OddballGreg - What Makes A Game Addictive?

Image is a screenshot of Factorio, which is produced by a devoted team of developers based in Prague.

What makes a game addicting? If you're among the millions of gamers in the world at this point, then it's entirely possible that you've played some game or other that just seemed to maintain grip on your attention for a seemingly ridiculous amount of time. What exactly is it that causes that?

Time. It's not something most of us have a lot of usually. Between work, school, studies, hobbies, relationships, sleep, and whatever else tickles your fancy, finding time for everything we want to do can occasionally be a little difficult. Especially when you start playing certain games. We've all experienced it at one point or another I'm sure. You started playing Borderlands 2 with your best friends, you picked up Factorio for a steal, or downloaded Dwarf Fortress to find out what the zany, ASCII font craziness was all about, and before you knew it, you were 200 hours down on the game, and still begging for more while your exhausted body begged you to go to sleep. Considering it's 6 in the morning and you have work in 30 minutes... that may or may not have been a good thing. (Probably not.)

So how does it get to that point? And I'm not talking about the easy, default "because it's fun" answer that you're probably thinking right now either, I'm talking about the basis of that fun. What is it about these games that makes us sit and play them for far longer than is actually a good idea and still consider it fun? I will point out that what I'm about to talk about is mostly opinion and conjecture based on logical thought, so feel free to consider and offer your own causes or thoughts on the subjects down in the comments below.

Consider, for a moment, what it is that makes these games so incredibly fun and addictive. The basis of their gameplay. (I'm sorry, graphics do not make for an addictive game, Crysis is only cool the first time.) Factorio is a game about building a factory on an alien planet. Dwarf Fortress is about settling some forsaken location in the hopes of making what is likely to be a very short-lived home for your civilization and Borderlands 2 is about going on insane adventures, preferably with friends, while you loot and kill your way across an entire planet.

Now, you may be sitting there thinking: "but none of those have anything in common." 5 points to a house of your choice, since you're entirely correct. They don't have the same ideas, same gameplay, same appeal or same anything really. Which is why they do admittedly appeal to different kinds of people. There is no one fits all solution to making an addicting game, as people are inherently different with their tastes. However, these 3 games do have something about them that makes them addicting to people who enjoy their appeal.

Factorio appeals to a person's enjoyment of perfection, or at least the journey to it. It's extremely difficult to design an efficient factory in the game, and there is more than one way to go about doing, which can be influenced by the environment the player needs to deal with. Suffice to say, it's hard to run out of things to do in the game, yet every time you get the right combination of factories and smelters right, the game offers the satisfaction of running like a well oiled machine. It's hard not to play this game for hundreds of hours when your'e constantly thinking of new and creative solutions to  a fun problems. Some people would find all that thought somewhat arduous, but strange people like me enjoy it, so it's unsurprising that Factorio is a very popular and somewhat overplayed game. (Not that anyone's complaining.)

Then we have Dwarf Fortress. This game is insane quite frankly. What is it's appeal? That's a difficult question to answer when it has more than a few. Problem solving and efficient designs make an appearance as Dwarf Fortress's appeal as well, with the creation of efficiently designed fortresses being a point of pride for some. But what's perhaps more interesting about Dwarf Fortress is it's ideals for how a game should be played. First and foremost, there is not actually any way to win. Your fortress will inevitably end in disaster, either as a result of a "Catsplosion", "Tantrum Spiral", "Goblin Siege", or as it is so commonly referred to among the more veteran players: "Fun".

Catsplosion? Tantrum Spiral? What the hell? Precisely. This game is so full of ridiculous ways to lose, and seemingly absurd things that can happen, that it's impossible to not want to play again just to see what happens next. Some of my favorite stories include a soldier that wrestles a werewolf to the ground by grabbing it's teeth and biting it to pieces, an unfortunate colonist who's arms get ripped of by a giant badger 2 days after her arrival at the new fortress, a fortress filling up endlessly with particularly frisky cats to the point of crashing the game due to lack of RAM, and many, many more. My advice, if you want to laugh uncontrollably, I suggest both going here to read the EPIC tale of Boatmurdered, the most infamously messed up story of Dwarf Fortress I've ever heard with tales of murderous elephants that like besieging goblins, elf slaughter by lavaspill, a generation of cheese and death infatuated dwarves and a long list of fortress mayors who had no idea what they were doing. After that, watch the equally funny but slightly more tame playthroughs by my favorite YouTube commentator, Quill18, in which the earlier mentioned events, and many more, took place.

And then, of course, Borderlands 2. What's not appealing about this game? Endless loot ala Diablo. Check. Endless hordes of enemies to shoot ala Diablo. Check. Incredibly weird and just downright crazy yet very funny dialogue, jokes and wise cracks throughout the somewhat rather absurdly violent game. Check. Most importantly, it's about as much fun as you can have playing with friends. The crazy, over the top humor and action, combined with the unending want for better loot, strangely permeats the game and inspires equally absurd and hilarious commentary from the people playing it. Basically, this game unapologetically makes you act like a funny psychopath with your friends, which is about as much fun as the game itself is. It is essentially appealing because it makes people act strange and preys upon human greed for more. Not that I'm complaining. A good 100 hours later, I don't feel like my time was wasted in the least.

Remember how I said that these games didn't have anything in common? I may have left out one thing. The simple fact that they prey upon human vices in clever ways. Factorio and Dwarf Fortress prey upon the human search for perfection. We want the best, and these games abuse that want to make us keep looking for better and better ways to play them. The leveling system in Borderland does this as well to a fair extent, but Borderlands is more effective at preying upon the human need for acceptance. If you and your friends are all acting like idiot and laughing at over the top gunfights, you're connecting socially. Subconsciously, humans crave that connection, so it makes sense that you'd want to keep doing that.

Basically, what makes a game addictive? Manipulation of subconscious desires. (Phew... and I thought this would be a lighthearted article. If you're feeling a little down, here's a video of cats acting stupid, with my compliments.) They manipulate us into achieving goals that are hardcoded to give us an endorphin release in our brains, which we want more of, and thus come back to experience again. Which is, interestingly enough, the definition of addiction. So yes, games can be addictive, and are addictive for the same reason as anything else that is addictive. Because it makes you feel good.

In any case, that's all I've got for the subject. If you've got your own opinions or thoughts on the subject, then feel free to share them down in the comments below or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear from you guys. If you have friends who enjoy pondering the human mind and games, then consider sharing this article with them too. They may appreciate the interesting topic to ponder. If you yourself would like to read more interesting articles like this one, perhaps consider liking the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or following us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left so that you can get the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this article; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy gaming my friends.