gamer will give you predictions. The door-buster was a Black Friday invention where variable reward was the key to the game: only a certain number of amazing deals would be available for each store, and so no matter how good a shopper you were, the outcome required luck. In fact, Black Friday is the best example of how the nexus of variable rewards and shopping acumen create a trade-off between time and money: if you camp out the night before, you get a better deal, and if you know the layout of the store and have created a game plan to most effectively traverse the aisles that you need to, a few hours of your time can translate into hundreds of dollars in savings; that is, depending on the time of year, the reward of hours invested varies. But, it’s a competition, and there’s luck afoot. Losers have to face the scalping market.
You get stuff! It’s at random! And whether or not this stuff is good for you is based on whether you can spot a deal, whether you can pummel your way through your fellow shoppers, whether you know the schedule of shopping holidays. The brilliance of the gacha game is that it nests gambling within a new apparatus where skill is involved and where prizes are unique. Shopping seems to me to do the same thing.
The Habitual Casino
The problem with this, of course, is that gambling is highly habit-forming. Gacha games are designed to make you pull habitually, and so any bijection between gacha and shopping at large reveals some level of dependency formation.
But we should go further! To merely look at the similarities between a genre of gambling and shopping at large and say that our day is done, that shopping has been proved to be an addiction, is too facile. Most things have some amount of risk, most things have a learning curve, and people will and can collect anything.
Let’s turn to Nir Eyal, the expert in habit formation and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, other behavioral designers, and psychologists to discuss how the act of shopping uses these habit-forming methods.
Mastery: In Sharath Pandeshwar’s case study of the meditation app Headspace, the delineation of the the endowed progress effect shows how mastery of a system leads to habit formation. Headspace, like many other apps, includes detailed statistics on the user’s progress in an attractive data dashboard. It also awards milestones based on users surpassing certain goals, and uses a streak system where a user is rewarded for checking into the app every day. These are all standard features of self-care apps—Duolingo does this too. These features work because they show us our slowly building mastery. We like to get better at things. As I continued to shop, and I understood when sales were coming through, and I found tools to help me track prices and I found the review sites that best recommended me products, I found a truly rich joy.
Collection: Collection is inherently about habit—you can’t collect one of an item. It is imperfective: if you collect something, it is not a single action, but a series of purchases made over time. Collectibles is something I likely need to consider at more length later on, since I have been a collector of Pusheen the cat and Hello Kitty. But I think that the idea of having something, of increasing the number of things we own, particularly if they are rare things like designer merchandise or early releases of games, can form dependence. Acquisitiveness is likely an inherent part of human psyches, and anything that is naturally enjoyable can shift into addiction.
Variable Rewards: I like Eyal’s treatment of variable rewards: the argument is that inconsistency is something the human mind spends a lot of time trying to resolve. We crave patterns; we are creatures of apophenia. But trying to identify patterns, particularly where there are no patterns, is a mentally intensive task. Thus, when facing variable rewards, we enter into a trance—a trance that, Eyal says, would be familiar to players of video games. Marge Simpson in front of the slot machine exemplifies this in a more colorful form. I always have, in the back of my mind, a part of my brain that wonders when the next Steam sale is coming, and sometimes I find myself zoning out to consider this unpredictable piece of my life. We all live with low-grade uncertainty available to hypnotize us; shopping is another part of this.
Triggers: This is not at the core of gacha games, but a number of gacha games employ the use of push notifications to remind you of the subtle pleasures of purchasing a pull. Genshin Impact has routine double resin weekends, where you get more of the in-game currency. Your phone alights with a reminder of how easy it would be to sink back in. Greater attention to how cues play with habits can be found here. The worst part about leaving shopping behind, for me, has been that I still get advertisements for AliExpress, push notifications from my cashback apps, reminders of all the things I could collect. This, to me, is the most pernicious piece of our modern world of shopping.
But How Do We Leave the Casino?
This is what separates my casino from a run-of-the-mill gacha game: you can’t really log off. At the end of the day, unless you live in a cooperative autarky, purchases will need to take place. Furthermore, it is impossible to avoid the triggers—the internet is powered through advertising, if you drive you’re inundated by billboards, everything is designed to catch the eye.
We need to up our ante. Here are a few ideas I have sketched out that might be of benefit if you feel trapped in the world of shopping.
Social Accountability
This, to me, seems the most promising. We are working against some deep human desires: the desire to minimize uncertainty, to acquire, to learn, to form habits. The only thing stronger, in the humble estimation of this newsletter, is socialization. Social accountability was both Park and my friend-of-a-friend’s strategy to evade gacha games, and it is my own when it comes to this blog. Furthermore, the No Buy movement has beat me to the punch in this regard and there are Reddits dedicated to creating a space for proudly reducing purchases.
Finding a New Hobby
Ejecting a new habit wholesale is often less fruitful than finding a new habit to replace it. The idea is that habits are composed of cues, which leads to cravings which must be satisfied by the habit. Since cues will not go away, one should instead find a more productive way to satiate cravings. The habit of my roommate Grace comes to mind: she’s recently tried to cut her consumption, but that left her a lot of time to spare. As such, she joined a plant group on Facebook and began to collect free cuttings of plants.
To me, this is a perfect replacement, and has all of the gacha features of shopping: Grace collects many different sorts of plants; she is currently teaching herself hydroponics, something to master; and cuttings are themselves always a gamble—you never know which one will grow.
Grace found a way to satisfy her cravings with a hobby that is much more productive. Now, a contrarian reader may say that Grace has simply traded casinos, to which I must respond, well, yes she has. And certainly, this is a hobby that could get out of control for Grace—plants cover every surface in our bathroom, living room, and balcony. It is a tad excessive to a brown thumb like me.
But, she has found a way to match these cravings that does no ecological harm and which is absolutely free. I don’t see a problem with it that compares to Park’s lost $130 or to my friend-of-a-friend’s lost Saturday.
And finally, casinos are fun as hell. If Grace has made a new plant-based casino, then I say she has placed her chips wisely.
Mindfulness
Now, hear me out: I used to be just as conflicted with this buzzword, but my habits with shopping reminds me of my poor habits regarding using my smartphone. For that, I read Nir Eyal’s “Inidistractable,” and I believe his advice applies here as well.
One of Eyal’s points is that we do not get distracted without reason. Normally, we go to check our phone because of some discomfort that has happened in our life—a big report is due, an uncomfortable silence has descended on the conversation. His wise words are as follows: time management is pain management, and learning to control your schedule and get things done will require you to confront those moments of discomfort that a quick glance at your phone could sate. You need to be mindful of these pain points, address them with mindfulness, and dismiss them.
Similarly, shopping gives me a way to avoid the pain of boredom. I am trying to simply be more mindful of the time I have given to shopping, and the discomfort that comes with giving it up.
A certain mindful stance I’ve come to appreciate is that our thoughts are not us, and painful thoughts that we experience can simply be witnessed with remove, and not internalized. If we simply acknowledge these feelings rather than dwell on them, we can more quickly dismiss them.
I feel something similar is happening with me and shopping. I witness the desire to see discounts, and I let them leave me. The casino is still there. It still glitters. But if a casino puts you in a mindless trance then maybe mindfulness can be a line of defense.