You Gotta Know When to Hold ‘Em: The Ethics of Hearthstone

Trading card games are an ingeniously Machiavellian invention. What about them you ask makes them so clever? The booster pack. A collection of random cards (some of them rare!) that you can purchase for a chance to make your strategy stronger! Step up, buy your scratch ticket, and win, win, win!

I love this word. Google it, it’s a worthwhile addition to your vocabulary if you don’t already know it.

My personal experience with trading card games shapes my experience of them and this very opinionated article. I became interested in card games like this as a kid and started out playing Pokemon but then graduated to the Goliath of the industry, Magic: The Gathering. The game is fun, for sure, with creative and interesting game mechanics, story, and art. But the underlying business model is a twisted scheme to get people that love fantasy and gaming to shell out money. I don’t suppose the foresaw the magnitude of the impact it had when they conceived of the game. I have probably invested more thousands of dollars than I would care to know and I don’t have hardly any cards any more. I’m (melodramatically) embittered and jaded by the whole industry and I aim to illuminate the pitfalls of playing trading card games, the dubious ethics involved, and the alternatives that exist. I’m looking at you, Hearthstone. No holds barred.

Many of you may be familiar with Hearthstone, Blizzard’s digital trading card game. The internal game mechanics of trading card games are usually very clever and make for fun gameplay, but the surrounding business model of the games are not good for the player. Blizzard is great at seeing the successes of other games and building on that and the popularity of the free to play game is likely a contributor. In order to avoid placing advertisements in a game, there needs to be a mechanic that encourages people to continue reinvesting in the game. There are perfectly good ways to do that that don’t impact gameplay, namely, the sale of aesthetic items that only impact the look of the game, like skins and accessory items. Unfortunately, the collectible in collectible card game means that there is a component of collecting, which means that you don’t have all the game pieces to play the game to begin with. When you commodify the game pieces, suddenly people who are hooked by your fun gameplay want to drop money on access to the pieces that make their gameplay more successful. And when you can pay for better chances in the game, that’s what we call “pay to win”. This makes the game inherently unfair and quite expensive if you want to keep up with everyone else; he cost of unlocking most or all of the cards in a year’s worth of Hearthstone content has gone up to about $400 a year, conservatively. I shudder at the thought. The success, which is a combination of good gameplay mechanics and lucrative business, was probably inspired by Magic: the Gathering, the progenitor of the whole industry. It hit the scene in the summer of 1993.

The game was innocuous at first but it has grown in popularity and a competitive scene with prize purses and an after market for collectible cards has arisen, an expensive and indulgent culture. The notorious Black Lotus card has a trading price of almost $13,000 now. When the competitive scene offers huge payouts and the initial introduction of cards into the aftermarket is a gamble, remember those scratch ticket-like booster packs, the prizes involved become similar to a poker tournament. Avid players may argue that it’s a test of skill, but poker is the same way. Actually, when considering gameplay, poker is probably more fair because you don’t have to buy collectible cards and make your own deck in order to play, you play with the same cards as everyone else. It’s more accessible. It becomes a question of accessibility when considering the mechanics of the game. If I only have access to half of the black chess pieces but I’m playing against an opponent who could afford to have all of their chess pieces, it isn’t really fair anymore, is it? And when you pay for game pieces, especially when you have to pay more for better game pieces, the game is steeply divided not by skill level, but by wealth. The accessibility of a game that is equitable to it’s players should never have varying investment costs. Games always will require a time investment that may be different per player depending on natural ability and the time required to improve and that’s fine because games are a test of ability. Games should never be a test of wealth. Not only that, but the holding power of these games that capture your imagination and almost compel you to play, as they should, is insidiously tied in with how much money you are willing to spend. The compelling story, art, and gameplay of Magic make the game just enticing enough to get you to buy those damn booster packs.

Let’s dig deeper into how the booster pack game/business model functions as a detriment to the fairness of a game. In order to have a competitive edge you need to unlock cards by either winning games or buying booster packs. But in order to win, you have to have good cards in the first place. Grind out the games to unlock those crucial strategic game pieces, which is very disincentivizing because losing constantly can be frustrating, or succumb to the temptation of buying a chance to get what you want. The gameplay, as gameplay usually is, has a built in reward structure that taps into the player’s mind in a way that makes it engaging and fun. There are even concerns in politics that the booster pack system too closely resembles gambling; I’m not the only one who thinks so. These concerns have lead Apple to make changes to the App store rules which would require Blizzard to publish drop rates for items in randomly generated boxes and boosters, in this instance, booster packs. Games should do this or they are probably boring, but when trading card games do it it just serves to make you want to shell out your money and buy a chance at winning again, and again. If that sounds like destructive behavior, well, that’s because it’s pretty similar to the kind of addictions that can be created in people by slot machines. This goes beyond pay to win, where you know what you’re getting when you buy a power up in a game. The aspect of gambling that makes it harmful to a person’s health is involved and the benefit is a competitive edge in the game. For these reasons Blizzard should just convert hearthstone to living card game and charge a flat rate for access to all the content in an expansion to support the cost of producing the expansion and only sell additional content separately that does not impact the balance of gameplay. This would be far less lucrative for them, but far better for the players and the respectability and dignity of the game. They most certainly won’t do it because it would be an entirely different game. It pretty well doesn’t make sense either. They might be able to create this as a separate game mode, perhaps under a subscription model. The spirit of fair play and sportsmanship demands it or the game cannot be taken seriously as a test of skill and strategy. Harrumph.