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>ow do we differentiate from a compelling and effective form of entertainment with an addictive activity? Just like we have always done, if something constantl

• manfredo 7y ago
  > Having worked in GameDev, one of the most flooring things I have faced is people asking me for me to introduce said addictive inducing systems and mechanisms.... They want the enjoyment, they want to be "addicted", they want a game "so good" that they can't put it down. This is what I'm talking about though. Back when games were bought on a disk or cartridge and didn't feature any sort of micro-transactions there was no point in making a game addictive. It didn't matter if players played the game for 2 hours or 200 hours. All that mattered is that the game was good so that people enjoyed it, became popular, and sold well. In some sense, getting players addicted to any one game might actually be undesirable as it would reduce willingness to pay for subsequent games. Nowadays, so many games are trying to be "lifestyle games" that are meant to be continuously consumed instead of played through once or twice.
  • taneq 7y ago
    Not only were games addictive back then, but they were explicitly advertised as such and it was considered a good thing. Being addictive was the mark of a good game!
    • DougN7 7y ago
      Sid Meier’s Civilization (from almost 30 years ago!) was built this way. (Fantastic game! :)
  • leetcrew 7y ago
    > Back when games were bought on a disk or cartridge and didn't feature any sort of micro-transactions there was no point in making a game addictive. is this really true? when I was a kid (long enough ago that there were no skins or loot boxes), the most effective way to make me want a game was to see my friends playing it and having fun. there were probably tons of short single-player games that I was never aware of because people would just finish them quickly and not play while friends were over. but I still have vivid memories of watching people play smash and desperately wanting my own N64. maybe the industry wasn't so ruthlessly capitalistic back then, but there had to be some execs that realized how much free marketing you get out of addictive console games.
  • CyanBird 7y ago
    > there was no point in making a game addictive. This is what you are missing, they were already addictive, it was only not a wide spread thing because games in general didn't had mass appeal back then, it was a niche thing that could be ignored by the broader population. There's a quasi-infinite amount of stories of people becoming addicted to playing StarCraft Broodwar, and that game came in 1998, same with Quake, Counter Strike, Age of Empires. Yes, it is true that said games have become multiplied, but said games are simply filling what people ask for.... As I stated in my previous comment, people want this, they want the addictive parts of said games, and Capitalism will always be happy to provide... Also, what you mention of "games that can be played once or twice", I think that you are seriously misunderstanding the situation, Go has been played for thousands of years, same with Chess, compact self contained games with campaigns are actually something quite modern, the standard has been for games to be multiplayer. The games that usually destroy people's lives are those that have social or competitive roots, and it is because we as humans are intrinsically tied to our relations, ego, personal achievement, etc. "Addictive games" are not something external to the individual, but they use the individual itself. Lastly, the very reason why StarCraft, Age of Empires, Counter Strike/Half Life, Quake all sold so well early on is exactly because they were addictive/enjoyable. Had they not been then they wouldnt have ________ Quick question to all HN's; Is Dark Souls "Addictive"?
• badpun 7y ago
  > Reddit, Twitter, Youtube they all are designed to be addictive I think addictiveness it's probably for this medium. I remember the news forums, they peaked way before capitalism reached the Internet, and were better designed and more addictive than Reddit.
• danShumway 7y ago
  > Just like we have always done, if something constantly disturbs day to day activities, then it is an addictive behaviour. I highly agree with your point in general, but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make. In order to tell when something is disrupting day-to-day life, we need to have agreement about what day-to-day life is and what changes to day-to-day life count as disruption. It is not true at all for me that non-addictive, beneficial forms of media have never disrupted my day-to-day life. Arguably, getting into programming itself has been the biggest disruption -- because I got into programming the way I thought about problems changed, I started spending additional money on books and computers, my hobbies and friends changed to accommodate the new activity I was focused on. You'll see the same changes in behavior, groups, friends, and time management for someone who starts getting heavily involved in a local church, or exercise, or volunteer work. We don't think of these activities as "addictive" in the traditional, harmful sense because we think that the changes they force you to make to accommodate them are desirable. And who hasn't had the experience of reading a book so powerful and compelling that they couldn't get it out of their head the next day at work, or where it changed their worldview to the extent that it affected their daily routine? These sound like pedantic arguments, but I've been in communities that disagreed about whether a behavior was addictive purely based on the idea, "well, people are spending a lot of time on it, and it's causing them not to do things that everyone else does." No, the qualification of an addictive behavior is one that disrupts what our daily life should be, and while we can easily classify some behaviors (smoking, for example) as being problematic, it is much harder to draw an objective line in the sand on everything else. How you classify addiction is partially dependent on your worldview, because your worldview helps define what "normal" functioning looks like.
  • CyanBird 7y ago
    >but I highly disagree that this is a straightforward distinction to make. Yep, 10000000% agreed, this is why this question needs to be answered by the individual itself with the help of a therapist. There is simply no clear line as you well said between legitimate enjoyment and addiction, in my home country wherever the gaming addiction is brought up, then football players whom also straddle the line between addiction and commitment are also mentioned. Librarians in the past whom would read "excessively" were tagged as "addicts to reading" The line needs to be set by the individual itself, there is simply no reliable way to do otherwise unless in the extreme cases where people's lives break down around them
• PeterStuer 7y ago
  Are you really optimising for pleasure, or just for engagement?