Make Them Want. Delay. Fulfill. Repeat.

Players can get a deep feeling of satisfaction from games that literally play themselves. How cool is that?

Last week, I began my discourse on how video games can warp your brain chemistry to bring you pleasure in order to make lots of money and how difficult, delicate, and awesome that process is.

I have eight observations about how video games cause your brain to secrete delicious dopamine. Here are the last four. If you can master this dark art, endless success awaits.

5. Different Genres of Games Provide Different Dopamine Delivery Systems

Role-playing games let your characters earn small improvements, providing a constant flow of drug. Tough puzzle games and Dark Souls-type games hold back your dose for a while as you master a challenge and then reward you in one big flood when you finally succeed.

Open-ended games like Destiny are for the serious addict, who wants a lot of hits over a period of time. Short, self-contained games are for someone who wants a limited supply or likes getting the hits in a variety of ways.

This is why there will always be a market for finite-length single-player story games. They are safe to play. However intensely they consume your time for a while, they end. I'm fine with dumping all this time into Subnautica because I know I will eventually kill the Final Fish and be free.

By the way, part of the genius of Achievements systems is that they create a whole new layer of fulfillment and addiction on top of what the games already provide, and they do it with very little effort. Whatever mad genius in Microsoft came up with the idea of the Gamer Score deserves the Nobel Prize For Awesomeness.

My next game, Queen's Wish. Beating dungeons gets resources. Use resources to buy shops. The shops give you better equipment. Each step provides dopamine.

6. Like All Drugs, You Will Eventually Develop Tolerance

You will always develop tolerance for a drug. You will eventually get tired of walking on the hedonic treadmill.

Most people, as they age, stop playing video games. They sometimes ask me, confused, why they don't want to play anymore. Games used to seem so important.

Part of this is the increasing obligations of adulthood, taking away your ability to spend hundreds of hours in an MMO. I think it's more than that. After all, if you care about something, REALLY care, you'll make time for it. If you were that desperate to play video games, you'd play video games.

No, I think it is that video game-induced dopamine hits are a fleeting and hollow pleasure. Every hit you get makes you less fulfilled than the one before. The sense of accomplishment is an illusion, after all. Eventually, the fun you get just doesn't justify the time expended, and you put down the controller and leave your house.

When the rewards are provides by machines you make yourself, that magnifies the fulfillment. Have this game running on three computers simultaneously to triple your pleasure!

7. Don't Be So Judgmental About This.

Seriously. Dopamine addiction is a problem, but it isn't that huge a problem. Why get so mad about it? You're not trying to cure cancer. You're not freeing an oppressed people. You're writing about video games.

Look. I love video games. I have my whole life. I've dedicated my career to them. I let me kids play them. I think they're terrific, in moderation.

Yet, if you spend a hundred hours playing a video game, I think you should ask yourself if it's the best use of your time. If you spend a thousand hours playing a game, I think that you are making a mistake. If my kids try to get into speedrunning, I will, in a friendly and gentle way, strongly encourage them to not do that.

Look, I don't want to make any big fancy declarations about morality or what other developers should do. Video game writing already has wayyy too much of that. I just try to run my business in a way I can feel good about.

These days, I write games that you can be pretty much done with after 50 hours. That's a lot of distraction and dopamine for your 20 bucks, and then I free you so you at least have the chance to go to the park or take swing dancing lessons. This is how I make my peace morally with what I sell.

All I know is this: Writing video games that provide pleasure without dopamine hits can be done. It's just hard. Storytelling is hard. Generating emotions is hard. Dopamine is the cheat code for compelling game design.

Which brings us back to Anthem.

Now you can carry your addictions on your walks with you! You never need to have a moment of tranquility again!

8. If You Want To Sell a Drug, You Have To Provide the Drug!

This is the final point, and the one that will protect you from ruin.

Almost every game, even the most artsy one, uses dopamine hits to keep the player going. For example, Papers, Please! is unquestionably artsy, but it provides happy-making rewards for each challenge you complete correctly, and there is even a nice score sheet at the end of every day. (Return of the Obra Dinn does exactly the same thing, but it is subtler.)

I think a major skill of a successful game designer is a feel for how to give a player dopamine. How to generate those hits. How to pace them. How to introduce enough variety in other parts of the game to create the illusion of a fulfilling activity.

If people are saying about your looter shooter, "We aren't getting good enough loot," that's not a whine. It shows you are fundamentally failing at your main task. It's like someone at your restaurant complaining that their meal doesn't contain food.

You have to respond by giving them more food. Not too much. Not enough to gorge them. Just enough to make them feel rewarded enough to stay on your hamster wheel.

Make the player want. Hold back what they want. Give them what they want. Repeat forever. This is the art.

This is a touch cynical, I know, but it's how I built a career and a life in this business. Game colleges should have classes called "Addiction For Fun and Profit, Mainly Profit." If you want to sell video games, you ignore this topic at your peril.

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I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter.

The Glorious, Profitable, Inescapable Art of Addiction

Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers!

I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter from BioWare and Electronic Arts. Apparently, it doesn't give out enough loot for the monsters you kill. For a game like Anthem, this is BAD FORM.

Apparently, when you spend three hours killing a boss, the increase in your character's numbers isn't generating a sufficiently pleasurable dopamine hit to justify the time invested.

So Bioware releases a patch, and good loot suddenly drops like crazy. Our characters numbers shoot up and up, causing a pleasurable, sustained dopamine high. Ahhhhh. That's the stuff. But oops. The rebalancing was bugged! The loot rate drops, and again we are strung out, demanding that when we kill the level 99 Glip-Glop we get a properly satisfying purple (or legendary or epic) item.

They never enabled Anthem to give the players the sweet hits of neurotransmitter they desired. Anthem is therefore not serving the main purpose it exists for, so now the game appears to be slowly dying.

So what have we learned?

Time To Actually Look At What We Are Seeing

I can't be the first person to notice that complaining about these games' loot drop rates is like being mad that the bartender is watering down the drinks. Complaining your character's numbers aren't going up fast enough is the "My weed dealer sold me a bag of oregano!" for the new millennium.

While artsy indiepants developers debated whether video games are Great Art or a great storytelling medium, the big shot developers wearing the money pants became the most profitable drug dealers the world has ever seen.

Fifty of us spend 12 hours being this jerk so that I could get an imaginary sword. What force is powerful enough to inspire such madness?

A Brief Disclaimer to Get the Neuroscientists Off My Butt

When I say video games give you a pleasurable "dopamine hit" that’s shorthand for whatever pleasant chemical process is going on in the brain while you play. Is it actually dopamine? Or some other more complicated reaction of chemicals in the brain?

Beats me. Answering this question is way above my pay grade. I'm just using "Dopamine Hit" as a placeholder/shortcut term. But whatever is happening, it IS chemicals, and they are generated by the brain on gaming.

So, here are a few thoughts about the ways video games provide pleasure and manipulate our brains. Just observations. I don't have any answers. Nobody does. We can, however, look across the landscape and see what we see.

1. The Video Game Industry Sells Engines That Release Pleasure Chemicals In To Your Brain

Hey, I love artsy video games like Papers, Please! or whatever. I really do. But don't kid yourself. That is not and never will be where the real money is.

Popular video games sell so well because they cause the release of sweet, sweet dopamine in the brain. When you fill up an experience bar. When a stat number goes up. When you find a vein of diamonds and can make a sweet pickaxe. When you get the BEST sword. When you solve a puzzle or clear away a row in Tetris.

When you die fifty times to a boss in Bloodborne, you are holding off the fix, which makes the huge surge of dopamine when you finally win all the more satisfying. Aaaaahhhhhh.

I'm Not Judging

I know I'm expected to say how bad this state of affairs is, but I'm not going to. I don't think it's bad. I play these games. I like the dopamine.

This isn't an editorial. I'm not judging anyone. I write computer RPGs for a living. My games are crude and low-budget, but they give you your modest dopamine dose for a far more reasonable price than the free-to-play drug lords over on Android. I even throw in a decent story to put a patina of sophistication on the whole thing.

How many children are, right this moment, grinding at the computer to get the thrill of seeing a fresh vein of diamonds.

2. The Effect Is Very Real and Very Powerful.

Back in the day, before game designers got really good at parceling out the dopamine hits, I raided in Everquest and World of Warcraft. Hardcore. Hours a day for weeks to get my shot at one of the really high-end artifacts. When I got one, the good feeling, a really substantive warm illusion of accomplishment, could last for days.

These days, I struggle to remember what any of those clumps of data stored on a distant server actually were. (An "epic weapon"? Was that a thing?) However, the memory of the FEELING of satisfaction I got is still very strong.

Now, of course, we designers know to make the upgrades come in a constant flow of smaller improvements. A host of bars slowly filling up and numbers increasing, so that the warm feeling never stops.

This effect is so powerful that you don't even need to make the player DO anything. Look at clicker games. Cookie clicker is particularly good.

In clicker games, a few simple clicks jump starts the process of earning cookies/points/gold, and then it runs on its own. You can walk away from the computer, return later, and see your progress! In some games, not only do you not need to do anything, you CAN'T do anything, and you still advance. It really, truly feels like you did something! It's amazing how our brains work.

3. Writing An Addictive Video Game Is HARD

Making a truly addictive video game is an art. Like, it's really, super hard. If it wasn't, there would be far fewer failed video games. Artsy types don't appreciate how difficult it is.

When I am trying to design a game that pulls people in and gets them stuck there, I don't have rules. There's no algorithm. When designing a system, I sort through the 10000000 different ways I can do something, and I pick the one that feels right in my gut. The design that makes me go, "Yeah, this compels me. This would tickle my brain and keep me playing."

There’s no rules for it. It’s intuition. Feelings. Art.

I mean, think about it! When I write a game, I am trying to manipulate another human being's brain, at a distance, using nothing but these abstract mental constructs I build. Do I get to give the user cocaine or meth? No! I don't get a tool as easy or clumsy as actual chemicals. I'm trying to shape their minds with nothing but pure thoughts! That's awesome!

I like writing and visuals and all that good stuff, but don't undervalue addictiveness. Making a game addictive requires true craft, and this quality enables video games to provide something unique in entertainment. If controlling the player's brain was easy, Anthem wouldn't have burned up hundreds of millions of dollars and exploded.

Even artsy games are smart enough to provide a score to increase. Nothing is more fun than bigger numbers.

4. DLC and Micropayments Are a Side Topic, Not the Main Argument

Our industry has discovered that the pleasure jolt from advancing in these games is so great some people will spend lots of money to keep the drip coming. “Five minutes of gameplay and your fancy tower is completed right away? That will be a dollar, thank you.” Bottomless fortunes are being made off of dopamine.

Look, if an ADULT spends $500 of their hard earned money to buy Fortnitebux or Smurfberries or whatever, I don't know what business it is of yours. If an adult wants to spend cash on beer or DLC or opera tickets or loot boxes, it's their right.

BUT.

Parental controls are deeply flawed. The companies who give them to you don’t want them too work well, because they want the money your children will spend.

Suppose a tired distracted parent (as all parents are) makes a mistake (as all humans do) and lets their kid play the wrong game unsupervised for an hour. That game will happily suck your bank account dry and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

For decades, the world has been trying to portray our industry as malevolent and harmful and evil. They’re always been wrong so far. PLEASE do not allow your greed to make them correct.

Anyway.

Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you're grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren't spending more money. Just time.

What is the creepy part? Is it evil to charge a dribble of money for a game so addictive it devours hundreds of hours of your time? Or is the problem making the game so addictive it consumes hundreds of hours of your time in the first place?

Again, I am asking this as a person who writes games as addictive as I can make them in order to buy food.

This turned into a huge post, so this is just part one. The second half is to come.

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I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers Review

I spent a bunch of time with Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers on XBox Live over the weekend. Perhaps a little obscure for a review. But I thought it, while fun, made a horrible mistake, something other developers can learn from.

Uh, Magic, Wut?

For those who never tried it, Magic: The Gathering is a very ingenious card game that has made about 3 batrillion dollars. You are, like, totally a wizard, and you wield a deck of cards that summon monsters and fire lightning bolts and other awesome stuff. The cool thing about the game is that you buy packs of cards, but the cards you get are random. You then pick the cards you like and build your own custom deck from that. And then you fight other people, who have their own nifty personal decks.

This is really cool because you can make a deck that best represents how you like to play games. You can make a deck with lots of fast nasty creatures and rush the opponent in a banzai rush, or a you can make a slower, more cerebral deck with powerful defensive cards to wear the opponent down before you fire back with one overwhelming blow. This customization aspect is easily the best part of the game.

So How's the Video Game?

Well, it's ten bucks. You play it, and they hand you a premade deck and you play with that. You battle against either AI opponents or other humans online. You do well, and you get a different fixed deck to play with. Some of the premade decks are OK. Others of them will teach you the joy of pure, undiluted frustration.

The game's production values are amazing. The AI is pretty darn good. The rules of Magic have been adapted to make a lively, fast-paced online version. The title is definitely fun enough to be worth ten bucks.

But it doesn't have the deck-building. You can only play with premade decks (which you can modify, but only very slightly, and usually for the worse). Sadly, playing with these decks is a pretty dry experience. If everyone was only able to play with premade decks, Magic: The Gathering would never have been any sort of success in the first place.

And thus, the horrible, horrible error.

Go On.

Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic, didn't make this game to get your ten bucks. It was clearly very expensive to develop, and they're never going to earn it from cruddy XBox Live purchases. They made this game to make Magic players, to get you to go to the store (or Magic Online) and plop down folding money to buy the actual cards. My guess is that they left deck-building out because they were, like, "We don't want to give those cheapskates out there the ability to actually play the game for a mere ten dollars? Who do they think they are? Lowly cretins."

That's the only reason I can think of for this decision. Compared to all of the production values they were pumping into the thing, adding deck-building to the game would be no trouble at all.

But, and this is the part all developers can learn from, they forget the first rule of making the demo for a game:

ALWAYS PUT YOUR BEST MATERIAL IN THE DEMO.

You don't want the demo to be fun. You want the demo to make people freaking fall in love with the game. You want to use the demo to fill customers with hot passion for your product. Believe me, if Duels of the Planeswalkers really gets someone interested in Magic, that person won't be sated by the rinky-dink assortment of cards and options available in the video game. They's gonna' go spend money. But, to make Magic into a video game, for whatever reason, they ripped its heart out. What is left might attract some players, but nowhere near as many as it would.

And Magic is expensive. They want players to drop a hundred bucks or more. This is a huge hurdle to jump over. You want people to make this sort of commitment? Then your demo has to pull out all of the stops. Not half of them.

When you make your demo, don't be grasping. Approach the player with glad heart and open arms. Show them your best stuff. Addict them. Enthrall them. And then, before they have time to tire of you, cut them off and ask for the money. That's how you do it.

My Personal Experience.

By the way, I was sucked into the Magic thing by the 1997 PC version of the game. It had, as much as possible, the full Magic experience, including deck-building. It was really made with passion for sharing the game. I played it. I saw what the game was really about. Then I went out and, over the next few years, spent tons of money on Magic cards. Just my personal experience, for what it's worth. Using a video game to suck people in to the paper game can work.

Of course, then again, I shouldn't criticize them for doing less to get people addicted to Magic. That's like being angry at dealers for selling less addictive heroin.

About Addiction-Based Design, Part 2.

Last week, I linked to my last View From the Bottom article about addiction-based game design. It was originally meant to be a two part article, but most of the second half had to be lost to fit everything into one part.

This is the original second part of the article, which gives more examples and clarifies the sort of design elements I'm trying to isolate here. A tad dry, perhaps, but worthwhile. I think that World of Warcraft grindy addictiveness can be found in a lot of more games and systems (like achievements) than it first appears.

About Addiction-Based Design, Part 2.

In the last article, I wrote about addiction-based game design. This is game design that encourages players to experience the same content again and again (often referred to as "grinding") in return to obtain a series of little rewards. These constant positive reinforcements (money building up, skills increased, experience bars filling) are very satisfying, to the point of being mildly addicting.

It's a powerful design technique, and there are a lot of good examples of it being used (and pointedly not being used). Some of the examples are quite surprising.

Massively multiplayer games are probably the best example of encouraging addiction. When character advancement is frequently referred to as a "treadmill" and gold farmers earn money playing the game for other people's behalf, that should tell you something. Every level or nice piece of loot results in a feeling of satisfaction and achievement. If you play these games any amount of time, you will see players get into passionate arguments about who gets the nice treasure a monster just dropped. Of course they do. They are junkies fighting for a nice hit of their drug of choice.

However, there are other excellent examples that don't involve MMORPGs at all. Consider the Lego games (Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, etc.). The gameplay in these games, when you use adorable Lego people to reenact their namesake movies, is fairly simple and repetitive. Much of the fun comes from playing the levels over and over again to gather money, characters, and hidden treasure. Lego games encourage grinding the levels to earn cash to buy a stunning variety of rewards. Oh Legos, when did you turn to the Dark Side?

Games in the tower defense genre also use repetitive gameplay, accompanied with rewards, but in a far more benign way. In these games, you generally defend against waves of increasingly powerful but otherwise similar foes. You use the money from the victims to buy stronger defenses. It is the entire grinding/reward cycle, compressed pleasingly into a few minutes. The free Flash game Desktop Tower Defense is an excellent example of the genre, and it also shows that games can create that satisfying illusion of achievement without necessarily eating up huge chunks of time.

Another amusing example is the free game Progress Quest. It is a brilliant parody of the RPG genre, a game that plays itself. You just run it and watch your character gain levels. It's quite funny, and yet it is worrying how satisfying watching that bar fill up can be.

One of the best and most interesting examples of addiction-based game design, in my view, is Achievements, that metagame that can lay a layer of grinding and reward-gathering on top of even the most innocent game. Even World of Warcraft has them now, a move of awe-inspiring cruelty to its already fixated player base.

Addiction-based design is a powerful tool, but it is not necessary to create a fantastic game. There are games at the other end of the spectrum, that completely resist addiction-based design in their quest to provide fun. Tetris is a classic example. Left 4 Dead is another. You start a game, play for two hours, and you are done. Music games like Rock Band have a few grinding aspects (like gathering stars and fans for your band), but the bulk of the fun simply comes from picking a song you like and noodling along to it for three minutes. You can grind out fans, but it's completely incidental to the point of the game.

Here's a good rule of thumb: If a game doesn't need to save your progress or scores to be fun, it's fun isn't addiction based. It might be addictive, but it is that way simply because it's fun.

And, now that I've done as well as I can illustrating this aspect of game design, I have to ask the big question: Is it bad? Is it something that "good" designers resist?

No. We should understand what is going on and notice it when it's happening, but trying to addict your players is not inherently a bad thing. In moderation, the grind/reward cycle is like alcohol ... Pleasant, in moderation. The sense of achievement when gaining a level, or, you know, an Achievement, is real. It is odd that it's so satisfying, but it is satisfying, and we designer would be foolish to ignore it. Heck, I write role-playing games, a genre that is almost entirely founded on the grind/reward cycle.

But, like Spider-Man, we should use our powers for good and not for evil. If we want to write innovative games that further the genre and take it more in the direction of an art form, we have to make games that are more than just examples of some experiment where a mouse hits a lever and makes food pellets fall out. In my ideal world, it would be one color in our palette, nothing more.

But, then again, World of Warcraft has eleven million subscribers. So what do I know?

About Addiction-Based Design

My latest View From the Bottom column, sadly the last one, is now live:

About Addiction-Based Design

It made front page Slashdot, and the comments were not unfriendly. Which is kind of a first for me. It's a bit more dry that my usual articles, but I wanted to put on my fancy Game Design Theory hat and try to isolate a particular sort of way to make a game addictive: The World of Warcraft poopsocker way. Some academics in the psychology field have taken cracks at this, but I thought it was useful to approach it from the designer perspective, which includes not assuming that a game being addictive is not necessarily evil.

Anyway, the article was originally pretty long and I was going to publish it in two parts, but the column got ended so I had to submit a shortened version. Next week, I'll put up here the original second half, which I think has some other interesting points and examples.

And View From the Bottom, RIP. One of the sad side effects of the recession is that a lot of the editors and writers who boosted me for so many years are disappearing from their positions. Oh, well. Thanks to Richard Aihoshi for supporting me all these years, and best of luck at mmorpg.com!