The Theory Schmucks

With a ten million subscribers, World of Warcraft is the undisputed king of the Massively Multiplayer Online jungle. Between sales and subscription fees, it grosses almost $1.5 billion a year and, as of today, has well over 50% market share in the MMORPG business. The game’s so addictive it causes not-infrequent divorces and forms the basis for hilarious satire.

Why is WoW so addictive, though?

At least partly because the game itself is a hybrid, allowing the player to engage two different video game discourses (sorry) at once.

It works like this: most video games come in two flavors, ‘High Score’ and ‘Loot Table.’ (There are exceptions, like Endless Ocean, but not many.) Both archetypes are teleological — that is, they encourage the player to try and ‘win.’ The difference between them is how they define their win conditions.

Most High Score games have two win conditions: completing the game’s internal goals, and racking up the high score. Beating the game is usually relatively quick and easy because beating the last boss (or whatever) is usually the game’s soft goal. For more dedicated players, the hard goal is striving for the highest score possible, however the game — or its exterior structure — measures it.

The original Mario World is a great example of a High Score game. Beating the game is the soft, stated goal, whereas getting the high score — and often, beating your friends’ high scores — is the implicit, hard goal. Modern High Score games work a little differently; often, they replace an internal high score with something like the XBOX 360′s gamer score. Even so, the principle is the same.

Loot Table games, by contrast, only have one win condition: to pimp out your avatar (or city, or whatever) as much as possible. Beating the game, in the High Score sense, is either impossible or irrelevant. The only thing that matters is playing the game in such a way as you get to access its loot table. Whenever you pull the lever (or whatever) that allows you to access the game’s internal loot table, you’re rewarded with something. The key to the loot table is that your reward is sometimes an incremental improvement, but often is just trash.

In psychology, by the way, they call that a random-ratio reward schedule. The subject is rewarded at randomized intervals for performing whatever action the psychologist dictates. Incidentally, there are three other reward schedules — fixed-ratio, always, and never. Guess which is the most addictive? (If you’re not sure, look up B.F. Skinner’s experiments with pigeons.)

A good early example of a Loot Table game is Kirby Super Star. Beating the game’s easy; collecting all the different ‘hats’ is hard, or at least time-consuming. Every iteration of Pokemon works the same way: the goal isn’t beating the game, it’s catching ‘em all. And even then, there’s more to do (friends to battle, abilities to optimize, etc.)

A lot of why World of Warcraft is so successful — and addictive — is because it has the appearance of a High Score game and the architecture of a Loot Table game. High Score games are a lot of fun for a little while, but they don’t have much staying power. Loot Table games, on the other hand, are hard to get into. They’re also addictive — but only after you start valuing their internal currency.

One of the main features of a High Score game is that it encourages players to run through the same actions over and over to perfect their performance. A better performance yields a higher score, which is inherently desirable — that’s the logic underlying a High Score game’s hard goal. WoW replaces the hard goal’s motivator — a high score — with a roll on the game’s loot table. That accomplishes two things: it replaces the High Score game’s intangible reward of a good score with the tangible reward of better equipment.

That’s true of most MMOs, though. What makes WoW special? It scales. The easiest dungeons in the game don’t require many players (five), don’t take long (between one and two hours), and reward you with an exponentially better equipment than pre-dungeon content does. As players spend more time in the game, and become more invested in the game’s internal currency, dungeons start requiring more time and players to complete (and in turn give better rewards.)

The end-game dungeons, therefore, require a lot of time to complete — but anyone with the equipment to attempt them won’t mind. They’ll already be highly invested in the game’s internal currency.

Other MMOs follow a similar formula but with different proportions; it takes longer to access the game’s dungeons, or the game doesn’t cater to small groups of players, or the loot table is either too rewarding or not rewarding enough. Blizzard hit the jackpot with World of Warcraft: it has the inherent enjoyability of a High Score game, the addictiveness of a Loot Table game, and its content allows players to engage it at their level. It’s openly welcoming to casual players and scales to cater to dedicated players. Whoever came up with the architecture for WoW deserves a medal — if he hasn’t bought a few with his millions of dollars of video game money already.