What makes some games so addictive?
Analyzing Fall Guys: Ultimate knockout, the new summer hit
During the last years, in the game industry, we have seen indie companies releasing games that had become instantly trending, turning themselves into referents.
We are talking about games like Minecraft, Plants vs Zombies, Angry Birds, Candy Crush, Rocket League, etc.
But, what does it make these games so addictive, that even several years later, people still play?
I want to focus on one of these last hits that have bursted in on the last weeks thanks to Playstation, and explain which are the 4 main factors that make them so addictive.
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
For those who haven’t hear anything about the game, it’s a platform battle royal game where you have to defeat all the other players within the different levels until only one is left.
Easy to play (simplicity)
The first and most important common trade all these games share is the simplicity. You can give the game to your father, sister, or child and they will eventually learn how to play in a short period. But we can’t assume simplicity is easy. These games also must be challenging enough so users keep playing infinitely. It is the mix of both concepts that makes them so addictive.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was the first one in crafting a theory talking about something similar. He called it Flow and it goes like this.
Flow is the state of optimal experience, a rewarding balance of our skills and the challenges before us. It’s the enjoyable feeling of being deeply engaged in the moment, and it’s during moments of flow that our best work is produced, our greatest ideas expressed and our most admirable achievements accomplished.
So the idea is that you need to stay in a continuous flow channel that allows users not to stay bored or anxious because of the difficulty of the game.
In this case, you only need the joysticks and two buttons to play Fall Guys, which simplifies a lot the game as users only need to learn how to move and jump.
Online
With the irruptions of the mobile industry and a faster internet connection in the past 10 years, game companies have seen how online games became a standard in the industry.
The idea is very simple, you play against other users in order to win a reward. This easy concept has turned the online game industry into the most lucrative one, and all by triggering our competitive attitude. As humans, we compete since we were gatherers, and we fought for our food and also our lives. Now, we don’t fight for food but we compete against others all day, and sometimes even we are not aware of it, some examples can be sports, in our work, with our partner …
Check how important online games have become that now they invented eSports; which is a group of people playing alone or in teams against others and outsiders can watch the game on streaming platforms. This emerging market moves millions of dollars, is it so that in 2019 a Fornite event had committed $100M cash prize for the winners.
10 years ago, the game story was a lot more important than now. Although now you play games with a very good story and stunning graphics, it’s difficult to find a game with these characteristics that follows all the points we are highlighting in this article.
In Fall Guys you compete against 59 other users in different game screens, the last ones are eliminated, until only one is left to will win the game. All the players have the same opportunities, what matters is each user’s talent.
Freemium
Another important aspect that makes these games so addictive is that they are free to play. For me, this is the most important point of all. You can create an easy to play game based on challenging other users but if you have to pay for it, a lot of users will not play. There are tons of games with these attributes but only those who are free spread faster and to a wider range of users, even to those who were not first targeted by the company.
That doesn’t mean these companies don’t make money with the games, on the contrary, they have created microtransaction systems that allow them to collect real money from users in exchange for virtual tokens, to buy power-ups, unlock game screens, improve their characters, etc.
Rewards based on achievements
Imagine that every time you achieve some goal at work you get rewarded. In theory that will keep you motivated for the next goal, that will be harder but at the same time, the reward will be bigger, although sometimes you don’t know which will be the reward.
That’s called “rewards of the self” and as Nir Eyal explained in his book Hooked:
The rewards of the self are fueled by “intrinsic motivation” as highlighted by the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. Their self-determination theory espouses that people desire, among other things, to gain a sense of competency. Adding an element of mystery to this goal makes the pursuit all the more enticing.
As we talked in the first point, handle the right level of complexity is very difficult, and it is the job of the game designers to find a good balance between them. Is also important that this complexity comes with the hand of a good reward. If the reward or the goal to achieve is not well calibrated you can drive users to frustration and eventually make the user quit playing the game.
In Fall Guys you achieve rewards by playing and winning game tokens, the more game screens you complete the more tokens you get, and if you win the game you get another type of token that will allow you to buy exclusive clothing for your character. All users can get the same rewards, it will only depend on two simple factors: Skills and the time spent playing the game.
Conclusions
We will keep seeing new games that will attract a new audience and will become trending, but the questions I want to raise here are: Which of the current trendy games will last in the next years? and which will be their strategy to keep engaging with users? Because in this changing industry the hardest part is to stay on top and not to fall forgotten.
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