You could always make the game run in real-time, and make it so that there's only so much you can really do in a day.
Making shops close at 9pm (Or earlier) and everyone going home to sleep can render many games useless, and is a good indication for the player to go and get some sleep themselves.
This way, the player can still get 'happily' addicted (Play it every day), but they can't play it endlessly, which removes one of the primary concerns that you had about game addictions.
How to make great games less addictive?
I know what you mean it seems like only a certain games can give you this addiction. I think its games which give you percieved progression no matter how long you play them. I've played games like Galactic civilizations or Advance wars for hours thinking I'm getting somewhere in them tweaking all the parameters not really getting anywhere, but still playing it even when it isnt that much fun because their is always other options something else to do in it to draw your attention.
Its like you never really hit a wall in these sorts of games the difficulty never gets too hard or it seems their is always a way round or through.
I think like you said more clearer and smaller goals for the player to strive for instead of the far distance ones of conquering the world and building a starship.
I'm sure their are certain properties an addictive game has over a non one as well, I've played plenty of games which are fun but do not demand my attention as much as the ones that we think are addictive.
A certain amount of repetativeness for instance, it requires the player to repeat movements or go through similar scenarios over and over again.
Its like you never really hit a wall in these sorts of games the difficulty never gets too hard or it seems their is always a way round or through.
I think like you said more clearer and smaller goals for the player to strive for instead of the far distance ones of conquering the world and building a starship.
I'm sure their are certain properties an addictive game has over a non one as well, I've played plenty of games which are fun but do not demand my attention as much as the ones that we think are addictive.
A certain amount of repetativeness for instance, it requires the player to repeat movements or go through similar scenarios over and over again.
I beliave that fun is not dopamine, but that they are not mutually exclusive. I believe that fun and addiction are two seperate things. sometimes, they come together, and sometimes not. For me, fun is what really engages my mind, makes me think, and solve problems, but without hassle.(when I want thinking and solving problems with hassle, I'll build something, not play games). Addiction rewards some part of the brain with new things as slowly as it possibly can, without turning you away, so as to keep you hooked. Addiction = dopamine. Fun = interestingness.
Playful Puppy:
You could always make the game run in real-time, and make it so that there's only so much you can really do in a day.
Making shops close at 9pm (Or earlier) and everyone going home to sleep can render many games useless, and is a good indication for the player to go and get some sleep themselves.
This works under some circumstances, but MMORPG players *always* find something to do in off hours. Dungeon-crawling and crafting are good replacements for trips to the market. You'd be surprised what players come up with during off-peak times. It's the virtual world they become addicted to, not the actions within.
Consider Richard Bartle's paper, Players Who Suit MUDs. I personally don't believe that one particular facet of gameplay described in the article makes a game addictive. For example:
- Repetition can be addictive (Pac Man, Tetris). The gameplay doesn't change much, except for the speed at which objects in the game travel. (Also falls into the "obtain the biscuit" category).
- Obtain-the-biscuit can be addictive (Doom, Diablo, Gauntlet, any FF storyline). The game gives you a goal slightly out of reach, or gives you an item slightly out of reach, then has you do everything in your power to achieve the next level/item/whatever.
- Huge worlds for exploration can be addictive (any Ultima game world, EQ, Morrowind). Never knowing what treasures or quests or people or powers you might find.
- Socializing can be addictive (IRC chatrooms, forum boards, MySpace quick-posts). being able to communicate with complete strangers with whom you share a common interest.
When a game is comprised of many different potential sources for addiction, many more players become addicted, for different reasons. What common factor makes any "addictable" game addictive? Difficult to say. Accomplishment? Escapism?
You could always make the game run in real-time, and make it so that there's only so much you can really do in a day.
Making shops close at 9pm (Or earlier) and everyone going home to sleep can render many games useless, and is a good indication for the player to go and get some sleep themselves.
This works under some circumstances, but MMORPG players *always* find something to do in off hours. Dungeon-crawling and crafting are good replacements for trips to the market. You'd be surprised what players come up with during off-peak times. It's the virtual world they become addicted to, not the actions within.
Consider Richard Bartle's paper, Players Who Suit MUDs. I personally don't believe that one particular facet of gameplay described in the article makes a game addictive. For example:
- Repetition can be addictive (Pac Man, Tetris). The gameplay doesn't change much, except for the speed at which objects in the game travel. (Also falls into the "obtain the biscuit" category).
- Obtain-the-biscuit can be addictive (Doom, Diablo, Gauntlet, any FF storyline). The game gives you a goal slightly out of reach, or gives you an item slightly out of reach, then has you do everything in your power to achieve the next level/item/whatever.
- Huge worlds for exploration can be addictive (any Ultima game world, EQ, Morrowind). Never knowing what treasures or quests or people or powers you might find.
- Socializing can be addictive (IRC chatrooms, forum boards, MySpace quick-posts). being able to communicate with complete strangers with whom you share a common interest.
When a game is comprised of many different potential sources for addiction, many more players become addicted, for different reasons. What common factor makes any "addictable" game addictive? Difficult to say. Accomplishment? Escapism?
I find games that crash every so often aren't very addictive. Perhaps you should throw an unhandled exception whenever someone has played for more then one hour. [wink]
[IMO]
Problem? Probably not. Is it something that should at least have discussion, and likely two camps of thought? probably.
I concur. Games like civilization now have timers to alert you when you've been playing too long. A good start, but I think placing a small [disable-able] "you've been playing for $x hours, continue?" is enough to jar the player into considering stopping. That would be at least reasonable enough (imo) that it's really their choice to play too much.
Probably, but it's not as though most others consider it too little...
I personally think so. The key though I think is to make things non-invasive. Disrupting flow is harmful to the game, but if you just have a continue screen or a disable-able setting, then you're not going to effect heavy gamers so much as the 'lost in the game' sort.
Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid
Is there an ethical problem with aiming to make a too addctive game?
Problem? Probably not. Is it something that should at least have discussion, and likely two camps of thought? probably.
Quote:
So how can we design a game that still has these positive qualities but is less addictive?
Probably the weakest one of those attributes is the seamless gameplay. One possibility would be to allow an optional gameplay timer that can save and quit after a set amount of time. Of course, the problem with this method is if the player is at a critical point in time they would be fairly annoyed.
Another approach is to have natural points in the game where players feel comfortable switching the game off. I find that I have no problem playing level based games for a fixed amount of time, as the end of a level is an obvious point to evaluate whether I should keep playing the game. However this is harder to achieve in the more freeform games, such as large scale strategy games; the 4X genre is one that I frequently described as addictive. One possibility would be to insert milestones into such games - possibly reward screens that mark time elapsed or set achievements? - that provide the wake-up call.
I concur. Games like civilization now have timers to alert you when you've been playing too long. A good start, but I think placing a small [disable-able] "you've been playing for $x hours, continue?" is enough to jar the player into considering stopping. That would be at least reasonable enough (imo) that it's really their choice to play too much.
Quote:
My questions then are firstly the fundamental one: in your opinion am I being over-conscious in worrying about the addictiveness of games, or am I worrying too much?
Probably, but it's not as though most others consider it too little...
Quote:
Secondly: is it possible to still make great games that are not as addictive? In particular, can we take a traditionally addictive great game and make it less addictive while still retaining its greatness?
I personally think so. The key though I think is to make things non-invasive. Disrupting flow is harmful to the game, but if you just have a continue screen or a disable-able setting, then you're not going to effect heavy gamers so much as the 'lost in the game' sort.
The problem seems to be the rather negative conotation the word addictive has these days...so...use the word captivateing instead, it actualy describes things better.
Say "I find Heidi Klum's beauty addictive" and you sound like a stalker. But say "I find Heidi Klum's beauty captivateing" and well you generaly fit the average male profile.
"I was so captivated by Diablo 2 last night, that I didn't poor myself into bed until the sun came up." Doesn't raise the concern that useing the word "addicted" would. And it far better defines just what power the game has over you...you were enthralled by the game, enchanted by the game mechanics, charmed by its presentation, and took delight in your progression...
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.
Say "I find Heidi Klum's beauty addictive" and you sound like a stalker. But say "I find Heidi Klum's beauty captivateing" and well you generaly fit the average male profile.
"I was so captivated by Diablo 2 last night, that I didn't poor myself into bed until the sun came up." Doesn't raise the concern that useing the word "addicted" would. And it far better defines just what power the game has over you...you were enthralled by the game, enchanted by the game mechanics, charmed by its presentation, and took delight in your progression...
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'm not really comfortable with using the term addiction in this context, it carries a lot of baggage that doesn't really apply to games. We don't talk about people being addicted to reading, or playing an instrument, or writing code, but all of those activities can be enthralling and make you loose track of time in similar ways. Still I think there is a valid point here. A game that can give an enjoyable experience where you feel satisfied when you stop, as opposed to still wanting to play or feeling burned out, sounds like a good thing.
I think this is the key. You need to provide players with discrete points where they can stop, feeling that they have accomplished something. In a story based game like and RPG or an FPS like Halo, you can build in stopping points. These are like the end of a chapter in a book. Something should be resolved, and you should feel a sense of accomplishment. This gives you the ability to take a break and walk away feeling satisfied. There should also be enough of a cliff-hanger to make you want to come back and continue later.
In more freeform games (Civ 2 could suck up more time for me than any other game), you either need to make the individual games shorter or find ways to break up the game to add stopping points. There need to be sub-objectives to achieve.
Regardless of genre, when you get to a stopping point the game needs to clearly mark it for you. Have a screen or cut-scene pop up congratulating you on your accomplishment. Make the breaks explicit. Call them chapters or episodes or something. Give the player a resolution.
The pacing is probably also important here. Just as a gut feeling, I would say give the player a minor stopping point every 15 min and a major one every hour. Playtest this to find a pacing that works well for your game. Also, players will advance at different rates, so this is a going to be a loose thing anyway. Having the ability to set difficulty in the game will give the players some control. At a minor stopping point the player should have achieved a significant goal (defeated a mini-boss, captured a city, completed a quest, etc.) but still have one or more ongoing tasks they are involved in. At a major break you could try to provide more resolution, but still include a hook to bring them back.
Halo 2 did this pretty well for me. There were small objectives for me to achive in each level, which advanced the story and provided some resolution. And then, each level provided a major break (There were a few exceptions to that).
I think it's also important to provide a strong resolution at the end of the game. This is true even for replayable games, and possibly even MMOs. I have a friend who doesn't play MMOs any more, but for years he has wanted a "MMO with an ending". There are obviously business reasons to make MMOs be more addictive to retain players, but putting something at the end of the treadmill might be nice. Hey look, you beat the game, now here is the next adventure. Even if I stop in response to that, I'm more likely to look favorably on your franchise than if I leave because I'm burnt out on your game. Certainly, a strong resolution is critical for any non-mmo game.
Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid
Another approach is to have natural points in the game where players feel comfortable switching the game off. I find that I have no problem playing level based games for a fixed amount of time, as the end of a level is an obvious point to evaluate whether I should keep playing the game. However this is harder to achieve in the more freeform games, such as large scale strategy games; the 4X genre is one that I frequently described as addictive. One possibility would be to insert milestones into such games - possibly reward screens that mark time elapsed or set achievements? - that provide the wake-up call.
I think this is the key. You need to provide players with discrete points where they can stop, feeling that they have accomplished something. In a story based game like and RPG or an FPS like Halo, you can build in stopping points. These are like the end of a chapter in a book. Something should be resolved, and you should feel a sense of accomplishment. This gives you the ability to take a break and walk away feeling satisfied. There should also be enough of a cliff-hanger to make you want to come back and continue later.
In more freeform games (Civ 2 could suck up more time for me than any other game), you either need to make the individual games shorter or find ways to break up the game to add stopping points. There need to be sub-objectives to achieve.
Regardless of genre, when you get to a stopping point the game needs to clearly mark it for you. Have a screen or cut-scene pop up congratulating you on your accomplishment. Make the breaks explicit. Call them chapters or episodes or something. Give the player a resolution.
The pacing is probably also important here. Just as a gut feeling, I would say give the player a minor stopping point every 15 min and a major one every hour. Playtest this to find a pacing that works well for your game. Also, players will advance at different rates, so this is a going to be a loose thing anyway. Having the ability to set difficulty in the game will give the players some control. At a minor stopping point the player should have achieved a significant goal (defeated a mini-boss, captured a city, completed a quest, etc.) but still have one or more ongoing tasks they are involved in. At a major break you could try to provide more resolution, but still include a hook to bring them back.
Halo 2 did this pretty well for me. There were small objectives for me to achive in each level, which advanced the story and provided some resolution. And then, each level provided a major break (There were a few exceptions to that).
I think it's also important to provide a strong resolution at the end of the game. This is true even for replayable games, and possibly even MMOs. I have a friend who doesn't play MMOs any more, but for years he has wanted a "MMO with an ending". There are obviously business reasons to make MMOs be more addictive to retain players, but putting something at the end of the treadmill might be nice. Hey look, you beat the game, now here is the next adventure. Even if I stop in response to that, I'm more likely to look favorably on your franchise than if I leave because I'm burnt out on your game. Certainly, a strong resolution is critical for any non-mmo game.
some things I think help eliminate some addictive qualities
===================
Well, I remember when I had Pokemon Gold, it had an internal clock in it that make it so that during certain times of the real-world week than events would happen.
For example on Wendesday or something there would be a pokemon bug competition that lasted a few minutes but could only be accessed during a certain window of time, like betweeen 5pm and 6m or something. The actual event only took about 10 or so minutes and could only be done once for that window of time. It could be done on like 2 different days of the week though I forget.
<br><br>Anyway, it basically ment that I HAD to play it during a certain window of time, but after the event or window of time there wasn't really a need to play the game for that event. It was pretty easy to set it down after I completed the event.<br><br>===<br><br>Also, I had a Pocket Pikachu for a bit [bought it for about 2 bucks and lost it one day] It was neat because while I walked or shook it, it tallied up points that I could then transfer into my game to get certain items. Like Gold Berries that can heal a decent amount of PP.<br><br>So I actually was rewarded in-game for doing things out of game. By not playing pokemon, I could collect points by walking and then return to the game and buy stuff with those points.<br><br>=====<br><br>Also, in Megaman Legends 2. There is a quiz game that asks Real-World questions and you need to answer them to get an item used to get a certian weapon. Though many of the questions are pretty lame, they did make me look up some stuff for a bit [some were like, when did the US civil war start, or what are famous types of tea… not the best but interesting]. Putting real-world questions in a game and rewarding could help a little bit, if at least to modivate some to do some research.<br><br>===<br><br><br><br><br><br> some ideas<br>==============<br><br>One Idea I was thinking of, in MMORPGs allow players to get 'dayjobs' for their character in which the character works when the player isn't playing them.<br><br>The character could make money and level up some skills, the Player would be rewarded a bit for not playing the game. Also could help casual players keep competative with the more hardcore ones.<br><br>Not only that, but since the player is subscribing then they have a motivation to come back to spend their 'saved up' money. Also, when they are not online they aren't using up bandwidth so it could help the servers.<br><br><br>on another thought:<br>for games that prefer to be distributed through Bittorent, perhaps find a way to measure how much a player contributes in Bittorent and find a way to reward them ingame. Not sure if one could Torrent while playing an MMORPG, but if not then they could do work on the computer while torrenting in the background or something.<br><br><br>====<br><br>Also, if gameplay could be regulated so that there is say a 30 or ten minute cycle of rising action, peack action and then declining action, then an option to save and exit the game. it could motivate people to just go with the 10 to 30 min 'episodes'<br><br><br>Sort of like Harvest moon games, except each 'day' has something interesting going on and its not just "Water crops, milk cows, find time to talks with gils…" day after day. More like, <br><br>"Get things set up for monster invasion, deal with first wave, fight second wave, struggle against huge Boss, and then have action decline, NPCs start repairing things and players can exit satisfied." <br><br>Have each episode more or less self-contained so players can feel confortable walking away to play another day.<br><br>====<br><br>Anyway, just random stuff.
Author
Quote:Original post by Kest
I don't think you should feel guilty about allowing people to have too much fun. Trust me, I've gone the distance. Worse case scenario, they forget to eat for 24 hours.
Jobs come and go. But a lot of people are unhappy. Making those people happy is a damn good thing to strive for. Even if it does mean you transform a few potential doctors into McDonalds clerks. I'll be a happy clerk rather than a miserable doctor any day of the week.
Well, the worst case is that the player dies from overplaying the game (extremely rare, I know, and I'm not sure how much blame you can put on the game in those cases).
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.
Quote:Original post by tstrimp
I find games that crash every so often aren't very addictive. Perhaps you should throw an unhandled exception whenever someone has played for more then one hour. [wink]
Hey, that memory leak's not a bug, it's a feature! [grin]
Quote:Original post by Telastyn
I concur. Games like civilization now have timers to alert you when you've been playing too long. A good start, but I think placing a small [disable-able] "you've been playing for $x hours, continue?" is enough to jar the player into considering stopping. That would be at least reasonable enough (imo) that it's really their choice to play too much.
Nice - I didn't know that the latest Civilization had that feature. I do think it's a great idea, as long as it is optional and customisable.
I also think having more screens with a button marked "Save and Quit" might help as well. From studying my own behaviour in those types of games, if I get sucked back into playing the game even for a little bit after one of those break screens then I'll more often than not keep on playing. Making saving and quitting a single option without restarting the game should also help.
Quote:Original post by MSW
The problem seems to be the rather negative conotation the word addictive has these days...so...use the word captivateing instead, it actualy describes things better.
Captivating is a good word - although it does put a positive spin on what essentially means "to make oneself a captive to".
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement
