What’s in scope? Affirmation features
If your game has streaks, daily rewards, positive comparative player feedback, or an achievement system, you could be in scope of future age restriction regulations and the ongoing consultation considering what these should be.
The “Growing up in the online world” consultation (closing 26 May), which is intended to inform future age restriction regulations, has a section on “‘Addiction’, compulsive design and displacement.” This wholesome-sounding category covers features designed to provide “positive feedback, validation, or encouragement” to sustain longer engagement time. This means stuff like reactions, comments, achievements, follower counts, streaks, and personalised feedback. This is classic social media, but there is also potential for it to capture specific elements of mainstream video game design.
‘Affirmation functions’ encourage engagement with online activities by validating users’ efforts; for video games, this may mean recognising success and celebrating persistence. More concretely, this includes elements named in the consultation such as achievements, streaks, and personalised feedback on performance (comparisons with other users). Despite a long history of these features being used positively in video game design, blanket restrictions based on social media use-cases could affect all games, regardless of how they are implemented.
Achievement systems, where players unlock accolades for finding hidden items, completing chapters, or uncovering story endings, have been common since the mid-2000s. Recognising time spent in-game (in total or as daily streaks) is part of this, but even in the 90s games had features rewarding daily check-ins and date-specific activities with otherwise inaccessible content. Comparisons with other players are even more well-established; when the goal is to beat the competition, comparative rankings and metrics are necessary for play to be meaningful within the context of the game.
The point of a video game is to enjoy the success of overcoming an obstacle, whether against the game itself or in competition against others, and affirmation functions underpin this fundamental principle. They were not inherently developed to increase 'time spent online', but to enhance player experiences by rewarding different approaches to gameplay, encouraging exploration or persistence, and enabling competitive play. That's still largely the case and it needs to be recognised by regulations.
However, some uses of similar features in social media (a vastly different context) risk painting them all with the same brush. A move to regulate inappropriate gamification in social media should not entail automatic restrictions in other online activities, meaning that this is an area where it’s critical for industry to clearly articulate the differences between the contexts of social media and forms of online gameplay.
If you want to know how this could impact you, drop us a line – it’s a bit of a specialist subject over here.
You might also want to check out our handy tracker page and our overview of what else could land games companies in scope of the regulations and consultation.