Addicting Game Design: Compulsion Loops

Well, hello there! Today I wish to speak about the most basic way to make a gamer addicted to a video game.

Compulsion loops are, as the name implies, cycles of activities in video games, specifically designed to be repeated ad infinitum and to trigger the neurochemical reaction associated with rewards, leading to release of dopamine in the body.

These monotonous loops are usually used as replacements for actual game content, being repetitive (and pretty omnipresent in today's AAA industry), easier to create than an actual progression curve with rewards that are not very substantial, but offer the player an instant illusion of progress. A good example of a game series which abuses this kind of smoke and mirrors is Destiny: you fight the same 5 enemy factions the entire game in the same few hub maps of the game completing objectives. The entire game. You shoot your way through Vex/Fallen/Cabal/Hive/Taken the entire game, very rarely meeting more than one of them during a combat encounter. Missions are level-based, giving you a reason to grind repetitious tasks outside of missions in the open-ended levels or by replaying older story missions.

You might wonder why do I tear into Destiny in this article, and the reason is pretty simple: it is the game that I got addicted to for a period of time. Addicted in the sense that I started it up daily, pushed through the story missions, kept replaying the Strike missions to get loot and levels, looked up tutorials online for the rare loot which brought with it a small boost of stats over what I had and so went away four months of 2017 for me, And not because the game was good (although headshots and melee attacks are really satisfying), but because the loop was set up just right, starving me enough to motivate me to push on for loot, but just when I would be ready to give up it inevitably threw me a bone to pick, so to speak. This was stopped by the fact that at some point, some of the quests were PvP orientated. Grinding in PvP. That is what saved me from this juggernaut of a time waster. Quests that required certain actions to be grinded in PvP, meaning that the grind would not be reliable, because it relied on other players being in the perfect position for me to finish them off in a certain way, and for me to have the resources.

The loop was broken so hard in that moment that, to this day, although I own all the expansions of the original Destiny, I did not start the Rise of Iron questline, knowing that entering that compulsion loop again will eat up even more of my time, time which has become a lot more precious since I started going to university. I should mention that, although I see it as very manipulative, I do not entirely hate this kind of a gameplay loop, if it is used to support other aspects of a great game. I despise it because it can work so well by itself, if engineered just right, a la Destiny until the PvP quests started popping up and I do hope that those of you who read this entire post will look carefully at the games you play, so as not to get your time stolen away from you.

Sources: cover, 1, 2.

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