Taking Advantage of Addiction

I noticed an article today, the “5 creepy ways video games are trying to get you addicted“, that outlines some of the methods used to create addiction in gamers and thought that there is an insight here into methods that we should be aware of when designing persuasive technologies. The  methods discussed are as follows:

1. Treating the gamer as though they are a rat in an Operant Conditioning Chamber or “Skinner box” and giving them carefully scheduled rewards to ensure that they play the game for a long period, important with subscription type business-models, and crucially, that the players continue to play the game through less fun or more repetitive parts. This approach relies on making players conform to certain patterns of activity through carefully arranging time, activity, and rewards, which can be combined in many ways to produce the required behaviour patterns.
2. Exploiting the natural hoarding tendencies of humans alongside of the additional tendency of gamers to treat game items as real  to turn game items into food pellets, just like the rats get in the box. Given that a player expends time, effort and skill to obtain them, they have value. Game items are now considered to be real by some courts, insofar as they can be bought, sold or stolen, and therefore an industry has grown around producing and marketing these things.
3. Exploiting the idea that the next one might be the winner. This is the equivalent of getting the rat to keep pushing the lever even if there isn’t a treat available every time. People relax if they know that there is a reward each time they perform a given action, so variable ration rewards are used to make you keep trying, just in case.
4. Getting you to keep pressing the lever involves a number of techniques; Increasing difficulty so that whilst it is easy to get started and earn your first pellets, the period between rewards grows; Getting rid of places where you can disengage from the game without losing at least some of your progress; Punishing the player for incorrect behaviour, if they fail to press the lever at the correct intervals then they are punished.
5. The game fills a void in the life of the user. This is the real kicker because it means that the game is providing something to the user that is better than what they have outside of it. This is based upon a combination of: autonomy, the game being able to choose what they do, complexity, so as to avoid boring repetition, and a connection between effort and reward, so that the player can see the results of all of that grinding work. The reason that these work to addict people to games is that the designers aim to provide some combination of all three factors which is better than the combination of those factors in the players real life or job.

Of course the real secret to applying these techniques is to not make it obvious that they are being used. The whole point is that the correct combination of all of these factors is what earns a game like EverQuest the title EverCrack yet the players don’t feel manipulated.