How do you make an addictive video game? | Hacker News Reader

How do you make an addictive video game?

pjvogt.substack.com

15 pointsgarycomtois16 comments

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The way you make an addictive anything:

* Random, variable rewards, with the possibility for really great rewards.

* In as many different ways as you can feasibly include.

* Optimise for 'near-misses', which have been shown to increase the addictive properties.

> Random, variable rewards, with the possibility for really great rewards

The more I've thought about it, the more I realize that variable reward is a key component of fun. All of the most fun and successful games have it built in, even if you don't realize it. Does it have ranked match making? That's variable reward. Why do you think online chess is so popular now? The ranked match making gives you just enough wins to keep you hooked.

> I realize that variable reward is a key component of fun

Actually, Roger Caillois wrote a famous book on the different forms of play [1]. He uses four forms of play to classify games, and the one you are referring to is chance (Alea in his book). Another form of play that applies more accurately to chess is competition (Agon in his book). He also emphases two other key components of fun: playing a role (Mimicry) and physical sensations like in a roller coaster (Ilinx).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man,_Play_and_Games

> Another form of play that applies more accurately to chess is competition

In my personal experience in competition if you are only losing or only winning it's not fun. I think competition is variable reward dressed up.

I understand how competition can be seen as variable reward dressed up. On the other hand, in an attempt to classify games, separating the two components competition and chance is still useful. I think that chance is to be understood as a component completely independent of the player's skills. This allows to distinguish competitive games such as chess (competion with skills) and yahtzee (competition with chance) for example.

Even competitions of chance have skill components (unless they are completely random) and competitions of skill have chance components (who do you get matched against). Even in chess, two players playing against eachother will not always have the same outcome, it's not completely deterministic.

Ultimately pretty shallow. This is more an exploration of how it feels to make a "sticky" game rather than how to actually make a sticky game.

I certainly don't have any expertise or deep insight but I will say that one of the best videos I've seen on this is "The art of screenshake" by J. Nijman of Vlambeer [0]. There, he walks through what's a very basic 2d sidescroller shooter and adds in effects until it looks like an actual fun game. The idea being that layering feedback and effects so that every aspect of the game becomes more fun to play.

It sounds like this podcast was focusing more on Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, both games which I haven't played but are more strategy and luck oriented than the kind of games Vlambeer makes. I think one of the insights there is that there's a non-commutative aspect of the game that allows for different strategies based on context. For example, A > B, B > C but C > A, like in rock paper scissors, or some of its generalizations [1]. I think this is what Magic the Gathering did with each of the colors. Maybe the keyword here is "mixed strategies"?

Nijman's video highlights, to me, the importance of polish and how we basically understand that many core mechanics are fun and so don't need to be innovative if you add in enough polish or support around it.

One other thing I'll mention is that A. Bruce who developed Antichamber had a GDC talk about his process of development [2]. One of the interesting points he made was that he got it in front of players and watched how long they played. He tried to continually optimize for engagement, trying to get people to play a minute longer, etc. until he worked through to a fun game.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre_ciseaux_feuille_l%...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOlcB-JxkFw

Make it easy to play "one more turn". Each turn only needing a few minutes is what causes players of turn-based games to suddenly find themselves still playing at 7am. The built-in "pause" in the game's action—with each turn accomplishing a discrete task—offers an automatic offramp out of the game, which makes it easy for players to decide that they will take that offramp after "one more turn". If gameplay were not so discrete, players would at some point just pause the game on their own and leave.

As an aside, one thing that I found interesting was the discussion on Poker and how it's both high luck and high skill. I think this point gets lost a lot in the startup world where it requires both extremely good luck and high threshold of skill, so you get, on one side some people saying that success is arbitrary but filtered by wealth and, on the other side, these strongman narratives of genius innovators.

Then there is the classic Nintendo approach: "so you've put a lot of effort into this game? Well, you better keep coming back every day or we'll chip away at that".

- Animal Crossing: your island may become overgrown with weeds, villagers want to move out, some furniture will rust, your home will have cockroaches

- Nintendogs: the puppies will get very hungry and thirsty, they'll lose weight and stop recognizing your voice.

Digging into the abstractions of life (with my admittedly non-medical non-scientific background) it seems that if you really boil things down it's all dopamine

Dopamine reward: Anticipation, something good happens, repeat

Addiction: Anticipation, something good happens sometimes, repeat

To answer the question from that standpoint, reward the player.. but not too much :)

Everything on top of that is there to get the person into the loop in the first place

So why is "addictive" a quality in a game? So you pay for more IAPs?

This may have been good when games were pay once, but these days it's maybe something to stay away from.

IMHO, links to podcast episodes aren’t super well-suited for HN. Text works much better here. And in this case, there’s not even a transcript AFAICT.

So what is the tl;dr? What are we supposed to take away from this podcast episode?

Just make a good game, there are plenty of games that don't follow the skinner box/psychological tricks that are extremely addictive e.g. Counter Strike.

Start with easy difficulty and gradually make it harder. Introduce new mechanics along the way.

"This episode will change how you look at games. We talk to Ben Brode, the designer behind Hearthstone and Marvel Snap, about how a creative person learns to make the things they love, and about the secret ideas hiding in games as simple as rock-papers-scissors."

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