"In 2012, when I moved over to social/mobile gaming, there was no VIP in existence within social gaming, and what I was trying to do was take my learnings from real-money gaming and translate them into the world of social/mobile gaming." – Doyle recounts the origins of the Zynga VIP program.
"We've done so much experimenting at Zynga with VIP. We know what's the frequency of contact. We know what call types work. We know what times to call. We know exactly who to call and when. We know who has a higher propensity to be more susceptible to our call."
…
"If we take the slots genre for example, there's a lot of proven [methodology] that says in order to bring a slots player back to a slots game, an email sent to them should include the bells and the whistles and the feeling they get when they've just won and it ignites in them, 'I want to get back in the game'…
They’re able to do this because video games aren’t regulated like gambling, even though they target the same psychological loop.
It’s not just mobile F2P games that use this.
FIFA 23 does it via loot boxes.
There’s no doubt random treasures are fun. Loot boxes, or pay per random roll, definitely cross the line into addiction exploitation. This does make me think about the extra lives slot machines in Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3, though. They are a rush that hits the
pleasure/pain brain circuits. You can’t just hit them up all day, though. They come up at the end of levels, so there’s quite a lot of time between hits. I think access may be one of the squishy boundaries between “addictive pleasure” and “regular pleasure”.
I do also wonder how much “normal” surprise delight is part of this same thing. When you seek landscape variety while walking around, are you rolling dice?