Time Sinks and Addiction

Can you be addicted to something that doesn't take much time, money, or energy?

I was thinking about games that pull me in and don't let go. They're addicting because they're demanding. Most games are very demanding; you're either playing or you aren't.

But there's a bunch of games that aren't as demanding -- browser games, play-by-mail games, play-by-email games, the turn-based games that were popular on BBSes back when that was cool, etc. You play once a day, or maybe more, but you're not stuck to the keyboard. I don't think these games are very addictive. You might wait expectantly for the next turn to show up in the mail, and maybe that's a bit addictive, but it's also easy to go a week without playing, or planning, or thinking about the game other than "I hope my turn shows up soon."

Except Travian has been like that for me. You don't need to be at the keyboard all day, but it helps. There are those that play "speed" servers like speed freaks, and have "sitters" (people on the other side of the globe) that play the game with them -- where each one of them plays the game for 12 hours a day.

You can play the game by stopping in once an hour, or every three hours. The game is like compounding interest, though. You collect more resources, which you use to make bigger fields or more combat troops, which then respectively either produce or steal more resources. Which you then re-invest in bigger fields or more combat troops.... The faster you re-invest, the greater the growth. If you delay in turning around those resources, you'll collect a certain percent less -- say, 10%. And just like compounding interest, over the course of a week that 10% turns into 100%. Week on week, it adds up to orders of magnitude.

For me there's this very real, mathematical incentive to re-deploy troops as soon as they come back. Why leave them sitting around when they could be out making money for you?

In some sense the game's a time sink. A more elegant troop-command interface would make sending out raids faster, especially when one is raiding the same targets over and over. A way to queue orders for, say, an entire day would mean you don't need to log in and check so often.

And yet the game isn't like that. I feel compelled to log in, in order to play "efficiently." I'm addicted; I need my quick little fixes, over and over. I keep coming back for more, obsessively pounding the lever and getting my food pellets in tiny doses.

A similar mechanism happens in "full-time" games, ie games where you generally stay logged in / connected / playing for longer sessions. Tetris has levels; Diablo has levels; World of Warcraft has character levels; Half-Life has levels; Guitar Hero has songs and venues and stars; Mario has stars and levels; etc etc. There's always "just one more" task, and it's small.

Sometimes the task is, well, kinda stupid. I'm sitting here thinking about how to spend less time mucking with Travian, because I'm obsessing over it at the moment. I was tempted to just delete the account, about an hour ago, and move on to the next game -- or get back to writing code. That's because there's not a lot of 'game' to Travian. It's a bit like Chess in that regard; the pieces move rather simply, but it's the complexity of human opponents that makes the game so rich. It's not a puzzle, nor a simple strength or skill test; there's a lot of strategy involved in doing well. (Strategy of the planning variety.)

Addictive games give out rewards frequently. When the player expects some new trinket in a short while, they'll keep playing, and then stay, expecting the next trinket. There's easily more complexity to add here -- such as adding high-level or bigger rewards every so often. And tons of other stuff. But the basic notion -- small rewards at frequent intervals -- is the heart of addiction. All the better if the game demands constant attention and rewards that attention.