Bill Viola opens a loot box
The loot box implies a specific temporal dimension: the one with instant rewarding. When a player opens the loot box she receives immediate feedback. Sometimes it is dressed up with an aesthetic of suspense, but this is just cosmetics and the built-up climax often becomes just something undesired that the user wants (and even pay) to skip.
In order to work with the idea of the loot box without re-enacting its toxic behavior and mechanics it could be interesting to hijack its temporality. By inflating the time between the purchasing and the result, we could create space for dig deeper in this complex and delicate topic.
Loot box
pay ●-->○ get
SI17 Loot Box
pay ●--things could happen here-->○ get
This approach could help us in filling the loot box (tempo) without falling for the same addictive schemes that the industry is implementing for exploiting the players.
Inflating the loot box means that the player could reclaim her own leisure time. If we focus on the temporal fruition of the l~b we can imagine to produce not only an object, but a time slot that the person from the public can reserve for herself. If we define this time slot as leisure time then we could create a sacred and safe space to take a rest and to arrest the acceleration of capital. Something like a checkpoint, speaking from a gaming point of view.
An approach to deal with the temporal aspect in a way that doesn't feel forced could be to rely on real-yet-slow-time processes for the material production of the special issue. A digital manufacturing production could make a lot of sense in this context. 👀
See the loot—box—sealing—device for a concrete and 3d example