Progress Quest is the funniest. It rules.

a lot of it boils down to operant conditioning à la Skinner. especially the traditional action-RPG model (think diablo) with increasing intervals between rewards (level ups) is very effective... (since it´s based on a variable ration enforcment plan)

this might be a good start:

http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/behsys/operant.html

Quote:

Original post by Bobin_Hood i wondered - "what makes leveling up addictive, and will my system be taking away from the fun?"

Nothing, it is tedious and boring. I much prefer actually getting better myself, rather than having some avatar suddenly be deemed to be better because I stood around for half an hour chopping up another 150 spiders.

It's not addictive, it's just a required change so that a gaming experience can evolve. Just like finding new weapons in Doom, and unlocking a tech tree in an RTS game.

In some cases, getting another level is so mindnumbingly tedious that you're just levelling up so you can go to a new place and, uh, do it again...

It depends what the style of the game is. I was addicted to a game for 1 1/2 years where all you did was level. There wasn't a single thing resembling a quest. The graphics weren't advanced by any means, but they were stylized enough and fit the theme perfectly. However, it was very fast paced. There was always a new place to go level up in, and there were some extremely rare items (only 4 people having them out of 20000 rare). It was easy to meet friends, and there were special bosses that spawned every once in a while that you could go hunt with your friends. Some of them could wipe out a group of 12 if you weren't careful. You could kill most monsters in 3 seconds or so, and it usually took less than two seconds to start attacking something else, and the harder monsters attacked you first, so you were always busy. The stats of a character greatly varied. If you maxed out agility you would attack insanely fast and dodge almost perfectly (but there were those monsters that almost always hit you to balance it out), if you worked on strength you could bash tons of stuff in one hit.

Now compare this to another game I played. It was pretty, but every area looked the same. It took probably 20 seconds to kill something. Once you finally did kill something, you had to walk around for 20 seconds before you found another thing to kill. The game's prettiness caused it to be slow on even the fastest computers. I didn't even bother subscribing for a second month to that game.

I must say that when I used to have more time on my hands, I played RPGs. Now I don't have enough time, and I play more fast-paced games that don't require you to spend 50 hours playing just to level up a decent amount.

This is probably why younger gamers like RPGs more than older ones. If I were to play one today, I'd probably fall off my seat bored if I had to spend the whole time in a game levelling up. To me, its a turn-off not a turn-on (in a gaming sense, of course).

I think it depends on the game type. In a single player game, you spend your time leveling to improve your character so that you have the skills/ability to defeat the next bad guy, or access the next locked level.

In multiplayer games, the same is true to an extent, but you also have the "my character is better than yours" syndrome. Players will try their hardest to level the quickest, so that they can equip themselves with better items and be the first to access new areas.

I remember playing the original diablo with 3 other friends for weeks. We'd completed the game itself within the first few days, but then you keep on leveling so that you can get to a sufficient level to be able to beat the game on "HELL" setting. After that you'd imagine the game would lose its appeal. However, we kept going, for no other reason that to have the highest level character or gain access to a better item.

I think the addiction is probably a degree of the two above reasons combined. If you didn't gain new skill points or abilities when you level, I imagine much of the addiction would be lost, after all the reason for leveling is to improve your character.

I for one consider leveling up by itself a rather boring and often unnecessary thing, its used in far to many games just to stretch the play time a bit. Nothing is more frustrating than having reached the final boss, but then being required to spend a few hours leveling before one actually has a change defeting it. And random encounters just to enforce leveling aren't really motivating either.

I much prefer the Zelda-type of 'leveling' where you simply get a new item each dungeon or quest, without being required to actually defeat x-kind of enemies and such, you just open the tresure chest and its in there. There it matters what you do, not how often you repeat the same thing over and over again.

Its basically not even a problem with the leveling itself, but with the balancing of it. If I am good enough to run through the game to the final boss I want to be able to defeat him and not being held back by some stats that just make my attacks to weak.

The one thing that is motivating about leveling is that you have constant progress in the game, no matter what you do, you always progress in the game, so even if you are wandering around in circles you make progress by reaching higher levels. However creating this 'progress' just by some number printed in some option menu is a rather poor way of doing it, its much more enjoyable when they player really feels the difference, so instead of just having higher-attack points, give the player new moves, new weapons or whatever. And last not least make sure that the player must not ever do the same thing repeatialty just for levelings-shake. If you want the player to level, give him new areas and new quests to solve, don't force him to run around in the woods killing random enemies.

I'm surprised noone has mentioned City of Heroes, which applies a partial no-numbers system including the unshowed stats and getting new skills each level that you mentioned. As far as I could tell it didn't take much away from the fun, but maybe if we explored this concept of leveling up more, we could find ways to make leveling up even more fun.

You want to become invincible, you want to beat..- lets say crush, your opponents like you couldn't before (or in real-life). AND it is pleasing to see the numbers increase, after all, some of us are numberfreaks. Higher Higher!!