Gacha Games and the Psychology of “Just One More”

By Yosi Written at 2:47am, which is already a confession.

Introduction: My Daughter Did This To Me and I Want That On Record

My name is Yosi. I am 58 years old. I manage a satoyama woodland. I wake up at five in the morning. I go to bed at nine. I have calluses on my hands from thirty-seven years of coppicing trees, and until four months ago my relationship with smartphones extended no further than declining calls from my son about misdirected equipment deliveries and accidentally un-silencing my ringtone on the Nagoya train.

Then my daughter visited for New Year.

She said: “Papa, you should try this game. It’s relaxing.”

I want to be very clear that it is not relaxing.

I also want to be clear that my current rank is 47 in my regional server, which is, by any objective measure, extremely good for someone who started four months ago, and which I mention not because I am proud of it but purely as context.

I am a little proud of it.

Part One: What Is a Gacha Game? (A Question I Asked My Daughter, Who Laughed, Which I Did Not Appreciate)

A gacha game is a mobile game built around a mechanic borrowed from the Japanese capsule toy machine — the gachapon — where you insert a coin, turn a handle, and receive a random toy. You do not choose the toy. The toy chooses you. This is the entire psychological architecture of the thing, applied to a video game, scaled to infinity, and connected to a credit card.

In a gacha game, you collect characters. The characters have rarities. Common characters are easy to obtain. Rare characters require pulling from a randomized pool using a premium currency, which you earn slowly through gameplay or purchase quickly with real money.

The rarest characters — the ones that make your team significantly stronger, the ones featured on the loading screen with dramatic lighting and orchestral music, the ones that every other player in your regional server appears to already have — these have a pull rate of approximately one to two percent.

One to two percent.

I have planted seeds with better germination rates than this. I have coppice regrowth with better odds than this. I once tried to reintroduce fireflies to a degraded satoyama pond and that had better odds than this, and the firefly reintroduction took three years and significant personal investment and I considered it a difficult project.

I have pulled 94 times for Celestial Blade Ryuji.

I do not have Celestial Blade Ryuji.

Part Two: The Psychology, Which I Understand Completely and Which Has Not Helped Even Slightly

I am not an unintelligent person. I have managed a complex ecological system for nearly four decades. I understand feedback loops. I understand resource management. I understand the difference between sustainable harvesting and over-extraction.

I understand, intellectually, everything that is happening to me. This has not helped.

Here is what gacha games do, explained by someone who now understands it deeply and personally:

Variable ratio reinforcement. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. Rewards that arrive on unpredictable schedules are more compelling than rewards that arrive predictably. Your brain, which evolved to find and exploit unpredictable food sources on the savanna, cannot distinguish between “there might be berries behind this rock” and “there might be Celestial Blade Ryuji in this pull.” The dopamine does not check credentials.

I explained this to Takeshi — the young man who comes every month to help with the coppicing — during our last session. He nodded seriously. He said he had read about this. He said he plays three gacha games currently. I asked him if understanding the mechanism helped. He said no. He said he had Celestial Blade Ryuji. I told him to get back to work.

The sunk cost escalation. You have spent 60 pulls without getting the featured character. The pity system — a mercy mechanic that guarantees a rare character at 90 pulls — is approaching. You are 30 pulls away from a guaranteed rare character. Stopping now means those 60 pulls were wasted. This is not rational. Sunk costs are sunk. I know this. I have known this since university.

Pull 61. Pull 62. Pull 63.

The rotating limited banner. The featured character is only available for fourteen days. After that, they return to the standard pool — if they return at all. Some characters are vaulted permanently. Some are never seen again. The game communicates this with a countdown timer displayed in the corner of the screen in a font specifically chosen to activate the part of your brain responsible for preventing famines.

Celestial Blade Ryuji leaves in nine days.

I am mentioning this for informational purposes.

Part Three: The Community, Which Is Not Helping

There is an online community for my game. I joined it to ask a question about team composition. I now check it more often than I check the woodland moisture levels, which says something about my current priorities that I am not ready to examine.

The community has opinions. The community has spreadsheets. Someone has calculated the exact statistical probability of obtaining every character at every pull count, displayed in a color-coded table that I have bookmarked and consulted at 2am on multiple occasions.

There is a tier list. The tier list ranks all characters from S-tier — essential, game-defining, must-have — to D-tier, which is described in the community wiki as “does not meaningfully exist.” Several characters I spent considerable resources obtaining are D-tier. My daughter, when I showed her this, made a face that she quickly rearranged into a neutral expression, but not quickly enough.

Celestial Blade Ryuji is S-tier.

The community also has people who have spent, by their own accounting, amounts of money on this game that I will not repeat here because it will make me feel better about my own situation by comparison, which is exactly the kind of thinking the game’s designers were counting on when they made sure the community forum was easily accessible from the main menu.

I am aware of this. It has not stopped me from checking the forum.

Part Four: The Monetization, Examined by Someone Who Now Has Strong Opinions About It

The game is free to download. The game is free to play. The game will let you play indefinitely without spending any money whatsoever, in the same way that my woodland will let the bamboo grow indefinitely without any intervention whatsoever. Technically true. Not a situation you want to let develop.

The premium currency — used for pulls — can be earned through daily missions, events, and story completion. This gives you approximately enough for one or two pulls per day if you are diligent, play every day, and complete every available task. At this rate, obtaining a featured limited character requires either extraordinary luck or approximately three to four months of daily play.

The featured banner lasts fourteen days.

The math is not subtle.

There are packages available for purchase. The starter pack. The monthly pass. The “limited time value bundle” that is always available and is never actually limited. The battle pass. The expansion pass. The character skin. The alternate outfit for the character you do not have yet but are planning to obtain.

I have purchased the monthly pass. I told myself it was the reasonable option. It costs less than a bag of fertilizer. I buy fertilizer without thinking about it. This is what I told myself.

My son, who works in logistics, noticed the charge on a shared family account and called me. I was, at the time, on a local train. My phone was on silent. I called him back from the platform.

He did not say anything for a moment.

Then he said: “Papa, are you playing a gacha game?”

I told him I was conducting research.

Part Five: What This Has To Do With Satoyama, Since I Am Supposed to Be an Expert on That

Here is the thing that occurred to me at approximately 1am last Tuesday, during a ten-pull session that yielded two duplicate D-tier characters and a four-star weapon I already have at maximum refinement:

Gacha games and satoyama management have, structurally, almost nothing in common. One is a carefully evolved system of sustainable resource management developed over centuries to support human communities in harmony with their ecological environment. The other is a monetization mechanism designed by behavioral psychologists to extract money from people by exploiting the same cognitive patterns that helped our ancestors survive on the savanna.

But — and I want to be careful here because I recognize I may be rationalizing — both require you to play a long game.

Satoyama management does not reward impatience. You coppice the woodland now and the benefit arrives in fifteen years. You reintroduce fireflies to the pond now and you will not see results for three seasons. You resist over-harvesting now and the resource base remains productive for your grandchildren. The entire system is built on deferred reward, sustained attention, and trust that the process will eventually deliver.

Gacha games are the same, if you squint and tilt your head and are willing to ignore almost everything about them.

The pity system rewards persistence. The daily missions reward consistency. The long-term player with a deep roster of well-built characters outperforms the impatient player who whale-spent on a single banner and has nothing else.

This is an extremely convenient thing to believe when you are 67 pulls into a 90-pull pity counter at 1am.

I am aware of this.

Pull 68.

Conclusion: What I Have Learned, and Whether It Has Changed My Behavior

I have learned the following things from four months of gacha gaming:

I have learned that the human brain is not well-equipped to evaluate small probabilities repeated many times, which is information I will now apply to absolutely nothing because the pull button is right there.

I have learned that “just one more” is a phrase with no natural endpoint, in the same way that “just a little more bamboo” is a phrase the bamboo has been saying to my woodland for fifteen years.

I have learned that my daughter, who described this game as “relaxing,” has a very different definition of relaxing than I do, and that I will be revisiting this at the next appropriate family occasion.

I have learned that Takeshi, my most reliable woodland volunteer, has been rank 112 on our regional server since before I started playing, and that he has Celestial Blade Ryuji at maximum constellation, and that he obtained him on his third pull, and that some things in life are simply not fair.

I have not obtained Celestial Blade Ryuji.

The banner ends in six days.

I have enough saved currency for eleven more pulls.

The pity counter is at 71.

I am going to bed.

Yosi is a satoyama farmer and regional server rank 47 player based in rural Japan. He obtained Celestial Blade Ryuji on pull 89. He is not going to talk about what happened after that. The woodland is fine. The bamboo is advancing. Some things do not change.