On What Makes Games Addicting

So I might be addicted to Riot’s League of Legends. Well “addicted” (you won'tt see me dying because of playing too many video games like this unfortunate case).  I just tend to want to play the game even when I could be doing better or more productive things. It doesn’t matter if I have homework due in two days. I can just play LoL now and do the homework tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if I have homework due tomorrow. I can just play LoL now and do the homework tonight. It hasn’t affected my grades negatively; I get things done and I do them well. But it has certainly effected how stressed I get sometimes and certainly causes me to lose sleep. It’s not the biggest of problems (LoL is fun after all), but it’s something I should cut down. The important question is, what makes the game so addicting?

It’s important to note, it wasn’t always like this. I first started playing LoL when I was interning in Dayton, Ohio after my freshman year. One of the other interns introduced it to me, and it was fun. We did it every day after work mostly because, well, there isn’t much to do in Ohio. But it was just a pastime. When the summer ended and I got back home, I almost completely stopped playing, because I had old high school friends and family to hang out with. When I got back to school, I was so busy with work that the thought of playing the game never even occurred to me.

And so my LoL story would have ended, if the next summer, my high school friend hadn’t brought it up. Apparently he played it a lot at school, and he convinced my entire friend group back home to try it. And so now, basically all of my high school friends play the game to some capacity. I played with them all summer. And I would play with them during school over the next year. But it was still just a past time and a way to keep in touch with my old friends. The majority of my time at school was spent doing work or hanging out with my college friends. If I ever had free time, I would be just as likely to read a book or watch some TV (or even play another game) as I was to play LoL.

So what changed? Why is it now, even though I have a back log of books I want to read, do I decide to spend my free time playing LoL? Want to know what I think the reason is? I hit level 30. See, in Legaue of Legends, you have a “summoner” level which sort of indicates how much you have played in addition to allowing you to start each game with slightly higher stats. Level 30 is the max. At level 30, you can start participating in “ranked” matches. Riot has a system in place, similar to the ELO system that the United States Chess Federation uses for ranking chess players, which gives you a rank. Bronze is the lowest, Diamond is the highest (well technically there is one higher, but that tier is at an almost professional level). And this season (Riot has a new season every year where they do a partial reset of everyone’s rank) I got placed into Bronze.

So now I have a goal, to get out of Bronze. And to accomplish that goal, I play LoL. That’s really the root cause of it, I think. I want to get better, but more specifically I want to get out of Bronze. This leads to my hypothesis, which is not scientifically proven at all and based only on a case study of myself, games are addicting when you can make progress to achieve some concrete goals. This might not be the only thing that makes games addicting, but it’s certainly a factor.

A further example of this (for myself) is the Side Meier’s Civilization IV. It’s a different kind of addicting. I don’t play it a lot. But when I do, I can’t stop until the game is over. In fact that’s probably the reason I don’t play it a lot, because I know that I need to set apart a big amount of time for it, and I’m too responsible to stay up all night playing Civ. Why can’t I stop? It’s because at the end of each turn, I have a goal in mind. Once this unit builds, I can declare war and try to take that city encroaching on my borders. Or I can achieve legendary culture in one of my cities in another 5 turns. So I say, ok, I’ll wait until I reach that goal, then continue the game in the morning. But naturally, by the time I get there, I have started work on another goal, and the process continues. The turns in Civ are similar to games of LoL.

So I have this theory now. Now what? It’s interesting, because this theory doesn’t seem to hold that well in real life (again, for myself). I got a guitar right before I started college. I still don’t know how to play it. Yes, practicing your scales is less fun than a game of league of legends, but I still want to be able to play guitar. I know that being able to play the songs I like to listen to will be fun. And I’ve played games, like the MMORPG Runescape, where I’ve grinded for days at a task I don’t think is that interesting (killing spawns of monsters for example) just so I could level up to go do something fun with that new level. Why wasn’t I as motivated at learning guitar, and could I devise a way that uses the addicting quality of games to make myself motivated? That’s the really tough question.

The answer is probably…probably. The key with LoL isn't that I want to get better, it's that I have a specific goal. It’s curious a guide on how to stop procrastinating will mention how necessary it is to break a task into steps with specific goals and to focus on the end goal. I didn’t really do that with guitar. I kind of just started learning scales, then trying to learn songs, then giving up. But what if I went further than just making an end goal? What if learning X scales made me a Bronze guitarist. Then learning Y songs made me a Silver guitarist. Then learning songs of Z difficulty made me a Gold guitarist. What if I gave myself and experience and leveling system like Runescape? I think, and I would have to try it to be sure, that I could motivate myself to learn guitar. Or write a short novel. Or write my own game. Basically do any of the things I’ve thought about doing, but never really did.

This is the idea behind Gamification, and I hope more research is done with it? I might eventually get around to it myself. As soon as I get to Gold in League of Legends. Maybe.