Before we can talk about a game that features a risky consumable we need to acknowledge two phenomena: risk aversion and consumable hoarding.

Most of the people are risk averse. Which is good for survival but boring. So they rely on art to deliver strong emotions normally incident to active risk taking. A game – an interactive art – looks like the ideal safe environment to unleash one’s inner fury, but it is not what actually happens. Players launch the game and… keep displaying risk-averse behavior – this time about some imaginary loss.

Consumable hoarding is a long standing problem in game design. Players come into possession of a consumable power-up but feel reluctant to pop it. Instead they keep it for the rainy day, until it eventually becomes irrelevant due to progression curve and gets dumped for some chump change. And all the developer’s effort invested in creating this consumable is lost.

So, with this in mind, how do we approach a mod about junkie hooker?

Currently drug addiction mods go as follows. There is this highly problematic consumable that gives not at all game changing (more like largely irrelevant) bonuses. Why, we wander, nobody wants to take it? Well, no problem, let’s force feed it. And now you get drugs from rapists (why would they bother?), from forest animals (weird and possibly a bug) and weirdest of all – from guards. You know, the ones who supposedly keep this whole drug industry under the radar. But wait, there is also addiction. Which adds some not at all game changing penalties and apparently turns you into a klepto.

The thing is, the narrative of a junkie hooker is not about drugs at all. And not about whoring either. It is about slippery slope and being desperate. As in “I will sell my body and my soul for a fix”.

Real world drugs work like a sort of inhibition breaker. They literally rewire addict’s brain into risk tolerance. So when junkies rob a pharmacy they are fully aware* of what they are doing. They simply do not care.

With this in mind we want a junkie gameplay to deliver these four feelings:

- “Rush” when drugs are in effect

- Depression when they aren’t

- Desperation when withdrawal kicks in

- Overarching feeling of slipping down the slope

Slippery slope is relatively simple one. You repeatedly put the players into a situation where they are tempted to take some immediate “easy way” that they know will lead them into some trouble in the future. And let them watch their future trouble debt pile up.

Rush boils down to bonus gerrymandering in such ways as to encourage deliberate risk seeking. E.g. not some flat +sword_dmg, but progressively bigger bonus for each additional enemy in the proximity. And insane HP regen (useless if PC is not actually taking damage). And bonus points if you go commando. I mentioned in my other post that Skyrim already has a mechanics that works like this – sneak levelling. This approach doesn’t really apply well to magic/archery playstyle, but it can be argued that the junkie game in fact should be detrimental to arrow plinking from a distant bush, for this is textbook risk averse style. Brutal face to face carnage and gore only!

Depression is a tricky one. You cannot actually drive your players into depression, they will simply quit the game. If I were developing a game for real I would secretly sabotage the player in various small ways: friendly NPC suddenly becomes passive-aggressive, alchemy refuses to cook and “just nothing is right”. Which is how drug addicts describe it. We could also introduce some form of hangover under this rubric but at this moment I don’t see how it would help.

Now, the holy grail of desperation. At this point I’m still not quite sure how to get there. Obviously it needs to involve scarcity – it’s really hard to relate to the craving for something readily available. But then we run into the player’s general reluctance to, you know, actually consume rare consumables. So how do we get PC addicted in the first place? Again, I would consider a dirty trick when the drug becomes scarce as addiction kicks in. But this clearly needs more work.

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* In the process. They might not remember anything later, but that is another story.