Bright & Shiny Syndrome: The Hedonic Treadmill in Gaming

Corporate self-improvement is utterly broken.

We’ll get around to games in a minute, but first, a look at toxic work culture.

Throughout my career, self-improvement has been a core value of companies. And my undergraduate degree was in education. I was going to be a teacher for the earliest part of my career. I understand the value of educating oneself!

The culture doesn’t understand actual improvement, though. It only values the perception of improvement.

An example: we had mandatory half-year self-improvement goals. We’d jump through some hoops, do a writeup for our boss(es) and move onto the next one. It was performative, not substantive.

Another example: I worked for a company owner who had lists of dozens of books for his management staff to read. He would brag about having read each one multiple times.

One of our favorite things to do was to throw the principles of one of the books back at him when he was clearly violating its advice. Why could we do this so often? Because he was racing off to the next book instead of internalizing and applying anything from the previous one.

In this case, it would have been far better to read a single book in a year, then spend the rest of the year enacting its principles in your life.

This is what true self-improvement looks like, but it’s at odds with how we often need to justify it to ourselves, our employers or our professional circles.

Another example. Last one, I promise, though I could do this for a while. We worked with a consulting agency that did great work in the marketing space. I had a personal coach and at one point attended one of their conferences. The following year, I broached attending the same conference. The response from our owner: “Are they covering anything new that you can learn, or is it just the same stuff again?” I didn’t end up attending the conference again.

But if what we’d learned previously worked (and it did), why not attend the conference with the objective of refining and reinforcing those lessons? Why was attending suddenly worthless if there wasn’t something brand new?

That same company eventually abandoned strategies that had worked for it, in favor of new ones. I keep in touch with a few employees I know who are still there. It’s in danger of folding entirely. I (happily) no longer work there.

Bright & Shiny Syndrome: In Brief

What’s new? What’s next? What’s buzzy? What catches our eye?

We’re wired for this, biologically. Society is also programmed to reinforce such behavior, what with the thousands of messages we’re bombarded with each day. Encouraging these instincts represents trillions of dollars in yearly marketing.

Put the two together and we have a tendency to ignore or downplay something that’s older in favor of something that’s newer.

The Hedonic Treadmill

Google “hedonic treadmill” if you want some scientific justification for the phenomenon. In layman’s terms, it’s the idea that whatever new thing is inserted into our lives, its emotional impact is greatest at the very start, and we eventually return to an equilibrium point that’s similar to where we were beforehand.

However good or bad something is (a new, expensive car, for example), our happiness level tends to return to its default state after a certain period of time. Stated differently, “new” stuff is only responsible for brief spikes in happiness, not sustained fulfillment.

It has implications for our purchasing habits, certainly, and explains phenomena like “retail therapy.” It also speaks to biases that we hold toward new stuff, and against things that are already a part of our lives.

The Myth of Progress in Games

A real opinion I’ve encountered – not merely a strawman invented for false internet superiority – is that games are simply “getting better” over time.

This is problematic of course, but the general premise persists.

I’ll break down some justifications for this opinion (and their refutations) below. But frankly, I think a lot of it is bright & shiny syndrome in action, again reinforced by the consumerist juggernaut that feeds us lines that encourage such thinking.

If you take any year past about 1990, you’ll have hundreds or even thousands of new games to use as justification. I could cherry-pick examples that “prove” that older games are better, just as someone else could “prove” the opposite. Both are equally invalid statements.

Some point to rising ratings on popular sites like Board Game Geek as justification, ignoring how cultural trends affect rating levels. Video games have experienced this too, with fan complaints about anything lower than a 9 causing some outlets to have a 10-point scale that’s, in effect, more like a 4-point scale, to avoid fan backlash. 7 is the new 2. Ratings exist in a sociological context, is the point, so pointing to an 8% increase in average ratings between decades or whatever is not isolating one’s variables.

Others point to sales figures or media coverage. And while media coverage does bring in new fans, which is awesome, industry growth and sales figures are not proxies for quality, unless you think McDonald’s is the height of fine dining and Amazon’s “Basics” line of clothing is the height of fashion.

The other point is that new games really are better than older ones…for someone. Design trends have shifted, and some of those trends will speak to the preferences of individuals better than design trends from the 80s, 90s or 2000s. This isn’t a general principle though, but rather a statement about specific individuals.

And so we’re left with games and eras that will be better for some, worse for others, and individual trends within those eras will follow suit. There’s no empirical metric for claiming otherwise, regardless of how many claims you read of something getting “objectively” better that is ultimately a hobby where subjective enjoyment is the only Truth we can point to without significant caveats. It’s a breakdown in logical thinking to suggest otherwise.

The Weaponization of Bright & Shiny Syndrome

Edition wars in Dungeons & Dragons have sullied some toward older editions, claiming that racist and sexist philosophies enabled their design. While there are egregious examples of exactly this abhorrent behavior from those eras (and unfortunately, some that continues to the present day), D&D is too broad a game to be pigeon-holed like this, and there are merits to older systems that can be learned from or resurrected.

But the myth of progress is a convenient narrative for companies trying to sell you their new products that “fix” the problems of older systems. The current edition of D&D will truly be the best iteration of the system for many players, but the myth that D&D has experienced linear, unfailingly upward progress will blind some to older editions that might speak to their gaming preferences better.

Indie RPGs even invoke this language to position themselves against any edition of D&D, citing its dogged adherence to “outdated” gameplay.

I love a lot of indie RPGs, and I really do think some innovations in RPGs have been discovered in the last decade or so! But any manufactured war against D&D is just that: manufactured for attention. But this is the business model of some, and it works. Anti-D&D RPG communities are a thing on social media, which feeds into other media channels and a legion of products that bank on you believing their narrative. And any PR or adventure misstep by D&D and its parent company (there have been several) is used as evidence.

It’s outdated, it’s old. Get with the new.

Hopefully I don’t need the quotations or italics anymore for each instance of this, and you can start to see how bright & shiny syndrome is weaponized in order to taint our interpretation of earlier works of entertainment. When there’s a monetary incentive for an audience to believe that Product A is better than Product B, companies will go to great lengths to reinforce this messaging in subtle ways that accumulate over time.

Crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Gamefound are the worst offenders. And since this is where the most money is made on many games these days, they have legions of paid reviewers and often a built-in fanbase prepared to sell you a similar narrative of obvious, tautological progress that separates this next, new thing from everything that came before.

At least until their next product comes out, that is. 🙂

Keep your eyes open out there, friends.