Game Design - Essay 2

(For my game design class, I have reworked my first post into a more formal essay)

                Addiction is a topic that’s often brought up in relation to video games.  We’ll often hear stories like this in the news media usually with a bias towards making games look bad. It’s curious that something like that story could happen. What causes video game addiction, and is it possible to use that power for good? I’m going to try to analyze my own behaviors and dealings with the addictive quality of some games to try and figure that out.

                The game League of Legends is really what started me on this topic. I realized that I have been playing it a lot more recently than I have in the past, so much so that I would say I’m addicted. Not to such an extreme as the article linked above, but I definitely feel a big compulsion to play the game, and it’s probably affected my life in a slightly negative way. But this made me curious as to why, although I’ve had an account for almost 3 years, it’s only now that I’ve been playing a lot more. Whatever changed is probably a big contributing factor into what makes games addicting.

                The thing that changed was that I finally hit level 30 in the game. In League, this means I could start playing ranked games. Before this, I would play every now and then, usually with my friends over Skype. It was a way for me to keep in touch with friends. But once I started playing ranked games, I would go on a lot more, specifically to play ranked alone. I would play to raise my ELO because I was a lowly Bronze player, and I wanted to rise through the ranks of Silver, Gold, Platinum all the way up to Diamond.

                This leads to my hypothesis:  game addiction is caused by a sense of progression, by a sense of setting goals and then striving to achieve them. Don’t get me wrong. The game has to be fun at some level. People will come to your game because it is fun mechanically. But they will stay if you give them a sense of progression.

Another personal example to solidify this point is Sid Meier’s Civilization IV, perhaps my favorite game of all time. It’s a different kind of addicting, because I don’t play it all that often. But when I do play it, I usually play it all the way through in one sitting (Civ is a notoriously long game- At least 6 hours). Again, I think the reason for that is because in the game, I’m progressing from a simple primitive society, to an advanced empire. I will tell myself I’ll stop in 5 turns, as soon as my goal of getting a specific technology is reached, but by then, I’ll have a new goal and by the time the game is over it will be morning.

If this is the case, can we use this knowledge for some good purpose? I think so. For me, it was interesting how the sense of progression compelled me to play League, but when I tried to learn to play guitar a couple of summers back, I gave up pretty quickly. I don’t even think it was an issue of fun, because I remember my middle school years where I would grind for hours to level a skill in Runescape (a decidedly not fun activity) just to gain that extra level. I think the core of the issue is that when I was practicing guitar, I wasn’t really feeling like I was getting better. I think the sense of progression that certain types of games provide can be used to help people learn skills they wouldn’t otherwise learn. For the guitar case, Rocksmith is a great example, but this could be applied to anything (another example is DuoLingo for learning a language).

Gamification is a buzzword that’s being used (and probably misused) in business contexts to help companies run better. If instead of business people, we game designers were to focus some of our efforts to harnessing the addictive quality of our products, we could truly make the world a better place.