Essay: "The Difference Between Being Addictive and Good"

When people talk about the quality of a work of narrative art (whether a book, a show, a film or a video game) they often talk about how addictive or compulsive it is. I played it for 8 hours straight, they’ll say, or we watched a whole season over the weekend, or I couldn’t put it down. The recently released Diablo 3 has been called “the most addictive video game of all time.” This is meant as praise, I suppose, although it’s interesting that “addictive” is obviously not seen as being an attractive quality in most other circumstances.

Likewise, when people criticize a work of art, they often talk about how it lacked this quality, how it was boring or tedious. World-weary reviewers take pride in saying they found The Da Vinci Code dreadfully boring, that they were immune to its charms.  In other words, that it did not work on them.

There seem to be remarkably few people who believe that a work of art can be both addictive and dreadful, but that’s what I’ve come to believe.  Works of art aren’t addictive because they’re very good. They're addictive becasue they're designed to be that way.

An addictive book usually dangles some sort of carrot in front of you that you have to keep reading to get. They are written thinly, without much detail and lots of action, so that you can safely skim them without worrying about missing anything. You are rarely bored.  A common technique is relatively short chapters alternating between various points of view. The Da Vinci Code does this, and so do the Game of Thrones books. Each chapter ends on a cliffhanger, and you end up like a hamster running on a wheel, reading to find out what’s going to happen next.

Games are just the same, even worse. The typical dynamic in games is to reward a player for playing a long time. So if you click on a hundred demons you get a hundred gold pieces, which allows you to buy a better sword, which allows you to successfully click on tougher demons. The player is granted a wholly bogus sense of accomplishment.


Blizzard, the developer of Diablo 3 (and World of Warcraft) has perfected this technique and their games are very poplular. But they have also come under criticism from some quarters.  In particular, the somewhat-tiresome-but-very-clever indie developer Jonathan Blow said the following about World of Warcraft:

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. ... 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? ... But if you strip it and just have the gameplay, does it fall below a certain threshold, is it still something people would want to play?


Perhaps it's because I'm getting older, or working and commuting, or in a serious relationship, but I no longer desire to be "addicted" to shows, books or games.  I recently read The Hunger Games and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  They are both good enough books, as far as it goes.  I certainly had trouble putting them down, but when I was done I felt like I got nothing out of it (as an aside, The Hunger Games was particularly disappointing in how it induced me to believe that the heroine would have to make terrible, gut-wrenching choices and then the plot conveniently machinated to ensure that the "evil" characters did all the dirty work).  I read them both very quickly, compulsively, but I was oddly bored while I was doing so.  I felt a bit like I imagine a junkie does shooting up.  I didn't so much get pleasure out of it as alleviate the pain of not having the book done.  One way of defining addiction is that you continue to perform an activity even when you aren't particularly enjoying it, or when it is harming other aspects of your life.

I am also actively avoiding Diablo 3.  Not because I'm too good for it, and I'd find it dreadfully boring and tedious.  Just the reverse.  I am sure it is easily accessible and madly compulsive.  I would not be able to resist chasing after the shiniest sword and the biggest pile of virtual gold.  It would rob hours and hours of my life (far more than a book) but provide little of the intellectual stimulation I get from a game of Shogun 2 (which is addictive enough, thank you very much).


I guess I sound like a blowhard, or a hipster here, just like Jonathan Blow.  It's important to be clear that these works of art all work on me.  The Hunger Games is an engaging novel for young adults that raises some interesting issues (and then makes them disappear before they get inconvenient).  I am sure Diablo 3 would addict me as hard as anyone else.  They are not bad, per se.  They are just trying to do something (addict me) that I really don't want them to do.

If you think about it, a book who’s only pleasure is in finding out who did it is 99% a waste of time. You might have got the same pleasure from reading a plot synopsis online, and you would have saved a lot of time (Jorge Luis Borges actually made a half-serious argument against novels along these lines, and confined his own writing to stories of a few pages).  Now when I pick up a book, I want the experience of reading it to be enjoyable in and of itself.  I want it to be addictive not because it is jamming certain buttons in my brain, like a drug, or a slot machine, but because the actual process of reading it is enjoyable.  I’m tired of running on a treadmill to get a prize. After a while, it starts to feel like work, and I spend all day doing work, if you know what I mean.