About instant and long term rewards

Here's a bit about what I found out about our human nature:
Imagine a hot summer day, you are sitting in the park and have 1 $ left in your pocket. An ice cream man comes along with his car and offers some ice cream, 1 $ per scoop. You also know that there's fantastic ice in a restaurant about a mile away, which is cheaper, 0.50 $ per scoop. Now, would you rather choose to have instant ice cream (but only one scoop) or walk up to the restaurant and get the double amount? Instant reward or having a bigger reward in the long term?

Most people will have the urge to choose the instant reward. That's just naturally for all of us. It takes some discipline to postpone the reward, even if you know your earnings will be higher. But if we choose the short time reward all the time, our brain gets conditioned to always want things instantly.

Now let's make the connection to video games: Playing games is instantly rewarding, because it offers us fun, makes us feel better (seemingly) and gives you the feeling of having achieved something. Compare this e.g. to doing your homework, going to the gym or cleaning up your room/flat. I never saw a banner pop up saying "Congratulations, you are a hero!!!" when I finished my homework, neither did I ever have a level up after working out. A lot of real life activities have long term rewards: If do my homework conscientious, I might improve my grades at school, which will help me find a good job; and if I work out regularly I will have a trained body with high stamina and no back pain etc.
You might say: "Wait, that's one sided, gaming also has it's long term rewards!". Ok, let's look at the long term rewards of gaming.
There's a tiny percentage of all the gamers who can make a living of gaming, have theirs sponsors and compete in big tournaments all over the world. I would estimate this number to be lower than 0.0001 %.
I also found out the next argument to be untrue: "Gaming is more fun if you are really good at a game.". This would mean that I have more fun with a level 90 WoW character with epic gear than I have with a level 15 character. To me this was almost never true, once I hit the maximum level and had good gear, I created a new character because I enjoyed the slow pace at the beginning of the game. There was time to look at the world around you and read all the quests etc. In high level gaming, it's all about efficiency, there's no time to stop and watch. So you run and run for better gear only to make the game less fun... strange, huh?

Nowadays, patience is very rare. And if you leave the choice to a kid, if he/she would rather play video games or do his/her homework, you all know what the answer is. So avow for a bit more endurance and less "taking the easy way".

How today's video games work

Do any of you remember the good old Super Mario games for the NES / SNES? It was a simple jump and run adventure. You played an italian plumber who could grow when eating a mushroom and died when he fell into a gap or touched an enemy. I believe Super Mario World had about 90 levels. That's it. If you were done with these levels, you could replay them, but they remained the same, so there was no use in replaying them.

Let's compare this to a modern game, and for the sake of having a prominent example, I'll chose World of Warcraft (short: WoW). WoW is a role play game, which means you play a character which can be designed individually (so the player can connect with his/her character) and will then be trained to higher levels by gaining experience through fighting or completing quests. This character can be improved by choosing different talents while progressing in levels and equipping it with items that you will find along your journey. At the moment, the maximum level is (if I recall correctly) 90, so beginning from level 1 you have to train your character to have 89 level ups to complete the game, right? Well, not even close! Here is a list of what you would have to do to "complete" the game. And complete here means that you have achieved about everything that the game offers at this point in time. It does not mean that you are done with playing.

• Leveling your character to the maximum level: As seen above, the maximum character level is 90. If you want to reach this level, you have to go through an ever repeating process of accepting some quests from the villagers, finishing these quests (which is mostly connected to slaying some monsters) and turning them in for your reward (experience, gold, items etc.). While it takes only some minutes to get from level 1 to level 2, you will have to invest about 6 to 8 hours to get from level 89 to 90. So you see, the whole leveling phase will take - even a good player - multiple days of pure in-game time.
• Leveling your professions and skills: Every character can have two main professions (e.g. blacksmithing and mining) and all of the secondary professions (archaeology, cooking, first aid and fishing). Each of these professions go up to level 600 and the level increases by using the profession (e.g. gathering ore for mining or crafting a weapon as a blacksmith). This process can take very long because it either involves roaming certain areas to farm materials or earning a lot of gold with other activities to buy these materials for later crafting. The concept behind this is the same as with the character level: the higher your level is, the harder it is the proceed to the next level.
• Improving your gear: Every character has 15 relevant item slots (e.g. chest armor, gloves, trinkets). Each one of these slots can be filled with a respective item in different qualities and different levels. So to be perfectly equipped, you need to have an item with the best available quality and the highest level in each slot, plus you want to have a perfect enchantment and the perfect gems for each item. The top of the line items can only be gathered in so called dungeons, which you need a group of 25 players for that can play very coordinated and already have pretty strong characters (maximum level and good gear). This group of people can then kill every boss monster of the dungeon only once per week. These boss monsters drop loot (most of them between 2 and 5 items). On average (let's say a boss drops 3.5 items and there is 7 bosses in the dungeon), the raid (this is what the player group is called) gets 24.5 items, about one per player. So if the group is very very lucky, which means that only items drop, which players still require (and the possibility is about 0), and they do not fail to kill any bosses, it would take them about 15 weeks (almost 4 months) to get all the gear they need out of this dungeon. This gear then is required to enter the next, more difficult dungeon, in which the gear acquiring repeats. It's kind of a funny coincidence that Blizzard, the developers of WoW, patch the game with an additional dungeon about every 3 months...
• Collecting stuff: In WoW there's a lot of things to collect: sets of gear that look nice, pets and mounts, reputation with certain factions in the game, ... The list goes on for a pretty long time. Collecting stuff is typically an occupation for people who have good gear already and can't improve their gear at the moment because they already killed every boss of a dungeon in this week and have to wait for the next week for the dungeon to reset.

There is still some other stuff I could go over (Player versus Player, exploration, achievements etc), but I think you get the point: This game is designed to keep people playing forever and spending their whole time on doing so. At this point, i would like to quote Kripparrian, a very famous WoW, Diablo and Path of Exile player who streams his gaming: "I need a game that I can play every day, all day long!". This is exactly what WoW, and not only WoW provides. A game you can play all day for a huge period of time without ever reaching an end because there is no end. About every 3 months there is a new patch which adds some content, about every 2 years there is a new Add-On which increases the maximum level (and by this renders all items, which were collected before the Add-On useless), adds some new areas to the world and some new features to the game which people might find interesting (new character classes/races, new mechanics etc.).

The main difference between Super Mario World and World of Warcraft is, that Super Mario World was designed to give people some good hours of fun, while WoW was designed to take up all your time, even if it's not that fun anymore. For a quick personal reference: It took me about 15 hours as a young boy to complete Super Mario World while i spent more than 170 days of pure gaming (that's 4080 hours!!!) to "not complete" WoW.

You can see these structures of design in most of the modern video games, even in first person shooters and strategy games. Most of the time, a ladder system is provided in which you can progress by winning matches. Therefore you get rewarded with new weapons, some cosmetic aspects like equipment colors or a new avatar for the loading screen.

I am convinced that this is not a coincidence - today's video games are meant to make people addicted in order to secure the software company's profit for a long time. The players are just a means to make money, do not think that the game producers care about the gamer's social life or health.

Realising the addiction

It took me about five years to realise that this circle would never have an ending. If I was ever able to reach the end of one game (which in the current games is highly unlikely), there was already the next game being produced.
Now I hear you saying: "Well, if you already understood that, why didn't you just stop gaming?"

Well, it's not all that simple. Gaming made me feel like I was someone important, like I really achieved something. I never felt that sense of pleasure anywhere else (up to that point). It's just like after drinking some beer you feel like you can do anything! And I was addicted to this feeling. I needed it, every day. I needed the games to tell me that I am not a loser, that I am loved! All of which I couldn't find in my real life.

A little video on addiction and media [German]

Skip to 13:36 for addiction in coherence with computers.

Getting sucked into the addiction

From now on, the one hour of gaming per day (I was 13 and needed the permission of my parents to turn on the computer) was the only thing i looked forward to. During school I kept thinking about how I could beat the next level, when having lunch I already planned on how to use my one hour of gaming most efficiently. All my thoughts revolved around gaming. It seemed to be the only purpose in life.

The game showed me that investing my time would yield huge earnings! "If I level my character to level 10, I can learn that new powerful spell! If I can defeat the boss of this dungeon, maybe he will drop a great wand which will make me so much stronger! Everyone is going to admire my character as soon as I wear that shining robes!" This is what the game suggested to me.

As time went on, I exploited almost every situation in which my parents were not home to turn on the computer. When they went to bed at 11 pm, I stayed up for two extra hours to level my character. I quit playing in the soccer team, I was never really "good" anyways. I quit running around in the woods with my neighbours, I was "too old" for that now. And week after week, the "one hour per day" rule got weaker and weaker. My parents had just given up limiting my computer use. They knew all along that I was using every chance to play.

Now my life seemed just great! I could play whenever I wanted to, no one would keep me from playing all day long and improving my character. By the way, character in this context does not refer to my disposition - it refers to the hero which you play in computer role play games (short RPGs). But just as my character was about to reach perfection, there was an Add-On to the game. This Add-On introduced a whole new world, lots and lots of new quests and even more powerful items. Needless to say, the next day I got to the shop to buy the new Add-On.

But guess what? Just as I arrived at the Olymp of what the new Add-On made possible, a whole new game was announced: better graphics, a bigger world, dynamic day-night-cycles, enchanted items, ...! WOW! I needed to get this.

[...]

Next stop: addiction

In the next day's posts I want to point out that the addiction to video games shows a lot of parallels to other addictions, e.g. alcohol and that it should not be downplayed.

The beginnings:
Almost every addiction once started as something new, something harmless that was fun to try. I remember drinking my first beer back when I was a teenager. It didn't really taste all that well, but the feeling of being a little bit drunk was very exciting. Soon I started to drink some more, and there were nights in which I drank so much that I can't even recall how I got home. It was these experiences that made me take a second look at the dangers of alcohol, and since then I can drink responsibly and stop before I get drunk.
Computer games work in a very similar way: They catch your attention by commercials or you get to try a game at a friends. For most people, this first time gaming experience is overwhelming. It was the same for me: colorful graphics, sound effects and stories similar to those in movies sucked me into a fantasy world where everything seemed possible. I could be the shining hero of the kingdom, an evil villain in my witch tower or a hunter living in the deep of the enchanted forest. Kicking a ball towards a goal could not keep up with that.
With this first time experience in mind, it was a no brainer for me to buy a computer along with some computer games. As it seemed, I had found the hobby that truly made me happy, that gave me everything i longed for - self esteem, power, a place where I could hide from the world.

The games I played

As a longtime gamer I have been into a lot of popular games, so here's a list (chronological):

• Command and Conquer
• Sport games (FIFA, NHL, ...)
• Age of Empires
• Empire Earth
• Warcraft 3 (Top 200 EU ladder)
• Counter Strike (playing ESL)
• Diablo 2
• World of Warcraft (classic - MoP), several max level characters, some server firsts, rank 14 PvP etc.
• Several Call of Duty games
• Starcraft 2
• Minecraft
• The Elder Scrolls III - V
• Diablo 3
• Guild Wars 2
• League of Legends

This list is by far not completed, but I guess these were the games that consumed most of my time. I am not proud of this list, it's just to show that I have some kind of justification to write about this topic. 

If you have never heard of any of these games, be glad. If you know a lot of these, you probably know what I will be talking about in the next days.