by Adam Alter
In the context of gaming, experts call this sensation the ludic loop—from the Latin ludere, for playful. You enter a ludic loop when, each time you enjoy the brief thrill of solving one element of a puzzle, a new and incomplete piece presents itself. The ludic loop can be found in challenging video games, difficult crosswords, repetitive but stimulating work tasks, slot machines that grant you low wins among many losses, and countless other immersive experiences. Ludic loops, like all flow experiences, are very powerful.
When I visited reSTART, the Internet addiction center, I asked one of its founders, Cosette Rae, whether she had ever been addicted to games herself. She was lucky to have been born a few years before the kids she treats today, she said. “Had I been born ten years later I may have developed an addiction. I remember playing a game called Myst. It was beautiful! But it was slow, and it would freeze, and I was, like, I just have too much on my plate.” I remember Myst as well. It was a gorgeously rendered role-playing adventure game. It was also very clunky, because the P.C.s of the early 1990s just couldn’t handle the demands it placed on their memory chips, and graphics and sound cards. In 2000, a magazine called IGN printed a column titled, “Is the world’s best-selling P.C. game ever still worth playing today?” Its conclusion: no. Myst had aged badly, and playing it “was like watching hit TV shows from the 70s. ‘People watched that?’ you wonder in horror.” The patients at reSTART are now playing games that were inspired by Myst and its contemporaries. The big difference is that they’re smooth, their graphics are seamless, and they almost never force you to reboot your computer.
What gamers see as progress, Rae sees as dangerous. Her experience with Myst inspired her, fifteen years later, to create artificial barriers that disrupt the formation of ludic loops. She doesn’t want to experience flow where games and phones and emails and the Internet are concerned. “When you analyze why people use these gadgets less often, it’s when they become irritating—an obstacle. So I used to buy the latest and greatest tech gadgets, the latest and greatest computer software, and I learned, as a harm reduction strategy, to wait two or three years before buying a product. The addict self wants more power and more speed, easier accessibility, the latest and greatest. So I pat my non-addict self on the back and say, ‘good job’—you didn’t go and buy the new iPhone; you haven’t upgraded your computer.”
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Not everyone avoids temptation so assiduously. Like Alexey Pajitnov thirty years earlier, an Irish game designer named Terry Cavanagh played one of his own games incessantly. Cavanagh is a prolific designer, but he’s best known for a game called Super Hexagon. The game belongs to a genre known as “twitch” games, because it requires you to develop almost superhuman reflexes and motor responses. Your task is to guide a small arrow around a circular path at the center of the screen while evading incoming walls for a minimum of sixty seconds. Unlike many compelling games it doesn’t coddle you—it’s difficult from the very easiest level. (Imagine starting Tetris on Level 8 instead of Level 1.) Even the slowest of the game’s six levels is unforgiving, and I had to play for many hours before I completed that level. (I’ve still never progressed beyond the game’s third level.) Super Hexagon is so difficult that some designers call it “masocore”—a game that’s almost cruelly—“masochistally”—punishing.
While fine-tuning Super Hexagon in 2011 and 2012, Cavanagh played the game over and over again. He noticed, much as Pajitnov had with early versions of Tetris, that he improved rapidly. What seemed hard initially became easy with practice, and this sense of mastery was addictive. “I think if you can finish the first mode and you’re into it, you can finish the game completely,” Cavanagh said during an interview. “I’ve seen this happen with the people that were beta testing it—they thought ‘well, this is just way too hard for me’ and then they got to the point where their reflexes were good enough and they understood the game well enough that they could actually finish it. That’s what the game is all about. It should be a challenge to overcome.”
The game was a big hit in the indie gaming community, and it won several major awards in 2012 and 2013. But despite attracting a bevy of fans, Cavanagh had been given a head start, and he seemed to be the best Super Hexagon player in the world. In September 2012, at a conference called Fantastic Arcade, he played the hardest level of the game in front of a large audience. You can watch his astounding performance on YouTube. For seventy-eight seconds he performs a series of agile moves that are hard to see let alone imagine performing yourself. The little arrow jumps around the screen projected behind Cavanagh’s head, and the crowd gasps as he conquers the game. He celebrates by saying quietly, quite bashfully, “Now there’s a much larger percentage of people who have seen this ending.”
At first Super Hexagon sounds too difficult to be appealing, but Cavanagh built in a series of hooks to prevent novices from giving up. The average game lasts only a few seconds at first, and rarely longer than a minute, which means you’re never pouring too much time and energy into a single run. “Because it’s so short, it’s, I hope, kind of inviting,” Cavanagh said. “I’m really happy with how that aspect of the game works. You never really feel like you’re losing progress, even when you fail at the end of a fifty-nine-second run. You just go right back into it, because the game is tuned in such a way that it doesn’t feel like a loss.” As soon as the game ends, it starts up again without pause. It doesn’t give you time to wallow in defeat, and before you know it you’re focusing on a new attempt as though the trail of failures that came before it had never happened. The ludic loop is preserved, and you’re never yanked from your flow. The game’s music has the same effect. “The music starts in a random place when you restart,” Cavanagh said. “If the music started in the very beginning every single time, then every single time you died you’d feel like ‘Oh, I’ve lost and I have to start again from the beginning.’ It’s really important you don’t feel that way, you don’t feel like you’ve lost.”
There was something else about Super Hexagon that hooked me: the sense that victory was just around the corner. Sure, my first several hundred attempts ended in failure, but I always felt that, but for a slip of the mouse button, I’d have guided the small arrow away from the oncoming wall. I was sure that I’d finish the level in time. Near wins like these, where you’re sure you’re close to winning despite falling just short, are very addictive—in fact, often more so than genuine wins.
We know this from a paper that two marketing professors published in 2015. In one experiment they asked a group of shoppers to scratch lottery tickets. Tickets that contained the number eight six times in a row earned the lucky shoppers a twenty-dollar prize. The experimenters designed the tickets so that they either presented a win (left), a near win (center), or a clear loss (right):
Most shoppers scratched the cards from top left to bottom right, which meant they quickly discovered they had lost in the “clear loss” condition. Shoppers in the other two conditions got off to a great start, but the winners ultimately won and the near winners lost when they reached the critical eighth row. In these and other studies, the experiment’s participants completed another activity after either winning or losing the game, while the researchers surreptitiously monitored their behavior. In each case, those who had almost won were more motivated and driven no matter what they were doing. They bought more products from stores, sorted a stack of numbered cards more quickly and efficiently, and walked faster to collect an unrelated reward. The researchers even found that they drooled more—they produced more saliva—following a near win rather than a clear loss. The experience of almost winning lights a fire under us, and drives us to do something—anything—to ease the sense of disappointment that follows a last-minute loss. Other researchers have found similar patterns, suggesting, for example, that gamblers prefer to play games that present near wins on 30 percent of all spins rather than games that present near wins on 15 percent of trials or no trials at all.
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Near wins signal that success is nearby. That’s why I continued to play Super Hexagon in the face of countless failures. In the context of a game of skill this makes perfect sense—a near win sends the useful signal that you’re close to achieving victory. With practice and grit you’re likely to achieve that goal. But sometimes that signal is meaningless, particularly when the game relies entirely on luck. As anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll told me, that’s how casinos hook gamblers. Slot machine wins seem to be tantalizingly close, when in fact there’s no material difference between a near win and a clear loss. Neither one signals that you’re more or less likely to win the jackpot in the future, since it’s illegal to change the odds of winning on any particular spin.
The second biggest problem with slot machines is that they lure you in. You can’t pass a well-designed slot machine without at least slowing for a quick look. The biggest problem, though, is that they refuse to let you stop playing once you begin. What they do best is to obliterate your stopping rules.
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During the 1990s, psychologist Paco Underhill famously watched thousands of hours of retail store security camera footage. The cameras captured all sorts of shopping behavior, most of it mundane but some of it interesting and useful to the store owners who asked Underhill for help. One of Underhill’s most famous observations was the so-called butt-brush effect. In cluttered stores, where merchandise racks are placed only a few feet apart, customers are forced to squeeze past one another. Underhill’s footage captured hundreds of these unintentional butt-brushes, and he noticed an interesting pattern of behavior: as soon as women, and to a lesser extent men, were brushed, they tended to stop browsing and often left the store empty-handed. Butt-brushes were costing stores a lot of money, so he sent a team to investigate why. Were customers abandoning the store as an act of protest? Were they disgusted by the idea of touching a stranger? In fact, customers had absolutely no idea they were reacting to butt-brushes at all. They acknowledged leaving the store, but almost always said it had nothing to do with the presence of other shoppers. Sometimes they cobbled together good reasons for leaving—they were late for a meeting or needed to collect their kids from school—but the pattern was just too strong to deny. What Underhill had identified was a stopping rule—a cue that guided customers to stop shopping. The rule wasn’t something those customers could explain, but it was there, guiding their behavior all the same.
We tend to overlook stopping rules because often it seems more important in the short-term to question why people start doing something new than why they stop doing something old. If you’re selling something, your first question is how you can encourage people to use your product rather than how you can prevent them from moving on to a different one. If you’re a doctor trying to encourage your patients to exercise, your first question is how you can get them to start working out—not how you can coax them to continue. And if you’re a teacher, your first question is how you can encourage students to study, rather than how you can push them to keep studying over time. You have to ask why people start before you ask why they stop, but stopping rules play a huge and sometimes overlooked role in driving addictive and compulsive behaviors.
Unfortunately, the same new technologies that make life easier also disrupt our stopping rules. Wearable tech like the Apple Watch and Fitbit allow you to track your workouts, but they also discourage you from paying attention to your body’s internal exhaustion cues. Both Katherine Schreiber and Leslie Sim, the exercise addiction experts I mentioned earlier, think that wearable tech aggravates the problem. “Tech plays a role inasmuch as it reinforces the calculating mind-set,” Schreiber told me. “It reinforces how much attention you pay to walking a certain number of steps or getting a certain number of hours of R.E.M. sleep, for example. I’ve never used one of these devices because I know they would drive me insane. It’s a trigger for all sorts of addictive behaviors.” Sim compared Fitbits to calorie counting, which “doesn’t help us manage our weight any better; it just makes us more obsessive.” Calorie counting makes us less intuitive about what we’re eating, and Sim also wondered whether wearable tech made us less intuitive about physical activity. Some of her patients say things like, “if I’ve only done fourteen thousand steps today, even though I’m really tired and I need to rest, I have to go out and do my extra two thousand steps.” These results are also concerning, because the healthiest approach to exercising in moderation and eating well is to enjoy them—to cultivate an intrinsic preference for salads and thirty minutes of walking over burgers and inactivity. Unfortunately, counting calories and steps crowds out intrinsic motivation by signaling that you’re only being healthy because you’re trying to meet numerical targets.
The same technology that drives people to overexercise also binds them to the workplace twenty-four hours a day. Until recently, people left work behind when they left the office, but now, with the introduction of smartphones, tablets, remote log-ins, and emails that find us wherever we happen to be, that stopping rule is obsolete. Since the late 1960s, but especially in the past two decades, Japanese workers have whispered about karoshi, literally “death from overworking.” The term applies to workers, particularly mid- and high-level executives who struggle to leave work behind at the end of the day. As a result, they die prematurely from strokes, heart attacks, and other stress-induced ailments. In 2011, for example, the media described an engineer who died at his desk at a computer tech company called Nanya. The engineer had worked between sixteen and nineteen hours per day, sometimes from home, and an autopsy suggested that he died from “cardiogenic shock.”
A recurring theme in karoshi cases is that victims spend far more time at work than necessary. They’re often successful, and they have more than enough money. They aren’t bound to work longer hours to support themselves, but for one reason or another, they can’t seem to stop. In 2013, Chris Hsee, a business school professor at the University of Chicago, wrote a paper with three of his colleagues about why people have such weak stopping rules when it comes to work. In one experiment, the researchers gave undergraduate students the opportunity to earn chocolates. During the experiment the students could do one of two things: listen to pleasant, soothing music or endure the harsh sound of an annoying tone. Some of the students earned a chocolate for every twenty times they heard the tone. It was unpleasant and ultimately left the students with chocolates (a sort of wage), so the researchers considered it a form of work. On average the students earned ten chocolates, which seems like a good outcome—until you realize they only ate an average of four chocolates at the end of the experiment. Once they were on the wage-earning treadmill, they couldn’t stop even when they had enough in the bank. They were so insensitive to stopping rules that they spent too much time working and not enough time playing. As Kent Berridge, the neuroscientist first introduced in chapter 3, discovered, people sometimes continue wanting a behavior long after it stops bringing them joy. The students, once locked in work mode, couldn’t seem to stop even as the benefits of working declined. At the end of their paper, the researchers speculated that:
Overearning may be an overgeneralized [rule of thumb]. For much of human history, earning rates were low. To earn and accumulate as much as possible was a functional [rule] for survival; individuals did not need to worry about earning too much, because they could not earn too much . . . Like overeating, overearning is a modern-era issue stemming from advancements in productivity, and it carries potential costs for humans.
You can see the same destruction of stopping rules in other places, too. Until quite recently, gamblers fed dollar bills into slot machines, but now they play with cards that register their wins and losses. Shoppers, similarly, pay for their purchases with credit cards. In both cases, it’s hard to keep track of mounting losses that might send a stopping signal if they were more obvious. Instead of watching as the wads of bills in their wallet dwindle, shoppers and gamblers use a single card that remotely and
abstractly registers each loss and each expense.
In a classic paper, marketing professors Dražen Prelec and Duncan Simester showed that people will pay up to twice as much for the same item when using a credit card rather than cash. Credit cards, like slot machine cards, hide all feedback from a spender, who has to keep track of his own gains and losses instead. American Express once coined the slogan, “Don’t leave home without it,” but Prelec and Simester cleverly turned that slogan on its head when they titled their paper “Always Leave Home Without It.”
I heard a similar story time and again from game designers, who described a growing movement of ethical game design. NYU Game Center director Frank Lantz told me that FarmVille and other Facebook games were successful in part because once you were hooked they never let you go. “Facebook games run twenty-four hours a day—they’re persistent games. They aren’t games where you have to start a session, and then play, and then save your results, and then come back later and begin the session again. They’re just always going whenever you want to play them.” The fun never ends because the game doesn’t impose its own stopping rule. There are no chapters or sessions or levels that tell you when your gaming session begins and when it ends. Bennett Foddy agreed: “Some designers are very much against infinite format games, like Tetris, for example, because they’re an abuse of a weakness in people’s motivational structures—that they won’t be able to stop. Instead they prefer to make games that engage you till you get to the end—and then it’s over and you’re free from it.”
Some games pay vague lip service to this idea by warning you to stop and take a break when you’ve been playing for a long time. But those warnings are toothless and, in some sense, tease you to keep playing. I played a strategy game called 2048, which was all the rage on New York City subways for a couple of years. (I discovered the game by asking a fellow subway rider—the tenth person I’d seen playing the game in a matter of days—what he was playing.) One of the game’s welcome screens says “Thank You. Enjoy the game and don’t forget to take a break, if needed!” Right below that warning is a button that takes you to Apple’s app store, where you’re offered a medley of similarly addictive games, many by the same design team. The solution, as far as the designers of 2048 are concerned, is to stop you from playing one game by offering you a series of others to take its place.
