Facebook, that is, and my recent hardcore addiction to it. Or specifically, its games.

It may seem odd that a long time hardcore gaming addict should fall prey to the same gaming trap that sucks in Farmville loving housewives and grandmothers having Words with Friends, but there is no doubt about it, I am addicted, and like with hard drugs like heroin and crack, the time between initial exposure and serious addiction was very brief. I was hooked pretty much right away. Even as I type these words, I feel a strong urge to go play them and see how all my little virtual worlds are doing. But I will not, because if I did, there is no way I would be able to restrain myself and continue to write.

Now as a student of the video game form (in much the sense that a wino is a student of the grape), I have to ask myself just what it is that took my jaded self so hard and so fast.

I mean, I have been playing video games since I was barely tall enough to see only the top half of the Space Invaders screen. Surely I should have a fairly high resistance to all their tricks and guiles. Yet the Facebook game phenomenon felled me like a heart-struck elk. What gives?

I think the key here is that the truly addictive ones are designed to be a sort of Satanic synthesis of all the various elements that can make a video game addictive, all turned up way past eleven.

Here are some of those elements, in no particular order.

• Colorful, cartoon style graphics. Attractive cartoon graphics are inherently visually rewarding to the player, making every interaction colorful and fun. The rise of the Angry Birds juggernaut attests to that. Add in some fun sound effects, and the game becomes pleasurable to interact with purely as a toy, with the discovery of a new animation generating the sort of delight that a baby feels when discovering that shaking an object makes a noise.
• Keeping you very busy . The brightest and most amusing animations in the world would not have much effect if they were few and far between, so the games make sure to give you tons of little tasks to do in order to keep those rewards coming fast and strong.
• A full mind is a happy mind. Also, by giving the player so many things to do, the games can create that highly pleasurable feeling of being “in the zone”, operating at peak efficiency, which has the powerfully addictive effect of pushing all the noise and confusion out of one’s mind and letting one be truly absorbed in the moment. All video games have this potential, but these Facebook games do everything to maximize this potential.
• Constant small rewards. In addition to the other forms of reward, in these games every little action generates some small, incremental in game reward. Just a little bump, like some gold pieces, a resource you might need later, experience points, or whatever. This reinforces the rewards from the animation on a higher mental level, and increases the pleasure and hence the addictiveness.
• Quests, lists, and goals. And to complete the troika, all of these games give you lots of medium-term goals, usually but not always called quests, for the previous two levels of reward to slot into, making every action immediately rewarding, incrementally rewarding, and goal oriented rewarding, and this creates a broad and seamless reward stream that is potently addictive.
• My spreading empire. Those three levels then nest neatly into an open-ended long term goal structure based on growth. Your castle gets bigger and nicer looking, you get closer and closer to being able to defeat the evil Count Villainous, you go up levels and have more powerful abilities. The more you play, the more you have. Powerful stuff.
• Just a little friendly competition. And if that is not enough to get you to devote yourself to the game, all these games have ways of letting you compete against both your friends and all the other players in general, so that the more (and better) you play, the higher your name climbs on the leaderboard, thus drawing in the people for whom interpersonal competition is a powerful draw.
• And as the pusher always says… … the first time is free. Thus, there is no entry bar. All these games are free to start and technically free to play forever.

And with that, we start getting into the dark side of these games. If all these games consisted of was a fun, additive, but highly rewarding experience, they might cause a dip in productivity but they would hold no sinister underside.

But these games are profit driven enterprises, and all these potent manipulations of the reward center of the brain have one goal in mind : to convince you to pay them real money for virtual items, and what is more, to convince you that it is entirely your idea to do so.

The secret lies in their dual currency systems. All these games have two virtual currencies : a common, easily acquired one which you get via gameplay, and a second one that they give you just a little bit of at first but that costs real money to get after that.

Usually but not always, the difference is made explicit by having the lesser currency be silver, and the other be gold.

And you can play the game as much as you like without ever buying any of the for-pay currency. You are never forced to pay money to continue in the game. Not… exactly.

However, the games are so structured that in order to keep playing continuously, you have to pay. They offer you a very rich stimulation stream, made especially rich at the beginning of course, only to have it suddenly end when you turn out of a third currency, often called “energy”.

And you can get more energy right now…. for real money currency. They are counting on your desire to maintain this high stimulation level in order to get the dollars from your pockets.

Also, of course, there are “premium” virtual items that you can only get via the real-money currency, things that are more powerful, make the game easier, or just plain give the exact same sort of signals of wealth and status that real world luxury goods give off, and for a fraction of the price.

So while I am so far enjoying playing all these little games, I am fully aware that, as appealing as they seem, they are basically machines to create psychological addiction for profit.

And I imagine I will get burned out on them soon enough.

Luckily, I can’t afford to get truly addicted.