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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.'"
Huh, rather long to be a troll. Just flamebait then?
They are just losers who have no satisfaction in real life. The easy successes and minor penalty for failure make the game world more attractive than real life.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
GDC, 2001 I think it was. We had a roundtable on this very topic - I was new to the games business, and there's all these absolute game design legends sitting around the table. At first the discussion was really good - ways that games can be made more addictive, for instance by varying the reward payout schedule to be more like a slot machine, or by alternating between risky feeling and safe feeling gameplay, etc.
Then the discussion kinda took a turn for the wuss - "Well, we *can* make games more addictive, but *should* we?" And each person that spoke was trying to look more socially conscious than the last.
Then the designer of Tetris - holy shit, Alexey Pajitnov himself, stands up and says "What the hell are you people talking about? I CHERISH the times I'm addicted to games. What else am I going to do? Read some stupid book?"
The discussion got back on a proper track.