Addictiveness!

What makes a game, a drink, or a particular brand of gym shoe addictive?

Surely, that is something which has been contemplated by Electronic Arts, Systembolaget, and Adidas for many years already, and the only ones able to pin it down so far are Systembolaget. Come to think of it, that's quite ironic considering the role that the government takes in minimizing damage from alcohol to society.

No, wait, ironic isn't what it is...it's some other word...oh, yes; huge fucking hypocrisy!

Anyway, onward to dick jo...games!

I think it's time for me to finally give my views on what makes games addictive, because I know you have been waiting for a very very long long time for that very thing. Okay, so maybe I don't really know what the word 'addictive' means, so I'll just line up and shoot down things that make you want to play a game over and over.

Of course, it's not just one single thing, so I'll try to take us through a few of them. Let's get this show on the road!

First, on our list, is the concept of 'Shit to do'. After all, you want to have stuff to do in a game, and this can be accomplished in different ways. The easiest, but by far the least entertaining, is repetition. You just make the player do one or two things over and over again, IE your good old Diablo or Borderlands. One kill is pretty much the same as the other.

Now, this doesn't necessarily mean the game sucks, but it's not a particularly inventive way of getting you hooked.

Another way of doing it is to simply go the Bethesda way and make a billion different things to do and pack the game with it until it bursts out of its pores. You add easter eggs, sidequests, different kinds of crafting, furnishing and the kitchen sink. This one is more difficult and costly because you actually need to design all of the different things separately rather than copy-pasting the lot of it. Rockstar also like to do this. By doing it this way, you're unlikely to be able to experience everything in a single playthrough, so I'll have to have another go at it. And another.

The third way is giving you a million things to do, each and every one of them mutually exclusive, IE you give the player lots of choices along the way but they can only take one of two and a half quadrillion paths, so they need to play it again and again just to see how it would pan out. This includes the powers that be giving you the option to make either an evil, goody-two-shoes or flamboyantly homosexual character. See also: Bio-fucking-ware. Fuck this option, because I only ever either do goody-two-shoes or Hitler anyway.

The last way I'll bring up is the option of simply giving you such a bloody rewarding storytelling experience that you'll come crawling back in spite of everything else to go through that marvelous adventure one more time. In other words, what Dragon Age Origins did to make me want to play through it more than once, or even once, seeing as how the game mechanics themselves sucked big black...truffles!

So, let me just mail this to EA and maybe they'll make another game that doesn't suck. FUCK YOU Command & Conquer 4!