Atlantic Roleplay Community Boards

[Halister Marner]

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I thought this was a fairly laymen, but yet interesting article.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
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"There are those who dream to escape reality, and there are those who dream to change it."

[Merci d'Rue]

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yep that is creepy!
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May destiny guide you...

[Kaelthir]

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Very interesting article. Video game addiction is interesting, as it seems to combine elements of gambling and escapism.

It got me to really consider my own gaming habits. And ultimately, in MMOs and single player games I have a similar playstyle: I like math, I like being able to figure out how I can grind to accomplish something. The illusion of choice is important, I hate leveling in games as it is nothing but a chore. But achievement points in WoW? I love it! I can choose what I want to do and go at it, and for the harder achievements I can mentally allocate what I want to do each day and figure out how long it will take. Even in UO with imbuing I really got into the math and what I needed to do for my gear. As well, the social aspect of MMOs makes the reward for achievement points being able to show them off to people. But then, I have atypical gameplay patterns for WoW. Before they added achievement points I'd usually play it for a month and get bored and quit for 4-5 months until I felt like leveling my character a bit more. I have no desire to do any normal endgame things, I hate raiding and instancing and PvP gets repetitive fairly fast. But I love achievement points, I can work on a lot of them by myself.

Interestingly, though, I spend less time playing WoW than I do RPing or doing things RP related. The interactive storytelling is far more engaging to me than WoW, in its current form, can ever be. There's very little room in WoW for creativity, which is what I crave. Granted, me playing WoW cuts down on the time I'd spend doing arguably more productive things like scribbling like Nothus does, but at the same time that's just fluff too. Scribbles of Drayek with dicks for arms isn't going to help my portfolio and is probably just as meaningful in the long run as getting an achievement in WoW.


The part of the article I found most interesting was the part at the end where it went into WHY people get addicted to things, which is really the root that needs to be looked at. Look at everything people are getting addicted to now, MMOs are one of the better things. For a lot of people, food addiction is becoming a big problem. frack, I have a problem with that myself, I am an awful stress eater. The article talks about how unfulfilling life is, perhaps this makes games like WoW the scourge of the suburbs? I want to do art about suburban life, I'm still trying to figure out a way to go about it. It's hard to really depict the meaningless suburban life-grind in a way that hasn't been done. I've tried to tackle some issues related to the article in my art, namely with food and how food corporations exploit people and get them to eat things. Or even just the image that companies create and sell with their food. Or comfort food or cravings, tricking people into thinking they REALLY want to have something right now. For example, I could start talking right now about chocolate ice cream and how I'm going to go have some and how I love it when it's extra chocolaty and with peanut butter mixed in and how such and such brand sells it, and how many of you would start imagining chocolate ice cream and good memories of chocolate ice cream and begin desiring it? You might not even be hungry, but if you've had a bad day this IDEA of ice cream, the mental buildup around it, sounds rather good and rewarding. And so, you want to treat yourself, and you might go out to go get some ice cream. Advertising is exploitive, just like addictive gaming is exploitive.

I'm going to go through the articles linked to in the Cracked article, but do you have more good pages on gaming addiction, addiction in general, or unfulfillment of modern life?

[Kaelthir]

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Actually, I want to also state that the article got a few things wrong. I'm sure all of you caught how it was wrong about UO, but it's also wrong about modern WoW. It's easy to target WoW since it's the biggest MMO out there, but the game is actually headed the Nintendo route and is becoming easier and less grindy for general goals. In the MMO circle there's a lot of new games that come out trying to be the "WoW killer" by positioning itself as being MORE HARDCORE, and NOT SOME KIDDIE GAME!!!, but all of them fail because that's not what the general public wants. In North America, the general public isn't interested in grinding for little to no reward (unlike in Asia where intense grinding is standard gameplay), it's only people who call themselves "hardcore" who are interested in it.

What it turns out a lot of people here want is instant gratification. WoW is aiming to appease that. They made leveling faster and easier and took a lot of grind out. You can use interface options to enter battlegrounds or to find random groups for instances, which comes down to the gambling aspect of doing that to get better gear as a random drop. BUT, it gives you a fallback so you get a reward for your effort: The emblem system it describes in the article. So yeah, while if you bought an entire set out of frost emblems, that's a fallback in case the random number generator fails you.

I'm not trying to defend World of Warcraft here or say it ISN'T addictive, I just think the article is painting the picture wrong. They made it easier for the average person to get addicted. WoW is gaining a huge amount of players by becoming easier and giving more instant gratification. WoW is candy, they made it easy for people to hop in game for an hour or two a day and feel like they accomplished something. Even if you only do one instance a day, you can earn progress towards getting something due to emblems.

[Cam]

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Boobies
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Butter
Hawtness

[Malicite]

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*clicks feverishly to avoid the shock*

Mind if I throw this up on Facebook? I have a few friends who might benefit from it...

Um, that WoW Frost Emblem garbage (not that, but generally) was why I left the game. It's uber lame to spend 10000000000 hours to get some piece of nothing armor that would be rendered useless by some other 100000000000000000000000 hour item.

*thinks*

WoW is the devil.

[Ariana Lenoir]

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Thanks Halister *smiles*

*walks into hoarders anonymous*

Hi, I'm Assia and I'm a hoarder.

"Hi Assia"

[Jonathan Strathmore]

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Sums my life up in five easy steps. I love the internet.

[Jonathan Strathmore]

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