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I would however feel guilty about transforming potential doctors into McDonalds clerks. I certainly wouldn't be satisfied spending my whole life serving fast food, especially if I knew I should be doing something else. I don't particularly want a game I design to do more harm to society than good.

I wonder if there will ever be a court case in the near future where someone sues a game company for having limited their potential. Would be interesting. hehe
"I could have become a doctor, but instead Lemmings forced me into a life of a car parking inspector!"

But think about the future - in the future we will have virtual reality, which for many will be *dangerously* addictive. Much more so than a few hours wasted on Civilisation. I can picture a bleak reality where people will never want to leave their virtual worlds, will need to be drip fed to prevent their bodies from starving to death, and a whole new field of psychology will open up to combat this new form of addictiveness.

You raise a good point by starting this discussion.

A bigger problem lies in that some companies may deliberately try to make games (namely MMORPGs) to be as addictive as possible. The reason behind that, logic dictates, is that their income is mostly based on the number of concurrent subscriptions, rather than the initial price of creating a new account. They will do everything in their power to make it hard for the player to stop playing at any given time (be it a temporary break, or a full-time account cancellation), but instead persuade him into staying online longer, even when it becomes boring, not fun and unnecessary. Of course, it's all usually masked behind careful considerations for the general appearance of the game, making it seem like every "addictive feature" was a natural choice for the game type to make it a "good game." The reality is, it all could've been easily made the other way to promote healthy amount of playing, had that been their goal.

I really think that's a much larger problem, when games are specifically made with addictive properties as a top priority, rather than other games where such properties are merely an unplanned and non-deliberate side-effect of fun gameplay and high game quality.

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Original post by Trapper Zoid I would however feel guilty about transforming potential doctors into McDonalds clerks. I certainly wouldn't be satisfied spending my whole life serving fast food, especially if I knew I should be doing something else. I don't particularly want a game I design to do more harm to society than good.

I totally agree with your decision to add small elements that remind players how long they've spent playing, or to give them frequent chances to discontinue. But I really believe it's up to each individual player, and you shouldn't transform the design of your game to suit one out of thirty players. A save/quit option on every interface screen will not bother anyone. But forcing your hero to take naps every 16 game-time hours might.

If your game is good enough to corrupt three people into losing jobs, then it's good enough to make thousands of people's lives more interesting. I think that kind of math adds up.

I mean compare that to GTA, which several people actually claimed convinced them to kill people. That's something that would bother me. Even though I know the game itself is pretty much innocent, I would still feel pretty crappy if someone was pointing their finger at me to blame for the cause of deaths.

Addiction is in the player, not the game. To make a player less susceptible to being addicted to a game would be to make it less interesting or less fun. A non-addictive game is a game no one would play.

Maybe I'm wrong but this comes from my experience. I'm severly addicted to games, if I could I'd play them all day every day. When I pry myself away from games and end up watching TV, I'm extremely board. I end up working on the yard or lately building models. I have a need to be doing something at all times and while games do not produce a real life output, they are the best option for constantly doing or building something (my addiction is primarily to MMOs and manufacturing or games with good progressive storylines).

People are typically addicted to games such as MMO's due to the idea of constantly improving. Remove that aspect. I would be much more interested in an MMO if it had no leveling or item collection. This may also make player interaction much more social rather than competitive. It would certainly make skill level much more important.

In addition, it is also important that the game satisfies the player in small doses. If rewards are only given after long periods of gameplay (especially when the player is tricked into thinking a task will only take a few minutes) the player will feel obliged to keep going.

Interesting difference between flow and adictiveness.
The thing that makes me stay in some games is the thought that something must be done right there and then.
For example, in RPGs, if I stop I might forget what I was doing (or what I was planning to do), so I better get all my checklist done before leaving.
A journal with a note-taker fixes that (Ultima Underworld!!)
In FPS it's usually the thrill of finding out what's next. Checkpoints work wonderfully here, letting me know I can take a break. Good checkpoints don't get in the way of the flow.
As for MMORPGASDFs, item collecting and social interactions are the draw. About item collection, shops closing at certain hours could work to break up marathons, maybe affecting the rate of random drops depending on how long you've been logged in? about social interaction... well, groups break up when they have to break up anyway so I guess that takes care of itself. Otherwise they'd just do IRC or MSN.

I'll keep this in mind when designing... you brought up some very good points!

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Original post by Drethon Addiction is in the player, not the game. To make a player less susceptible to being addicted to a game would be to make it less interesting or less fun. A non-addictive game is a game no one would play.

I don't think that's true in all cases. I don't think I've been addicted to the highly abstract puzzle games such as Tetris, but I still find them interesting and moderately fun. Admittedly I tend to play the games I get addicted to more often, but it's hard to gauge if that's because of the level of fun they provide or if it's due to their addictive properties.

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Original post by balohna People are typically addicted to games such as MMO's due to the idea of constantly improving. Remove that aspect. I would be much more interested in an MMO if it had no leveling or item collection. This may also make player interaction much more social rather than competitive. It would certainly make skill level much more important.

The constant improvement aspect is one of the core elements to making a game addictive. Unforunately it's also a fairly staple game design element for the interesting progression of a game. Removing that element may work for arcade style games (including FPS), but the character improvement design meme is core to some genres such as RPGs.

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In addition, it is also important that the game satisfies the player in small doses. If rewards are only given after long periods of gameplay (especially when the player is tricked into thinking a task will only take a few minutes) the player will feel obliged to keep going.

I utterly agree with this. For example, one of my pet peeves with strategy and tactical games is there's a lot of unnecessary time spent micromanaging and navigating through multiple menus that really should be streamlined. It tends to double the amount of time it takes to play the game.

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Original post by Madster Interesting difference between flow and adictiveness. The thing that makes me stay in some games is the thought that something must be done right there and then. For example, in RPGs, if I stop I might forget what I was doing (or what I was planning to do), so I better get all my checklist done before leaving. A journal with a note-taker fixes that (Ultima Underworld!!)

That's an interesting point, and one I believe is true in my case. I know I do tend to like to finish my present objective in an RPG as otherwise I'd forget exactly what it was I was meant to be doing. While a journal does help, I'd really like to see some sort of auto flashback system in these story based games ("Previously in Fantasy Quest XVIII, our hero has ventured into the Fire Temple to rescue the Princess of Fate! Can he rescue her before she is sacrificed to the Demon Goddess? Play on to find out!")

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Original post by MSW The modern negative conotation of the word addictive makes it sound like the game over rules your life. That its like a drug, and you must take your fix at every oppertunity, every day, for the rest of your forseeable existance...Which isn't the case with the vast majority of players...while true they may rush home from work to play, even put aside a number of personnal obligations, its all short term...more acuritely befitting the term captivated, rather then the potential life long and disruptive term addictive.

I agree. The term "addictive" is far too overused these days. Addictive generally means something that generates an actual physical biochemical addiction. If you're using it to mean "anything that might possibly become psychologically addictive to someone", then the term loses all meaning, because everything is addictive to someone. There are undoubtedly people out there who are "addicted" to games that all of us would consider boring.

I think it's wrong to purposefully develop actual physically addictive things for profit. But I don't think there's anything wrong with creating fun things with no physical addictive qualities. I guess I would consider it wrong to directly give something to someone who you know has a psychological addiction to it, for example, if you knew your friend finally got over an actual severe Everquest addiction, and you pestered him to play with you until he gave in again. But I don't think, as game developers, we have the fine-grained marketing control necessary to stop people with specific psychological problems from playing our games.

Ultimately, the number of husbands who stopped caring about their wives didn't actually go up when Everquest came out; it just became the new thing to blame instead of alcohol or television.

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Original post by makeshiftwings Addictive generally means something that generates an actual physical biochemical addiction.

Im going to be pedantic about that... I think there is a fine difference, but one thats relative to the discussion.
Addiction certainly can involve chemical dependancy. But more important to understanding addiction in general is the way in which the chemical dependancy -leads- to a reward and punishment cycle which reinforces the behaviours involved, and creates a potentially damaging pattern.

With that in mind, Id agree with Trapper that there probably is some form of responsibility to steer away from directly promoting behaviour patterns which are observed to lead to unusually high frequencys of addiction (or at least detrimental behaviours similar to addiction).
With a little study I dont think it should be that hard to design the reward patterns of a game to avoid patterns which promote damaging behaviour but still reward the player.


Another interesting point I noticed in reading through this thread is the belief that ongoing growth cycles are a fundamental part of RPGs. They're certainly a core part of most computer RPGs, but looking at their origins I think reveals a lot. Dungeons&Dragons, for example, which is a fairly major influence on a lot of RPGs, does -not- actually reward players on a continuous basis. CRPGs only use a simplified model of the D&D system, awarding xp as the character adventures. The D&D model is actually to award all that xp only at the end of a mission or play session, not ad-hoc during play. I think thats a good example of certain pre-concieved notions that could take a good hard look to make games less addictive and still reward players.

My thought is that a game's success is wholely predicated upon is addictiveness---if you choose to make your game less addicting, you're making a worse game. You're shooting yourself in the foot. That's my view.