Factorio is awesome. It's kind of funny-ironic that a counter-example to "making games as addictive as possible" is an indie game addictive enough to be called "cracktorio" by its fans.
When people talk about "making games as addictive as possible" in the general and pejorative sense, they usually mean something else: they mean that the optimization goal is not "fun", but "making money off players". That very often involves making games less fun on purpose, to exploit player's psychology against them. You keep frustrating them on purpose - but not hard enough for them to abandon the game entirely - in hopes that over time, enough of them will break and buy the paid content or unfrustration features, to relieve their psychological pain. Explicitly additive aspects get included to maximize the time the player is exposed to these monetization opportunities.
Addictiveness is ultimately a red herring in these discussions. Factorio is designed as a win-win game, the devs wants to give their players the best experience in the game's category. Modern, pay-to-win, addictive games are designed by malicious people with no moral compass, who want to extract as much money as possible from people, as cheaply as possible.
(Like with many of the big problems in our industry, focusing on tech or immediate "sciency-sounding" consequences is missing the forest for the trees. These problems all stem from people being allowed to exploit others for money. Solutions to mitigate immediate consequences will be worked around very quickly. Real solutions need to involve restrictions on the types of business that can be done.)
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[0] - https://xkcd.com/356/
I just played a mobile game, and as usual it has a hundred different in-game currencies that you can buy with real money. Every time I finish a level there's an endless parade of meaningless "rewards", and I see some coins going into a piggybank. When it was full, I clicked it, and the game congratulated me for now being eligible to buy the contents.
The game is a clone of puzzle bobble. Like you said, none of that is making puzzle bobble a "better game". It's saying "Wow, you won/earned something! It's almost yours now, you just have to pay this tiny fee to actually have it...". I don't feel like I'm on the same side as the developer, and this is worlds apart from how Factorio treats players.
Since "addictive" still has positive connotations in gaming, I'll just call it "manipulative" from now on.
The intent is of course to form a habit, so that players habitually play the game no matter if it is still fun. Combine that with a good reward system that gives you positive reinforcement at random intervals, and you get something that is designed to addict you to the game.
You, personally, don't like time-gated content. That's fine. But it's another thing entirely to say that because you don't like it it's morally wrong. Tons of people have no problem with it and in fact enjoy being limited by how much time they can play a game per day and to slowly build up their progress over time.
Plus, for many games these things are this way for multiple reasons. For instance, Genshin Impact, a very popular game released recently has time-gated content in the way you mentioned. But it's also a game made in China, where there are rules stating that kids can't play games for too many hours during a single day. In such an environment, time-gating is a perfect solution for both the legal problem of not encouraging people to play for too long in a single day, but also as a way to prevent people from levelling too fast beyond what the game has to offer. In this latter case it's just another way of keeping people engaged until you release new content.
That's an interesting point I've never heard of before, thanks for bringing it up.
Still, I think there's more to tease apart about time-gating. As a high-schooler, I spent plenty of time on time-gated games (AstroWars and OGame). From that experience I know this mechanic alone is very addictive, and I make a conscious decision to avoid these types of games now. I had my fun (particularly social type, my fiends were hooked in just as much as I was). And, I don't consider this mechanic to be a problem alone. What matters is why it's there. Is it to make the game fun, in its particular way? Or is it to maximize the players' exposure to monetization opportunities?
The root of my point is this: particular mechanics a game employs don't matter; what matters is why those particular mechanics were chosen. Intent, not engineering.
I've seen a lot of people struggle with this concept over the years. so I want to clarify a few things:
- People equivocate the word "addicting." That is, they switch between two meanings: "specific behavioral addiction, as defined by a schedule of reinforcement," vs. "something I enjoy a lot of an spend a lot of time doing."
- I've also seen people confuse any kind of reward in a video game (eg: beating a boss, winning in multiplayer, obtaining a high score, etc.) as being "addicting" and equivalent to various skinner box techniques noted above. (schedules of reinforcement, time gating, etc.) The problem is of course, that these things are not equivalent at all. Someone addicted to Space Invaders high scores is very much not the same as someone who threw their life away to play World of Warcraft.
- Not all games that have loot drops should be considered addicting in this sense. I would say that in hindsight, this is pretty clear. Diablo II is very addicting, but look at the forums, and check out some gameplay videos. No one is highlighting the gameplay, or boss fights, or music, or setting. They're all talking about loot drops. Whatever the developer's original intent, the gameplay of Diablo II is loot drops. Compare this with something like Dark Souls. Yes, there is loot in this game, and enemies do drop it. But except for a few achievement hunters, no one is talking about all their time spent grinding in Dark Souls. Really, the core of Dark Souls' gameplay revolves around overcoming the various challenges presented to the player.
Maybe there just arent' many of us who don't mind paying for games as long as we don't have to buy hearts and diamonds and coins and what not.
There's this bias where games that are extremely addicting but that appeal to intelligence, the perceived most important trait in our society currently, are OK, whereas games that are addicting and appeal to other traits, like the ability to do the same thing over and over, are morally wrong. Both types of appeal are manipulative in the same way, but one is cast as morally wrong because it doesn't appeal to what the elites in our society (such as you, dear HN reader) value.
Engrossing
Captivating
For instance, as a kid, I've spent some ridiculous amount of hours playing Unreal Tournament (and to the lesser degree, Quake 3 Arena) - some of it with friends in an Internet cafe, but a lot in single-player mode too. I'd consider these two games to be pretty addictive for their time. But they were addictive because they were fun. Not because they tried to lure me in with skinner boxes, keep me in with time-gating, and monetize me with microtransactions.
Or, more recently, I've spent countless of hours playing 2048. At some point it became my go-to activity for every moment I wasn't actively concentrating on something. It may sound like an "intellectual" game, but in reality it's pretty braindead once you get the gist of it. You could probably say that the time I spent with it was unhealthy, but again, at no point it tried to be anything but fun. There were no features in there designed with exploitation in mind.
Or, roguelikes and roguelites. Between Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and RimWorld, I'm probably approaching some 1000 hours of total play time. Both are fun and addictive, in the positive sense. Neither has any of the addictive money-making features in them.
I could go on. But the point is, I maintain that ill intent is a better way to categorize games than "addictiveness". And I hate to invoke the "you'll know it when you see it" cliche, but the difference between the games designed to be fun and the games designed to milk you is glaringly obvious. Entertainment has value, and good entertainment tends to be addictive (it's pretty much a tautology). But it takes more than good entertainment to create a problem.
You view roguelikes and roguelites as positively addicting because of your personality and the fact that those games test for the traits you care about, not because they're objectively better than other games that focus on another trait.
You probably don't view MMORPGs where the entire point of the game is just grinding mindlessly for months or years as positively addicting because your personality isn't the type that would like that, but there are tons of people in the world who aren't like you and like the average HN reader who would agree with you.
I've written more extensively about this before so I feel like keeping arguing here might be pointless, but in case you're curious for a more full version of the argument: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/66
In any case, I think making something that is emergently addictive or addictive because it is fun is different from engineering something to be addictive by liberally lifting from all the years of research that went into slot machine design.
I don't know whether you frequent casinos but if you sit in the slot area for a while then compare that to big budget mobile p2w games (including Clash Royale which is actually also fun) is quite alarming. There are so many design similarities that lootbox games are basically slot machines without needing to pay out money...
- Static/dynamic typing: borders -- I prefer static typing to dynamic typing; this is a change from preference for dynamic typing in the past; today, I find "mixing and matching" of types to almost always cause runtime errors, not new insights
- Engines/frameworks: no borders -- I dislike frameworks in general, gamedev or otherwise, I much prefer to compose libraries myself
- Roguelike/Roguelite: ??? -- I don't care about a strict definition, but having a somewhat clear definition is useful for managing expectations
- Progression/No progression: ??? -- I like both
- Grinding/No grinding: no borders -- Grinding is boring, though I'll do it if you hang a nice enough carrot in front of me
- Gacha Games: no borders -- As expressed above, I consider them immoral, and that has less to do with mechanics and more with why they're employed. That said, I don't think Gacha mechanics have any sort of special borders compared to many other fun, well-defined mechanics.
- Professions: ??? -- My professional software dev is mostly a borderful experience, but I also do gamedev on the side...
- Easy Modes: ??? -- I don't see how it fits in your argument at all, or how is it even a topic at all (except for competitive multiplayer games, about which I don't care all that much). Most games have "easy mode" in form of a wide variety of cheats to choose from.
It seems I'm leaning a bit towards "no borders", but then I think this borders/no borders split isn't really "carving nature at its joints". It does not factor personality cleanly.
Also, as additional objection, I think you could use this argument to justify getting people addicted to gambling as a matter of "personality difference". I feel this explains too much.
If this is done by being fun and enjoyable, and the developer doesn’t cross the line into preying on addictive behaviour, no problem.
If the developer implements mechanics that are designed to “hook” the player to the detriment of the enjoyment and their health, then we have a problem.
I'm familiar with all of these except for "time-gating." What is it?
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Mobile games use time gating for "lives" or "energy" or something so you can only play so much then you have to wait. Then they try and get you to spend real money to circumvent the time gate.
MMOs use time gating to slow player progression, with mechanics where you can only earn certain rewards once per day or once per week or something. It slows players becoming too powerful too quickly, or from completing their collections too quickly or from grinding the new rare drop in the first week.
This type of stuff is even creeping into other types of games, unfortunately. Especially with every game nowadays being an online game, even the single player ones.
If you want to see a company that really walks the line: look at Digital Extremes.