Why Mma Pro Fighter Is Addicting

Mixed-martial arts fanatics on Facebook have found the one game where they can be a mixed martial artist who has to start from the bottom to become one of if not the best fighter there is (on Facebook that is).  MMA Pro Fighter created by Digital Chocolate is one awesome game and this is what makes it addictive, or is it?

Have you heard of the Skinner box?  This is a box created by one BF Skinner to show that you can affect the decisions of a subject by manipulation of stimuli and providing rewards.  To see how this is affecting your decision whenever you hit that "Fight" button on MMA Pro Fighter read on.

To make the game addicting, like MMA Pro Fighter is, the makers have to make you like what you are doing so that you would have to do it over and over.  One way they are doing this is by making you believe that you need the virtual things that the game is offering.

Virtual things like power snacks and band-aids on MMA Pro Fighter are not real but why do we want them?  Heck, even fight shorts in the game are not the best-looking yet players would buy these with real money.  What they are actually selling is the idea.  The game is designed to make you feel that you have to get the best for yourself.  That includes buying stuff like the fight shorts mentioned earlier.

Collecting items or buying them is common for people.  That's why some people buy too many cars that they would not even use.  In a game like MMA Pro Fighter, the more spare change you have, the more things you can buy for your fighter and the faster you would level up.  Which brings us to the experience points and how they are manipulated to get you addicted to MMA Pro Fighter.

In a trick they call shaping, players level up faster at the start of the game.  But when it comes to higher levels, it gets tougher.  But people still play the game simply because of the reward they are going to get once they reach a higher level.  This conditions the player for even higher levels.  The charm of the reward in sight is too much for players to resist even if they need hours to play to reach that level.  What more, if you really want to level up faster, you would need stamina and health on MMA Pro Fighter.  A few fights that would give you enough experience points for you to be satisfied could strip your health.

Good thing there's those stuff you can buy with real money right? These stuff would enable you to play more but you have to pay for them.

Avoidance.  Play or lose it.  That's another strategy to keep you playing it.  In MMA Pro Fighter, you become fat if you do not play for some time.  If you want to be the best fighter amongst thousands of MMA Pro Fighter players, you know you have to be fit so you have to play regularly.

The best tactic of game developers is to make you very comfortable with the game.  Too comfortable that you would play it even in your office or during school hours.  How do they do it?  By taking account these three things:  Autonomy, complexity, effort and reward.  People love these three.  First, in a game, you can do anything you like unlike in school or at work where people would have to tell you what to do.  We don't want to do things which are repetitive, so we want complexity and with different ways to level up on MMA Pro Fighter, it just seem to be a perfect fit for us.  And then there's the clear cut path between effort and reward.  In real life, it's not common to feel that direct reward after exerting effort.  In a game, you will know that you have exerted the effort not for nothing because you got that experience points indicator telling you that your reward is coming very soon.

Are you addicted enough to MMA Pro Fighter?  Add me up as a sparring partner then.