Ark: Survival Evolved and What’s the Allure?
UX Academy’s assignment was to reflect on a product and its usability, accessibility, and its ethics.
I am not a hard-core gamer. Even today, I wouldn’t call myself one, but there was a good year-and-a-half when I lost my life to Ark and maybe, just maybe, I must admit I was powerless to its allure.
I woke in the morning and turned on the TV and Xbox and went straight to “work” on the game. Then, I would quickly get ready and go to my real-life, job. When I got home, I was immediately back at my “second job” on Ark. Sleep was rare, but it never really mattered all that much, I just needed enough sleep to start all over again the next day.
The Game I Loved to Hate
The people whom I surrounded myself with during that period also played Ark and told me I would love it, they were right. I started playing Ark in 2016 when it was an alpha game. Of course, the game was glitchy, but that was to be expected. There was a steep learning curve to this “unfinished” game. There was no tutorial available.
The game consisted of many 24/7 multiplayer servers. Once selected, a character would land in a “new world” and have to figure out how to survive, for example punching trees to get resources until you could build more tools and picking berries to eat and not die. (Other obstacles were that players had to learn to avoid eating narcoberries that could knock their characters unconscious, and run from dinosaurs to live long enough to build shelters.)
Ark itself is a much more complex game than I very briefly described, but that is not my point. Overall, the game’s integral concept as an “adult” version of Minecraft with more realistic graphics and DINOSAURS kept users playing.
The game also lacked an “endgame” or storyline, other than to keep taming dinosaurs and player interactions. (Only with additional add-ons did the Specimen Implant become a full concept for the game in Extinction. Pictured Below)
Once people finessed the steep learning curve and grasped the barebones fundamentals, it was an amazing game to play. Despite usability issues, such as server-wide drops and dinosaurs sinking into the world (and no instructions), the designers kept chugging out new add-ons. Wildcard officially released the game in 2017, two years after the initial alpha version’s debut.
After the official release, there was still no available tutorial. The company kept adding new elements and maps, such as dragons and newly made-up dinosaurs with amazing abilities plus a new Tek tier. These kept their user base playing and hungry for more. Others, like myself, found the initial alpha issues challenging and the difficulties persisted even after the official release. Losing everything in a server drop still happened and hours of real-world time could be lost.
What Made this Game so Addicting?
Despite those pitfalls, I would still wake in the middle of the night to raise a new dinosaur, which took anywhere from about five hours to five days in real-world time to raise a dinosaur. The constant building, creativity, and somewhat endearing pets kept me coming back. Eventually, as servers became overpopulated, a dark pattern emerged. If users didn’t get back to the game within a certain amount of time, dinosaurs would die of starvation or the base that the players built would despawn because everything was on a timer that required constant interaction.
This was probably not designed to be a dark pattern initially. It was meant to clear the servers so that the game world would not be overpopulated when players built something and then decided to never return to the game. Psychologically though, this constant demand for attention developed a dependency in users. People would feel responsible for their “pets” and not want to lose everything they had worked to develop over days, weeks, and months. For example, raising a Giganotosaurus takes 5 days in the real-world. The desire to keep everything alive and intact overruled other important usability issues.
Usability issues such as no natural mapping using the Xbox and each game that is played on an Xbox can use different controls for the same task, other than moving around. For inclusivity and accessibility, there are some aspects, such as having the option to have item descriptions appear below the image in an “Inventory.” There was also the ability to change the gamma and contrast levels to make the image clearer for viewing. Otherwise, there was no option for making the font bigger or having an audio description (not including the audio description that Xbox has available).
Conclusion
I have gone back to this game about once a year since I stopped officially playing full-time. Each time, it takes me about a day or two to relearn the correct controls to avoid killing my character or sending a dinosaur off in the wrong direction. As of a year ago, there was still no tutorial or help to make this game easier to relearn. Things might have changed since I last logged on as there are always patches and updates, but this game doesn’t sell based on usability or accessibility. Its core attraction is its continually expanded content and the open-ended concept and inherent but promising unknowns of the game itself.
