Episode 60 – Which monetization tactics are truly predatory? (with Elena Petrovskaya)
This is part 2 of our first two-part exploration of predatory monetization. Our guest, Elena Petrovskaya has been researching player complaints about monetization and has categorized them into 35 different types of potentially predatory monetization techniques – from pay or wait to the use of battle passes to aggressive advertising and dark interface design patterns. In part 1 we went over all of them. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I highly recommend going back and checking it out. This time, we evaluate. We ask what is supposed to be predatory in these techniques, which ones we think are not actually problematic, which ones we think are particularly problematic, and what, if anything, should be done about them in terms of regulation.
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Our guest for this episode is Elena Petrovskaya, a PhD researcher at the Centre for Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence in the UK. She specialises in predatory monetisation in digital games and its consequences, and is particularly interested in the links of game design to gaming disorder. She uses her background in psychology and human-computer interaction to take a player-centric perspective: developing knowledge bottom-up and working directly with players as the primary stakeholder. Her work spans ethics, wellbeing, and the lived experience of technology and its use. Elena’s work has been published in high-impact venues, she has given invited talks, contributed to written evidence calls by the UK government, and engaged with the public through media outlets such as The Conversation.
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Hosted by Shlomo Sher, Ph.D. and Andy Ashcraft
Production by Carmen Elena Mitchell
Music and graphics by Daniel Sher