The Secret of the Mobile Domination

Zynga are the perfect representation of games that seemed to have just erupted for no real reason, take their infamous FarmVille as an example! It was fun for a while, then you realise it was nothing but grinding and then you get so many requests to help fill your friends Easter Egg basket you just stopped playing. You stopped collecting those weird cow variants for your virtual farm! Why did FarmVille get so successful? There's a lot to go through!

Avoiding the Elephant in the room of the mobile let's talk RPGs or MMOs as we've talked about them so much lately! You want your character to reach max stats as you embark on your journey, how do you do this? Grinding! Whether you be slaying Cruelcumbers in Dragon Quest IX or Goblins in RuneScape grinding is as much a part of the game as the game itself, but grinding is dull and tedious. It's a slow process to get little reward yet mobile games like The Simpsons: Tapped Out are based on the grinding mechanic. Waiting a real 24 hour cycle for Homer to watch the Monkey Trauma Centre Marathon, but why do we keep sending him on this task? Why do we keep grinding for endless hours when we could go on epic quests in different games? It seems strange but there is a reason we choose the tedious route!

Let's look at Dragon Quest, a classic RPG series with everything you could want from a fantasy RPG adventure. When you start playing you level up quickly, you see yourself making swift progress and phsycologically your brain is being rewarded. Every time you level up you get a shot of Dopamine, your brains "happy drug". Dopamine receptors in the brain accept dopamine which keeps you playing a game, keeps you wanting more rewards and acheivements and in turn, more dopamine. That's why, most of the time, you can play for long sessions without getting bored, your brain wants you to keep playing! So why do you get tired of certain games? For me it was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, however, I was less tired of the game and more burnt out but that's beside the point, you see, dopamine receptors can close. As these receptors close it takes more of something to give you the same rush that it did before. Using Skyrim as an example I would need to put longer play sessions in to get the same feeling as I used to get from the game, but games like Skyrim and Dragon Quest do another thing really well: Side Quests! Side Quests break up the main story and can keep you playing despite you becoming tired of the main game. The dopamine rush you get becomes stronger!

This brings us back to those Goblins in RuneScape, why do you keep slaying them? Why do we keep grinding like in The Simpsons: Tapped Out? Why is the mobile gaming market taking the world by storm? Think about what we discussed about Dragon's Quest, when we are dropped into the game we are being rewarded straight off the bat, this keeps the dopamine supply fresh as there are constantly new sources to cause a shot of dopamine! Many games have a tutorial you can just blast your way through, The Simpsons: Tapped Out allows you to quickly skip the building process in the first few missions, and then we are left to the dreaded microtransaction if we want more than one donut per level! By implementing these long tasks we are forced to stop playing and, therefore, the dopamine supply is being cut off when we are most invested! Candy Crush is the perfect example: by using lives you are forced to wait to continue playing, unless you want to bombard friends on Facebook to play!

When looking at FarmVille's success it's down to our phsycological habits, we want to grind for virtual money to buy that virtual Turkey because our brain feels good when we play these games. Next time your "friend" sends you another FarmVille request you know that they've fallen victim to dopamine! It's something that we all succumb to, whether it be in gaming worlds on epic quests or eating fruit, fruit? Yep! Fruit is another source of dopamine! But why do you keep getting notifications, really? There's another side to this story, one that challenges a fundemental question which we'll save for another time. Why? We've got a month of pure terror to get through starting tomorrow...

Carrotman61's Festival of Horror opens tomorrow! You have been warned...

#psychology #grinding #mobile