Making Addictive Games

I wish it was titled: "Making games enjoyable." Addictive is not a good word.

This is an interesting update on Bartle's Taxonomy of Players (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm) from back in the MUD days. Sadly, this article is a little dated if you check out the list of games used (Dark Ages of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies). I would love to see results from a survey like this that used players from Farmville, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City.

I wrote an article about adding gaming components into your web app a few weeks back if you're interested: http://blog.areastudios.com/2010/01/14/make-your-web-applica...

Abstract: "An empirical model of player motivations in online games provides the foundation to understanding and assessing how players differ from one another and how motivations of play relate to age, gender, usage patterns and in-game behaviors. In the current study, a factor analytic approach was used to create an empirical model of player motivations. The analysis revealed 10 motivation subcomponents that grouped into 3 overarching components (Achievement, Social, and Immersion). Relationships between motivations and demographic variables (age, gender, and usage patterns) are also presented."

Nick Yee has run the Daedalus Project for years. I know and like it for its insight into the demographics of MMO players: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

This paper gives you some structure if you think about integrating game aspects in whatever you are doing.

Here is a link to the Google PDF Viewer if you don't want to deal with browser extensions:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nickyee.c...