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Understanding Addiction-Based Game Design
spidweb writes "The common theory is that games like World of Warcraft are addictive. But what are the exact qualities that make it so? Are there specific elements of the design that can be pulled out, distilled, and used at will to give a game drug-like properties? Is it wrong to do so? A new article at IGN RPG Vault attempts to isolates the exact qualities that go into making an addiction-based design. From the article: 'If a game uses rewards of any sort to entice you to experience highly repetitive content, you should see what it's trying to do and which of your buttons it's trying to press. If you don't mind, that's cool, but you should understand it.'"
As a wowtard myself i was addicted to the game for a while, back when it was still up and coming. I can say that, for at least myself, I was addicted to the time invested vs rewards you could achieve. I would pour my time into real life hobbies and the payoffs from those were far less interesting, and nowhere near as cool as those that I could achieve in WOW. Yes I was a social recluse, but that's life. /played time on my main toon, before BC was released, was over 200 days. Add to that 4 other 60's with about 10 days game time to level each, plus time spent in pvp with them, rep farming, yeah. It wasn't nearly as destructive as some other people report it was for them, but I was still addicted to the rewards I could achieve, because it was so clear how to do things, and how to get what you wanted. There are many other aspects to it of course, but that was the kicker for me.
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There is a pretty funny theory that the vast majority of WoW players are well-respected professionals who play the game in their free time. Through the playing of WoW, they not only practice their leadership skills, but also organizational skills and planning skills. The idea is that the game reinforces and promotes cooperative game play while preserving a fun environment.
But we all know the truth. It's 30 year old lardballs who still live with their parents that play this game. The lack of friends and human companionship drives them to seek out online communities where they can be accepted as who they portray themselves as rather than for who they, unfortunately, are. Seeking companionship is one of the most primal of human urges.
I don't know how you can say the game is addictive, in that sense. I'm not addicted to breathing or eating, but I'd die without doing either of those. We are talking about something very close to the core of being a human, not a dependency developed through repeated exposure.
Well it didn't post my last comment. I was addicted to the rewards that were available to me, and the clear cut, investment required for them. Do this X many times, get this in return. Kill X many of this, and get this. I was and still am(sorta) addicted to wow. I /played my main over 200days(pre BC), id been there since it went live, with 5 other mains all 60 with alot of /played time on them. It was mostly a replacement for the lack of things I had to show for myself.
Before people jump down my throat, its not like I sat in my room all day playing (almost) I was a social recluse by choice, I enjoyed my life as it was, and I just found that I lacked the disciplin and the means of which to obtain the things I wanted for myself. WoW was my answer.
WoW's "addictive" nature is a blend of many components.
First and foremost, it's the reward system. Human beings do things due to rewards. That's how we work. We used to hunt and gather, and our reward was meat and berries. We went, we did, we got something, we were pleased. In today's world, that doesn't work out anymore so well. Usually, the reward you get is abstracted away from your work too far for you to make that connection. We work a month and eventually, our accout grows a bit. But we don't see how they are connected. It's not like I get some kind of micropayment for every line of code I write or debug.
Even if, what kind of reward is money? It's again an abstract concept that has no "real" value until it's redeemed for what you actually want.
WoW gives you very directly reward for actions. First, there's that fanfare playing when you accomplish something (don't you think that doesn't matter! It tells you "you did that well", it praises you), you get some goods (more or less useful), what really counts, though, is that the game acknowledges that you actually "did something".
The next part is user interaction and commitment. Since people do rely on each other and have to, you are guilt tripped into playing even if you don't want to. They need a healer/tank/whatever or they can't accomplish their goal. Your decision to stay away from it lets four (or 24, or 39) people down. This in turn makes the player feel appreciated, welcome and needed. And trust me, today, a lot of people feel like they ain't needed or appreciated. Or even welcome.
The sense of accomplishment, where you feel like you progress. Today, again, we don't really get that feeling very often. You might, in school, when you ascend through the classes towards graduation. In your workplace? Maybe stuck in a burger flipper job? Where do you progress? Where does your life go to? WoW tells you exactly where it's heading. You can watch your progress by watching your level and the kind of outfit you wear. More over, everyone else, not just a small subset of people who happen to judge success by the same yard stick as you, everyone in the game can appreciate what you have "done", because everyone else uses the same gauge to measure success: Level and equipment.
Yet at the same time, there's still the feeling of having no responsibility, it's still a no-commitment thing. You could just log off and nobody could hold it against you. There ain't any real life issues to deal with should you decide to just leave. No job that you'll lose, no family you would lose, no class you could fail, just because you decided you don't wanna anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The kind of people who get consumed by online engagement usually aren't very successful in real life anyway. If they become successful in real life following a WoW addiction, very often it's specifically because they now value the real world so much more after being essentially isolated from it.
My belief is that technology, like all advancements, helps separate people further into their "natures". If someone is susceptible to addiction, avoidance and escapism, they'll have more advanced ways of doing that in the future, but well-adjusted people will just be the same well-adjusted people, but with fancier phones and whatever else fits into their lifestyle. They will be largely unaffected by the growth of MMOs, except that some of the people they might have hung out with before will now play games instead.
Sam ty sig.
The model for this game design is really from D&D. E.g. Do stuff, get 'loot' randomly after an encounter, fill up the XP bar to hit the next level, improve skills, abilities, feats, etc, etc. The difference is that you don't have to go to your buddies basement(with your Doritos/Mountain Dew) and bring your dice on a Sunday afternoon to get your fix like with a video game; It's right there in your computer room. It also gives the experience to those who are imagination impaired. The potion of the gaming industry using these 'evil' methods should be thanking Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson for the money they're making.
There is no substitute for physical, in-person, flesh and bone companionship.
I'm a gamer and there have been times that I've set aside what I consider an extensive number of hours to play. One such time that comes to mind is the release of Rome: Total War in 2003/04 or so. I remember playing late nights for two weeks straight including, sleeping about an hour and then heading into work. After the kid was asleep at 8:30, I'd be back at it again.
When I was younger and had fewer responsibilities (pre-children), devoting that much or more time to a game would not have been as big of a deal.
However there is a limit. Yes, it may be no different than devoting hours to a hobby and just as tangible. Yes, using an online game as a fulcrum for social interaction for those that it does not come easy to (and for those of us whom it does as well) can be rewarding, same as a hobby would.
Yet it still can't beat having a beer or a glass of wine with your friends, or a good vacation, or that certain girl/guy with a twinkle in their eye. It can't beat watching your kid run the wrong way on the soccer field.
I'm not sure the phenomenon qualifies as an addiction; we are way too eager to classify anything we can as such. By this definition texting could be an addiction. Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, on and on. But it might be a harbinger something the parent alludes to, which is our willingness to substitute physical interaction and learning how to deal with people for virtual interaction and further stratifying ourselves.
Blacker than my baby girl's stare. Black like the veil that the muslimina wear. Black like the planet that they fear...
I suspect that about 90% of what you just said is a load of bullhonkey.
Define successful in real life.
I've noticed that it's often a problem of the "long tail" so often described in online companies.
There are millions of people who do not share interests with most of the people around them. Some of them are able to find some common interests and just ignore the rest of what they want to do, some aren't. I know where I grew up, I was the only person in my class who was really into video games and computers. I found some other people I could be friends with anyway, but it was a part of my personality that would have gone completely unexpressed without online gaming.
There are enough people online, heck, enough people just playing wow that you will be able to find not just a few people who share your interest but hundreds of them. I fail to see how it is inherently worse to be forming friendships with those people than with the people who happen to be geographically close to you.
Yes, there are a few things online friends can't do for you - getting you laid being the most important. But assuming you have managed to find a companion somewhere, what is inherently worse about meeting your friends online for a raid compared to meeting them in a bar for a pint? Why are people who hang out with their friends in a bar considered social and normal and those who have equally many friends disturbed losers? In my experience, the level of closeness and friendship in those sorts of groups is no different.
Being poorly socialized will follow you online as well - it is a separate problem from where you are trying to be social.
A lot of WoW players eventually lose sight of the fact that the whole game, end-to-end, is a rewarding and fun experience to be savored. This is a consequence of the game's design to some degree.
When you start out, you play around a lot and have lots of fun. You make mistakes, and you see sights, you make some friends about the same level. You level together and experience progressively bigger and cooler dungeons together.
But then you get to the level cap, and all your friends are at the level cap. So you want to do things with them. But end-game content requires such a time commitment - raiding, grinding for gold and items - that there's no reason to ever go back and experience the rest of the game in the same way. If you DO level another character, it's to fill a hole in your guild's roster (leveling a healer or tank, for example), and you tend to blaze through content because you already know the ropes and there's no reason to go back and make friends all over again.
Another thing which WoW does is play off of your sense of community and obligation, even if that community is dysfunctional. The difference between a good player and a noobtard is not something you can easily tell, even based on what they've accomplished. So you tend to stick with people that you know, and you come to rely on each other. Not to toot my own horn, but I was a pretty good raid leader and an awesome tank back in my day, so when I didn't participate, 39 other people had less fun as a result. It's probably a peculiar case, but this was more what kept me coming back than the reward treadmill.