I just finished perhaps my fifteenth round of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook with a strange realization: I’ve been manipulated! Then, it being a CoD4MW2 free weekend I decided on playing that and lo and behold, it too messes with my psyche. It’s all about the fact that these games were designed to create an addiction.
Allow me to show you an example: Bejeweled Blitz is very little about seeing some combinations and very much about getting massive combos and random happenstances. Basically it’s a game of chance, and the way the gems fall dictates almost all of what you will be able to do in the game. Thus it is not that hard to manipulate the user into receiving the score the game desires of him. This is the first mechanism of control, and the strategy played by this is to catch you in the game the first time you play. By allowing you to get a pretty high score on your first go and getting close to your friends it causes you to get very excited about it. Then, exactly like a drug, your scores become normal scores from your second game on and you’re hooked trying to get that initial score and then beat it. And now it’s not that easy because the game won’t give you the easy combos.
The second mechanism is time; scarcity to talk in marketing terms. The game lasts exactly one minute. You can extend that by paying or by playing long enough that you get coins which you can use to add a mere 5 seconds to the end of the next game. Because the time is so pressuring (it’s reinforced by a very loud and annoying audible alert that it’s running out) you tend to play one more game just to see if you can do better. You also get a last hurrah which is basically a demo of what you could have done had you used up all the power-ups on the board. That also hooks you in to see if next time you can get them, and use them.
A third mechanism is continuous rewards. After every game you receive coins, regardless of your performance. You can even do nothing and still receive coins. This gives you a sense of accomplishment even if you basically suck at the game. It also gives you a target because the coins unlock various power-ups that can greatly improve your score. You also get a bunch of statistics and medals after the game, again another reward, and again they just pile up regardless of your actual performance.
The fourth way in which they keep you addicted is that they offer constant encouragements during the game, offering compliments increasing in power (good, excellent, awesome, etc.) as you progress in score multipliers and so on, again showing you it’s possible to do better. Also, you get this suggestion as you progress and you go over score tiers (25k, 50k, 100k, etc.) and that motivates you to push on, go farther. It’s addictive.
However the most nefarious method I’ve seen that this game uses to keep you hooked is the simple judgment of your skill. If it sees you having poor games and then even disastrous games it automatically offers you a board with more choices to match, more multipliers and so on. If it sees you losing, and therefore losing interest, it makes you win. It makes you have fun even if you don’t want to.
Modern Warfare has a different approach, although it also includes the useless medals and mounting experience points, not to mention unlockables. Its approach is the level system. You level up, you get new stuff, more powerful, bla bla bla. How do you level up? By playing. Playing a lot! And it’s definitely worth it, I mean you get a lot of new things but basically you can easily work with what you have at the beginning. But it’s made to be addictive. It’s made so people challenge other people’s worthless level numbers and unlocked bonuses and thereby suck them as well into the circle of addiction.
I have a friend who just quit WoW and it’s really interesting how he was caught in the game; he didn’t usually have that much fun yet he played on for hours each day. He had not one but more characters at the highest level yet he still played to get the best gear and so on. His addiction was serious and it was preventing him from doing other things, but that’s not what we’re talking about; the point is the game and its very intricate mechanisms of keeping you in it (did you know there are perhaps a dozen currencies in WoW, all useful for something in particular?).
Games are being created with consumption rather than experience in mind and while that makes a lot of sense from an economical point of view it does not from a let’s say moral point of view. They’re not meant to be fun anymore, they’re meant to be played a lot, obsessively, and shared with other friends in such a way to prompt even more purchases and so on. It’s sad because the games themselves suffer when subjected to such ideas, great features are thrown out and replaced with tedious grinding gameplay for no reason at all. Why do I need to be a level 70 to wield an AK-47? What’s the reason? There is none, other than it has to keep you in the game.
My conclusion would be screw these useless games and achievements and start living! Get some friends, go out, enjoy life! Meet someone new, maybe try something new if you can. Biggest problem here is that it’s shy people and loners that end up playing this kind of stuff because they just feel sad about their real lives so they choose a virtual world where they feel their life is progressing. And they can’t really meet new people… cause they’re shy. But hell, there’s a lot of lonely people out there, maybe you’ll find another lonely shy geek of the opposite sex to make it worth your trouble 
That’s all for today friends, hope you liked the change in scenery and I promise I have a very nice post coming up for tomorrow, already scheduled it and everything 
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