"Seeking" is the perfect word for the drive these designs instill in their players. You want to win the game, of course, and perhaps you want to see the game's narrative completed. In the initial stages of play, you may just be dazzled by the game's graphics. But most of the time, when you're hooked on a game, what draws you in is an elemental form of desire: the desire to see the next thing. ...
If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you'll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they're made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks. It's not the subject matter of these games that attracts -- if that were the case, you'd never see twenty-somethings following absurd rescue-the-princess storylines like the best-selling Zelda series. It's the reward system that draws those players in, and keeps their famously short attention spans locked on the screen. No other form of entertainment offers that cocktail of reward and exploration: we don't "explore" movies or television or music in anything but the most figurative sense of the word. And while there are rewards to those other forms -- music in fact has been shown to trigger opioid release in the brain -- they don't come in the exaggerated, tantalizing packaging that video games wrap around them.
It's about exploring the physics of the game:
Probing the limits of the game physics is another oft-ignored facet of gaming culture. ... There's something strangely satisfying about defining the edges of a simulation, learning what it's capable of and where it breaks down. Some people find this kind of exploration appealing in ordinary life: they're the sort that actually enjoys looking under the hood of the car, or memorizing UNIX commands. But video games force you to speculate about what's going on under the hood. If you don't think about the underlying mechanics of the simulation -- even if that thinking happens in a semiconscious way -- you won't last very long in the game. You have to probe to progress.
I didn't have a word for it at the time, of course, but I now realize that my tour through the universe of dice-baseball was a way of probing the physics of those early games. I'd learn the explicit rules for each simulation, but the really fascinating moment came when I'd start rolling the dice and generating results. Only by playing the simulations could you get a sense of their realism. ... I was detecting flaws in these systems, but there was nonetheless something profoundly satisfying about the experience. Bringing those imperfections to light felt like solving a mystery, looking past the surface illusion of player cards and charts to the inner truth of the system.
This answer satisfies me. In fact, these might be some of the most important paragraphs I have read this year. But a question still lingers for me, one that the book centers around: Are video games (and other forms of "escapist" entertainment) an epic waste of time? I am leaning toward yes, but I am only part way through the book so I will let SBJ finish his counter-argument before opening my mouth.
