The complaint here is that inferno (highest) difficulty is not enjoyable in the traditional sense. From what I understand, inferno is not designed do be addictive per se, it's designed do be hard and it's aimed at people who want to play hard games.
I believe (but have no good citations / evidence for) that there's another system in the brain for rewarding behavior, one that is based on the satisfaction of accomplishing tasks that are difficult. This other loop may be a little harder to study, I'd imagine that it would be difficult to get most animals to exhibit this loop.
Just take a look at a sample of walkthroughs for various games, alongside traditional guides you'll find esoteric ones: guides marked as "low-level", "solo", "pacifist", "naked", etc. There are also play styles such as "ironman". Back in the day, I used to play Diablo ironman with friends. You're not allowed to talk to merchants in town. I played FF6 "low-level", where you don't allow the characters to gain levels: run from any fight you can, but you still have to fight the bosses with a woefully underpowered team.
It's tapping into the same reward systems that reward programmers for refactoring code.
So I guess my final point is that you can't call something less addictive by analyzing it, since you can only analyze the addiction mechanisms you know about. You have to determine how addictive it is by measuring the behavior of the actual people using it. From a scientific perspective, this article is really a hypothesis.
I don't think anybody has ever shown any studies with animals being extra rewarded for achieving difficult tasks. To speculate, that may relate to our social wiring.
Not even the dopamine system is exactly and entirely a "reward system," there are multiple pieces carrying out various signal-processing tasks without clean alignment to our intuitive categories.
Despite the existence of localization and specialization in the brain, it is not common for any high-level behavior to weigh completely on just one distinct piece of the brain.
I believe (but have no good citations / evidence for) that there's another system in the brain for rewarding behavior, one that is based on the satisfaction of accomplishing tasks that are difficult. This other loop may be a little harder to study, I'd imagine that it would be difficult to get most animals to exhibit this loop.
Just take a look at a sample of walkthroughs for various games, alongside traditional guides you'll find esoteric ones: guides marked as "low-level", "solo", "pacifist", "naked", etc. There are also play styles such as "ironman". Back in the day, I used to play Diablo ironman with friends. You're not allowed to talk to merchants in town. I played FF6 "low-level", where you don't allow the characters to gain levels: run from any fight you can, but you still have to fight the bosses with a woefully underpowered team.
It's tapping into the same reward systems that reward programmers for refactoring code.
So I guess my final point is that you can't call something less addictive by analyzing it, since you can only analyze the addiction mechanisms you know about. You have to determine how addictive it is by measuring the behavior of the actual people using it. From a scientific perspective, this article is really a hypothesis.