Repulsion Loops

Whenever a new field gains in popularity, you start hearing buzzwords slung around like dirty pizza. When I was a kid, or a little more of a kid than I am now, at least, my first job was in the PR department of a major blue chip company (no, not IBM) during the time of dot-com boom and epic stock inflation, and this company's was one of the highest on the market. Our CEO was popping up on the cover of Fortune and things like that, and the PR people were patting themselves mightily on the back (then, during the bust, when they actually had to do their jobs, they tanked). Anyway, ridiculous, invented phraseology is born from the oily-handed womb of the PR departments, and back then all kinds of ridiculous pseudo-words were battering down the lexicon of sanity in my crazy little workplace (where I, by the way, had the important job of Photocopying Things).

There's more than a little hype now around the virtual worlds space, which I currently spend a good chunk of my time covering over at Worlds in Motion. By the way, have you heard there will be a one-day Worlds in Motion Summit at GDC this year? And guess who's content chair? Hint: It's me! Anyway, in thinking up panels and speakers for the summit, I've really tried to pick out cool people who are actually doing interesting work that's relevant to us both as thinking people and as gamers, because the virtual world is really just a cousin of the MMO.

The funny thing is, with all the ridiculous amounts of money virtual worlds can pull down with advertising dollars and investments right now, people are actually looking very closely at how to get as many users signed up to their worlds as possible, how to make those people come back as many times as possible, and how to make them stay as long as possible. They're looking at what users will voluntarily spend money on and what it is they value from an online experience. The buzzword for this -- and I think it's a hold-over from the dot-com era -- is "sticky." Yeah, I realize a lot of those weirdos find Second Life to be "sticky" for an entirely different reason, but what they mean is making users "stick" to their world.

I like to see this happening in the virtual worlds space (also, whenever you see the word "space" in a phrase like that, you know the hype machine is at full steam), because there's a lot that video games and MMOs can learn. Don't we all wish, sometimes, that certain developers had thought beyond what would make us want to buy a game to what would make us actually want to play it, and keep playing it? Online worlds, and MMOs, to some extent, need to be free these days in order to compete. Nobody wants to buy a download, and there are very few formats in which people are willing to pay subscription fees anymore, without a significant experiential value for their money. And yet the market is so saturated right now, you can't withhold your valuable content from curious users who just want to check the experience out, because it could mean the difference between them signing up and them moving on. So in aiming for the highest conversion rates, people are actually figuring out, psychologically, what makes us play and what keeps us engaged. Amazing!

The buzzword here is "compulsion loops." That refers to any small action taken that provides an immediate and gratifying reward, such that it motivates us to continue taking that action or to expand upon the behavior somehow. You play a quick, easy minigame, and earn some coins or points or something and buy your avatar a hat. You feel so good about it that you want to go play the minigame again. Or you had so much fun playing the minigame that you want to check out another one. Just five more minutes. Just five more minutes.

So, compulsion loops make games and online worlds sticky. There you go, I'm a buzz machine! But, you can see how the ideas are grounded in good sense.

Which is why I was so curious to hear about Kwari. It's that pay-to-kill game; where basically you need to spend real-world cash on ammo to compete in frag tournaments. Shoot another player, cha-ching. Get shot, lose money. They go to great pains to say this is a skill-based game, so they're not subject to the gambling banhammer. The funny thing is, I've heard the words "anti-social gaming" and "repulsion loops" used a lot in interviews and articles I've read about this upcoming title. I have to say, as a counterculture whore, I like the idea; it makes me grin a little. But when you think of the type of player that would enjoy the game and continue tossing cash to keep playing it in a trigger-happy frenzy, I've got to think it's being angled to exploit the gambling addict mind. That's a whole different kind of compulsion, surely.

Kind of makes you wonder; if game developers can use human psychology to zero in on the behavior of the brain's reward center to get people to play games for longer, and if a game like Kwari can manipulate the compulsive behavior patterns of people with addict tendencies, could they actually, someday, make a game that is truly psychologically addictive, putting wind in the sails of the "game addiction" idea?

Or have they already? Have you ever felt addicted to a game, MMO, online social world, or anything? If so, which was it, and, most importantly, why?