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Comment by PogoPuppy | Hacker News Reader

You are conveniently ignoring the part where a person gets happy over their character. Are you saying being happy has no real world utility?

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“gets happy over their character”?

You mean their virtual character becomes happy because of the virtual sports car they now drive?

Tricking people to confuse their selves, possessions and lives with a simulation is some genius marketing. How did they pull this off?

The same way they “tricked” you to be happy about that book, movie, t-shirt, blog post, concert, hobby or any other form of entertainment you consume that “means nothing”

But you don’t even consume this. You can’t even give the experience to someone else to enjoy. They made up a fake person and gave a pretend product to them, and billed your bank account in real dollars. This doesn’t make a bit of sense to me

Why are you pretending not to understand this? In gaming you control an abstraction of a person and it's entertainment to you, the real world person. In passive drama you likewise watch events happen to imaginary people. Why do we have to explain this to you?

Because I want to see how you rationalize throwing the money you need to survive away on a fantasy

They don't need the money to survive, perhaps they have excess or they have deemed other things more important and allocated their resources accordingly.

You don't need to understand it, you don't even need to accept it for it to happen. You're discussing in bad faith.

Step back once more, look at your life and you’ll realise that you can apply the same logic to any status symbol you own.

How did they pull it off? It’s human nature…

It's a pretty short-lived happiness.

The game have been out for 10 years. If people are still passionate about it, that’s longer than most things people do in life.

It's an addiction like other MMOs. You grind sufficiently to where you don't feel much from gaining more (xp/money/whatever) but feel awful if you lose anything, or if you simply stop playing and let it go "to waste." These games are deliberately designed this way. You can spend 10 years on it without anywhere near a proportional amount of fun, and you won't gain anything lasting. Like, you wouldn't say a 10-year alcoholic is simply passionate about alcohol.

These games are deliberately designed this way

Which design elements can one add/remove to such game to make a difference? Asking because it feels like a stretch to make an argument and also just how all things naturally are (opposed to designed deliberately).

Some people will sink 15 hours a week into an MMO or other addictive game, and that's not even the extreme case (that's like 50h). It's hard to make that actually fun, so just focus on keeping the player coming back. If there's a genuinely fun part of the game, make sure it's slightly more fun when you grind for hours first. Ensure there's some kind of never-ending progress, often in the form of rare collectibles that are added over time to ensure nobody "beats" the game even if they've done everything that's fun in it. Along with customizations, this will make players feel like they lose something if they quit. Also make it seem like they're doing something productive with their time. Some games have a "daily tasks" checklist that makes it feel like a job. Or the simple version is a button you press once a day for free loot, just to get people to log in.

And most video games aren't like this. You'll see a contrast in how addictive games are monetized compared to others. The tactics have been well-known for a while (World of Warcraft pioneered many of them in 2004-06), and in the past decade it's become a lot more common. GTA Online isn't totally an addictive game, but it seems to have a bit of that with the ingame assets.

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