Anyone who truly loves video games is a sucker for being manipulated. Whether it’s the dopamine hit of one more level-up, itching for damage numbers to increase, or scoring that key piece of equipment to complete a set. This stuff isn’t simply the territory of unscrupulous mobile games trying to get you hooked either, even ‘prestige’ games like The Last of Us keep you in a constant state of anticipation through sound and visual design while delivering their story.
But Vampire Survivors might be the purest example of compulsive design. A lot has been said about games as ‘Skinner Boxes’, aka the operant conditioning chambers designed by B. F. Skinner that quickly trained rats and pigeons to tap a button in response to stimulus and get a reward.
Vampire Survivors is a skinner box and you’re the rat tapping the pleasure button, with an ever-growing arsenal of weaponry and hordes of advancing creatures as your stimulus. Each enemy is defeated with a sound like popcorn popping and the act of the gems they release burns itself into your dreams.
Get those gems and you get weapons. Get more gems and you power up those weapons. Power up those weapons enough and you become a tornado of death: spewing projectiles, protected by shields and damage zones, and able to serenely sit in the middle of an army of monsters as they hurl themselves against your defences.
It’s a simple formula but oh-so-very-addictive. For a few weeks I couldn’t tear myself away from this game: I was hungry for each fresh stage, happily ticking things off the in-game to-do list, and trying my best to survive until the brutal end of the final level and beat the boss.
That’s all done (though there’s still a lot of game in here), but after countless hours poured into the game I have to wonder how much input I actually had on my enjoyment.
In large part Vampire Survivors plays itself, with attacks happening automatically and you simply moving your character around the map. If you’ve upgraded right the last ten minutes will be an eye-ball straining army of monsters futilely dying to your attacks while you fiddle with your phone and glance occasionally at the screen. Sure, there’s some skill in figuring out the right upgrades to take, but the game fills you in on what combinations of weapons to take and how to upgrade them.
Even so, when I finally beat Cappella Magna and final(ish) boss Ender I was clapping like a seal being fed a juicy fish. My reward for surviving that gauntlet was a way to crank up my damage to god-like levels and I was sorely tempted to head back to the early stages and clean house.
But it was time for a break and the longer I spend away from the game the more I realize just how insidiously it got its hooks into me. That probably makes it a masterclass in addictive game design, but also leaves me worried that I’d be susceptible to some unscrupulous developer who’d monetize the process and drain my wallet.
Hm, I guess I’ll ponder that over my next game of Fortnite.
Pixel Hunted 