Why is it addictive?
It’s an immersive, huge well thought out world with history and characters, so provides the addiction of escapism.
It provides the Skinner Box effect of variable rewards which is a known addictive mechanism. You don’t run a dungeon to get a guaranteed Sword of Power. You run it because the Sword of Power MIGHT drop. It’s a Fruit Machine or a Roulette Wheel, giving you the constant feeling that you ALMOST hit the jackpot, that you were CLOSE so have one more go.
It’s addictive because the balance between randomness and progression is tuned so that you always get a feeling of some kind of progression. You may not get the Sword of Power but you can grind currencies, tokens etc and still feel you are progressing. Every day you play you can improve something.
It’s addictive because the content (exploring zones, doing the campaign, etc) soon gives way to the mechanisms like competition, FOMO, dailies which are all specifically designed against one metric: retaining your subscription. It’s designed to keep you subscribed.
It’s addictive because for many people real life has no narrative structure or sense of progress or doing something meaningful . And because you’re constantly presented with an infinite and almost complete jigsaw puzzle that makes you itch to try and complete it, but all the time you get close they add more pieces to the puzzle.
The actual playing is also addictive. When you kill a player, down a boss, or even just press a cool button like a chaos bolt you’re getting a dopamine hit with nice animations, colours and sounds.
And lastly, the more time you put in, the more expansions you do, the more invested you are. Your character has defeated the Lich King and the Legion, sorted out the afterlife, beaten Deathwing, explored Pandaria etc etc……How on earth do you walk away from that? The more /played you have the harder it is to put it all down.
That’s why.
