I was never in the camp of "video games are EVIL!", but since I didn't grow up with them I never knew what side to take in the debate about gaming addictions. Then Cracked put up this article analyzing five psychological methods that game designers use. At first I figured that, it being Cracked, it was a humor piece. But the reasons listed and examples given do a smart job of not demonizing creator or consumer, but instead matter-of-factly laying out what elements of video games are engineered to attract certain parts of the brain. Here's the one that made my skin crawl because I had a small brush with it while going shopping in Puzzle Pirates:
#4: Creating Virtual Food Pellets for You to Eat
Most addiction-based game elements are based on this fact:
Your brain treats items and goods in the video game world as if they are real. Because they are.
People scoff at this idea all the time ("You spent all that time working for a sword that doesn't even exist?") and those people are stupid. If it takes time, effort and skill to obtain an item, that item has value, whether it's made of diamonds, binary code or beef jerky.
That's why the highest court in South Korea ruled that virtual goods are to be legally treated the same as real goods. And virtual goods are now a $5 billion industry worldwide.
There's nothing crazy about it. After all, people pay thousands of dollars for diamonds, even though diamonds do nothing but look pretty. A video game suit of armor looks pretty and protects you from video game orcs. In both cases you're paying for an idea.
So What's The Problem?
Of course, virtually every game of the last 25 years has included items you can collect in the course of defeating the game--there's nothing new or evil about that. But because gamers regard in-game items as real and valuable on their own, addiction-based games send you running around endlessly collecting them even if they have nothing to do with the game's objective.
It is very much intentional on the developers' part, an appeal to our natural hoarding and gathering instincts, collecting for the sake of collecting. It works, too, just ask the guy who kept collecting items even while naked boobies sat just feet away. Boobies.
As the article from the Microsoft guy proves, developers know they're using these objects as pellets in a Skinner box. At that point it's all about...
You can check out the other four discoveries here. Do you believe that gaming addiction is legitimate?
