The Loop of Agency

Symptomatically, I think that what compels people to play video games excessively varies from person to person according to their own selective notions of ‘fun’/gratification. Here’s a list of some of the various factors:

- Getting the high score

- Beating the game

- Discovering and exploring imaginary worlds (especially in MMOs)

- Role-playing (emotional bondage with characters)

- Relationships (emotional bondage with other gamers online)

The first two can of course be applied to almost all games (and most players). For instance whenever I find myself playing the odd game of solitaire, I admit that I cannot stop until I have either finished the game or achieved the next best score. I know. It’s obviously compulsive to an extent, but sometimes such simple and seemingly-non-time-consuming games are no different to pretty much all games. I guess the difference, though, depends on preference: Once I was introduced to a simulation-civilization type game called Virtual Villagers by my sister. It’s a strategy-like game where you look after a tribe of people on an island – playing as a sort of god to them. Initially I was quite engaged in the gameplay: expanding the population, building houses, training up a doctor to care for the sick etc. However, the thing was, the game could keep going even when your computer was turned off. Not really realising the consequences of this in relation to the sped-up nature of game-time and real time, I found out later that most of my villagers had died without my presence. After that I didn’t really have the motivation to continue playing. Though in comparison, my sister loved the entire game series even though she encountered similar disappointments, but I think what truly kept her engaged so repetitiously in raising a village of people over and over was perhaps her deep emotional attachment to all the characters (she named almost all of them, whereas I left them with their own simulated names). So I suppose that in the end, one’s degree of investment (time-wise, emotion-wise and money-wise) in video games can often be derivative of personal psychologically-oriented goals, despite the awareness of (or not ) of continual repetition in the activity itself – a state which, ironically, one is attempting to escape from in playing so much to begin with!