Comment by Spivak
3 years ago
But Minecraft has a really solid compulsion loop, it’s what makes it so easy to start playing and then realize it’s nightfall. You never have to wait for anything because there’s always something else to do, you get mild gentle pressure from the environment to do things like hunger, night, mobs that inject variety. Every step of building something is set up as a reward, and there’s tiers of progress that reward basically every action. Mining and drops is literally lootboxes.
You picked basically the most addictive game in existence that uses every trick in the book as your shining example. Minecraft just hides it well.
I’m straight up talking about the connotations of using the term “compulsion”. Last I heard these described by game developers they were referred to as “game loops” or “core loop” if they were referring to the main part of the game.
Using the term “compulsion” to describe it instead comes from a certain mindset that I believe is centered around making skimmer boxes