As a kid I burnt through a genuinely worrying amount of hours on my Mega Drive. After tearing open the glossy black box on my tenth birthday (having a meltdown on a level of this), frantically playing Sonic the Hedgehog in my dressing gown before school - I was hooked. That day all I could think about was what the next level after Green Hill Zone would be like. Luckily the Marble Zone didn’t disappoint and from that day I embarked on a journey of addiction and veritable obsession with video games.
When I finally solid the Mega Drive (to move to the Playstation) I had over 30 games and a joypad that had seen way too much action. I’d sit for hours absorbed in a zombie-like state playing my favourite titles like Streets of Rage, Kid Chameleon and Flashback.
My parents gave me persistent encouragement to pursue other activities, saying things like: “You should get outside and enjoy the sunshine”, “Why are you still in last week’s pants?” and my sister would cautiously navigate around me like she was dodging some afflicted leper, clearly concerned by the affect video game binging was having on me.
So yeah, in summary up until the age of 13 I didn’t see a lot of sunshine. I wasn’t what you might call, socially developed. But I did know how to execute a devastating dismantling of any opponent on Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition using Ryu.
When thinking about the question of “Why is gaming so addictive” there’s a lot to consider. If you think about the past, the games that used to dominate my childhood were essentially very simple. The mechanics, style and controls were about as basic as it gets. And even then they presented a dramatic evolution of what came before like the Commodore 64 and Spectrum. Aside from this simplicity, they were and still are genuinely addictive.
In the era of modern gaming we have the luxury of unprecedented power and diversity. You can enjoy the compulsive simplicity of Candy Crush on your phone or experience the visceral terror of war in first person shooters like Call of Duty on modern next-gen consoles.
We’re also on the cusp of VR gaming becoming a distinct possibility with Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus quietly gearing up to ignite yet another game-changing shift across the industry, if all is to be believed.
So while it’s obvious that the gaming landscape has shifted enormously in the last 20 years, what’s interesting to observe is that the two worlds of past and future gaming still co-exist. Despite the breakneck pace of technological acceleration, retro has seen a notable resurgence and is still loved and relevant - just look at global hits like Minecraft and the effect Flappy Bird had on the world.
For me this serves to highlight that whether a game is genuinely addictive or not doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether it’s cutting edge, retro or even 3D. So what is it that’s responsible for addiction?
If I can take anything from the hours I’ve spent playing games I think it’s possible to distill what it is that makes a game addictive into the following key areas:
Core Mechanics
At the heart of any addictive game are rock solid mechanics. The way Sonic ran and slowed with a real sense of inertia. The way Gears of War nailed the shoot and cover mechanism. Without really solid foundations it’s impossible to build a compelling experience.
Progression
Incentivised rewards and achievements are now engrained within even the most casual of games. We’ve come a long way from the Chaos Emeralds seen in Sonic. A well engineered path of progression and reward is now the bedrock of effective game addiction and monetisation.
Difficulty
Essential in generating the pull of addiction and where many games either fall or flourish. The balance needs to be just right, and what you’d term as fair, without any cheap shots at the player.
Community
Now engrained into nearly all games, multiplayer gaming enables both competition and co-op play for team-based gaming addiction. Nothing spurs you to up your game quite like getting a royal whopping in front of your digital chums.
Innovation
At any given point in time, gaming leverages technology or available resources in such a unique way it turns everything on its head and raises the bar for everything that follows. For example, when Grand Theft Auto went 3D (in GTA III) and reinvented the rulebook for open world third person games for years to come.
In today’s industry it’s become essential for development studios to engineer addictive experiences from the ground level, to not only put out games that people love playing, but also to ensure they effectively drive revenue (through microtransactions) and sustain prolonged brand engagement.
With production costs for commercial studios increasing, the physical shifting of units no longer makes the impact it once did and the revenue model has had to adapt. Today, studios can reap massive benefits from a successfully monetised game that capitalises on addiction-led microtransactions and leverages game mechanics that fuel the player’s thirst for progression. This approach not only seems to dominate much of the development culture but from a gamer’s perspective, is something we’ve all started to notice.
Just recently I’ve been playing a game called 8 Ball Pool on my phone, and after seeing numerous in-game adds like “50% off coins today!” had been thinking to myself, “I’d never pay for more coins. How sad would you have to be to do that!?”. Don’t get me wrong, I love the game but couldn’t ever imagine paying to play it…
However when I found myself beaten by a friend in a high stakes match that bankrupted me of the in-game currency and suspended me from play for 24 hours, it dawned on me that the in-game purchases were designed not only to capitalise on the cash frivolous (through the purchase of new cues, chat packs etc.), but also to pray on the weak of will. On a particularly dull train journey I cracked. All it took was impatience and an instant £1.50 transaction, then I was flush with coins and back playing.
8 Ball Pool took a measly £1.50 from me, but when I checked out the bigger picture I found out that it has over 10 million daily active players and generates $106k - a day! Impressive right? I thought so too until I checked out the leaderboard of top grossers, and it’s nowhere near! Currently the #1 revenue behemoth across Apple Store and Google Play is “Clash of Clans” that has over 7 million daily active players and generates nearly $1.6 million - a day.
That’s $584 million a year. That’s $66 thousand an hour. That’s just over $18 dollars a second… Reliably. (Thanks to https://thinkgaming.com for the stats).
So let’s wrap things up and look and the good and bad. We know that creating strategically addictive games is good for developers, it makes their business model more sustainable and potentially allows them to focus on delivering high quality core experiences. And on the flipside, playing fun and addictive games is generally a good thing for gamers; we all like to be engaged and enjoy the feeling of being ‘in the zone’ with your latest favourite game.
As far as negatives go there are a few to consider. There are concerns about whether this increasing obsession with game monetisation is ruining the culture of game development, and also on how close it is to crossing the gambling line based on the huge amount of parent horror stories about their kids racking up huge bills from in-game purchases.
For me though, far more worrying are the potential effects becoming addicted to games could have on individuals and society at large. Through researching this post I found numerous genuinely disturbing examples of gaming taking over people’s lives, impairing mental wellbeing and horrifyingly, even leading to loss of life. I guess like all other prominent forms of digital interaction, sometimes we need to check ourselves and ask, is this behaviour healthy? is it enriching my life? and is it time for a break?
So that’s it folks, on that somber and depressing note is where we’ll chalk it up for now. I hope you’ve learned something and this post stirs some thoughts on what makes an addictive game, and even some bigger questions about game addiction, even digital isolation.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to loose some more coins on 8 Ball Pool.
Our Operations Director Drew Dinneen asks whether technology is making us less focussed on socialising in real life, and if we're raising a generation of weaklings as a result.
