I talked to a developer of a popular free-to-play game, and he told me of many of the psychological hooks they use in their game.
Exploitation of hoarding behavior, community fame for specific players, random occurrences that are carefully scripted, etc.
Nowadays it's hard to find games free of ulterior motives.
Yes, addictive games and personalities have always existed, but now there's money mixed in.
I'm not even sure what kind of "old" game you're picturing that you think didn't have "money mixed in" - tetris? pong? goldeneye?
No, most online games don’t count as social. They’re anonymous, faceless, and typically populated with the utter dregs of humanity willing to say the most vile thing to get attention. Genuine human interaction this is not.
How about an old adventure game, where you were expected to pay once, enjoy the story and quizzes, and complete in X time (no "dark patterns" etc)?
And of which the creators were as passionate about the their creation and genre as you, as opposed to cynical 'let's make another addictive MMOG' or 'let's make another FarmVille' or 'let's make Angry Birds 335' studios?
Food also has "money mixed in" but you can have a honest local food joint, and you can also have a global "give them crap" chain like McDonalds. Sometimes with identical prices too.
This is how I feel too. All games are addictive and have psychological "feel good" hooks in them. However it feels like a lot of those scummy mobile games prioritize engineering addiction and exploiting those hooks over making a fun game. Add to that recent controversies about some games being considered gambling which, as an industry, shares this goal of making people addicted to the rush so that they spend more.
What pains me the most is that it works. People vote with wallets and support these developers.
The real exception is gambling games.
And I did think along the same lines (in a very minor way) with arcade games. Pinball - where skill let you prolong a game gave way to video games (like pacman or tetris you mentioned), which quickly got too hard to keep going. And it went further when games like gauntlet kept you feeding quarters in a pay to play way.
But at that time, we got atari and nintendo and so forth. Pay once, play for a long time. Kids grew up with this, and parents worried about the cost of a cartridge.
But the current crop of games is free, yet blatantly money oriented. Plants vs Zombies pre-EA vs post-EA comes to mind. Add grinding and then pay to not grind.
Yes, a little rose colored. But in vegas you can actually register as a compulsive gambler and the casinos will not serve you.
