Those of you that know me well would know that I have a fanatical obsession with Cracked.com, the site on the interwebs with the funniest ever top 10 lists, featuring legendary ones like “Top ten real life soldiers who make Rambo look like a pussy” and other great works of literature.
Well, this is possibly the most important thing I have ever learnt from a humour site (courtesy of Cracked.com):
Read the full article here.
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Do you like your job?
Considering half of you are reading this at work, I’m going to guess no. And that brings us to the one thing that makes gaming addiction–and addiction in general–so incredibly hard to beat.
As shocking as this sounds, a whole lot of the “guy who failed all of his classes because he was playingWoW all the time” horror stories are really just about a dude who simply didn’t like his classes very much. This was never some dystopian mind control scheme by Blizzard. The games just filled a void.
Why do so many of us have that void? Because according to everything expert Malcolm Gladwell, to be satisfied with your job you need three things, and I bet most of you don’t even have two of them:
Autonomy (that is, you have some say in what you do day to day);
Complexity (so it’s not mind-numbing repetition);
Connection Between Effort and Reward (i.e. you actually see the awesome results of your hard work).
Notice that pants are not necessary for job satisfaction.
Most people, particularly in the young gamer demographics, don’t have this in their jobs or in any aspect of their everyday lives. But the most addictive video games are specifically geared to give us all three… or at least the illusion of all three.
Autonomy:
You pick your quests, or which Farmville crops to plant. Hell, you even pick your own body, species and talents.
Annoying your Facebook friends with updates is a really annoying talent.
Complexity:
Players will do monotonous grinding specifically because it doesn’t feel like grinding. Remember the complicated Tier Armor/Frost Emblem dance that kept our gamer clicking earlier.
Connection Between Effort and Reward:
This is the big one. When you level up in WoW a goddamned plume of golden light shoots out of your body.
This is what most of us don’t get in everyday life–quick, tangible rewards. It’s less about instant gratification and more about a freaking sense of accomplishment. How much harder would we work at the office if we got this, and could measure our progress toward it? And if the light shot from our crotch?
The beauty of it is it lets games use the tedium to their advantage. As we discussed elsewhere, there’s a “work to earn the right to play” aspect of World of Warcraft, where you grind or “farm” for gold for the right to do the cool stuff later. The tedious nature of the farming actually adds to the sense of accomplishment later. And it also helps squash any sense of guilt you might have had about neglecting school, work or household chores to play the game. After all, you did your chores–the 12 hours you spent farming for gold last Tuesday was less fun than mowing the fucking lawn. Now it’s time for fun.
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If only we could see the ‘dings’ more clearly in real life. Back to work for me. Heh.
