Game Designers Making Drugs, Not Food says Blow

Gamasutra has an article reviewing a speech given by Jonathan Blow. The creator of the still in development PC game Braid aimed most of his comments at PC first person games, but he did take a few moments to talk about MMO's.
Some examples of these "scheduled rewards" are collectibles, unlockables, achievements or advancing the story -- the player wants to beat the boss monster so they can see what happens to Joe when he walks through the next door.

"Sometimes we take this really far," Blow noted. "MMOs are notorious for having relatively empty gameplay, but keeping players hooked with constant fake rewards – this creates 'the treadmill.' Rewards are a way of lying to the player so they feel good and continue to play the game." He noted some extreme examples of this, such as reported incidents of Chinese or Korean MMO players dying at the computer.

He continued, "As long as players are hooked, it doesn’t matter how good the core gameplay is. As long as they want to get the nicer sword, they’ll still play the game, and as long as they play it’s all the same to us as designers – I’m sure at this point, people think I’m needlessly babbling on about this point. But I want to put forth this question – would they still play a game if it took out all the scheduled rewards?"
He goes on to discuss the reward and time sink issues in a little more depth, so if you're geeky like me and love this stuff, click on over!
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