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The Development of Braid
Gamasutra sat down with Jonathan Blow, creator of the successful independent game Braid. He talks about going through the three-year-plus development cycle as a one-man team, and how his concept of the game changed as he worked on it. He also discusses what he feels is the difference between "natural rewards" and "artificial rewards."
"... for the most part, when you're playing Tetris, you're enjoying it because you enjoy fitting the blocks together. Whereas when you play World of Warcraft — and what I'm about to say is a generalization, since different players enjoy different things, obviously — a lot of the appeal of playing World of Warcraft is not in the core gameplay mechanic, because it's boring, a lot of the time. ... I think what keeps them in there is, at first, the level ding, because it's very addictive to get that. 'Okay, I've got more gold. Whatever.' And eventually, they've made this huge time investment and they've got a character there and they know what that level ding feels like and the next one is pretty far off, but they can get there! And it's not any better, because this is like number 67. It's got to be better than 66!"
Getting new stuff is a form of "leveling up", especially when you know (from FAQs etc) what gear you're trying to get and how. In this context (giving player a so called artificial reward) there really is no difference.
All the best gear and consequent social esteem comes from random drops. Because the drops are random, your best strategy is to spend as much time as possible killing as many things as you can to increase your chances of getting rewarded. Since these drops give social esteem, for a lot of people the payoff is high enough to be worth a significant investment in time.
It's basically the same kind of thing that causes people to spend hours in front of slot machines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning
And ya, I had roommates in college who only ever played WoW. They were losers desperate for all the esteem they could get.
No, he didn't miss it. He explained it quit well. His point was, as a GAME, its boring, and requires artificial rewards to keep you playing, then preys on the fact that the amount of time investment you have put into it obligates you to keep doing so.
And he's 100% correct. How many people are playing Spore right now more because they shelled 50 bucks into it and want to get their money's worth than because it is actually fun? How many people would have been done with the game at the tribal stage if it was free? The motivation for playing is that 50 bucks represents time you invested to earn... well 50 bucks.
And he clearly explains the social aspect - if you want a social aspect, there are certainly a lot of alternatives. Its there, and it makes it better, but it still doesnt change the fact its mostly menial tasks and if you want a good social aspect like teamplay, there, as an AVERAGE relative to time spent playing, are much better games for doing that.
Find me someone who plays Tetris just because they enjoy fitting blocks together.