How today's video games work

Do any of you remember the good old Super Mario games for the NES / SNES? It was a simple jump and run adventure. You played an italian plumber who could grow when eating a mushroom and died when he fell into a gap or touched an enemy. I believe Super Mario World had about 90 levels. That's it. If you were done with these levels, you could replay them, but they remained the same, so there was no use in replaying them.

Let's compare this to a modern game, and for the sake of having a prominent example, I'll chose World of Warcraft (short: WoW). WoW is a role play game, which means you play a character which can be designed individually (so the player can connect with his/her character) and will then be trained to higher levels by gaining experience through fighting or completing quests. This character can be improved by choosing different talents while progressing in levels and equipping it with items that you will find along your journey. At the moment, the maximum level is (if I recall correctly) 90, so beginning from level 1 you have to train your character to have 89 level ups to complete the game, right? Well, not even close! Here is a list of what you would have to do to "complete" the game. And complete here means that you have achieved about everything that the game offers at this point in time. It does not mean that you are done with playing.

• Leveling your character to the maximum level: As seen above, the maximum character level is 90. If you want to reach this level, you have to go through an ever repeating process of accepting some quests from the villagers, finishing these quests (which is mostly connected to slaying some monsters) and turning them in for your reward (experience, gold, items etc.). While it takes only some minutes to get from level 1 to level 2, you will have to invest about 6 to 8 hours to get from level 89 to 90. So you see, the whole leveling phase will take - even a good player - multiple days of pure in-game time.
• Leveling your professions and skills: Every character can have two main professions (e.g. blacksmithing and mining) and all of the secondary professions (archaeology, cooking, first aid and fishing). Each of these professions go up to level 600 and the level increases by using the profession (e.g. gathering ore for mining or crafting a weapon as a blacksmith). This process can take very long because it either involves roaming certain areas to farm materials or earning a lot of gold with other activities to buy these materials for later crafting. The concept behind this is the same as with the character level: the higher your level is, the harder it is the proceed to the next level.
• Improving your gear: Every character has 15 relevant item slots (e.g. chest armor, gloves, trinkets). Each one of these slots can be filled with a respective item in different qualities and different levels. So to be perfectly equipped, you need to have an item with the best available quality and the highest level in each slot, plus you want to have a perfect enchantment and the perfect gems for each item. The top of the line items can only be gathered in so called dungeons, which you need a group of 25 players for that can play very coordinated and already have pretty strong characters (maximum level and good gear). This group of people can then kill every boss monster of the dungeon only once per week. These boss monsters drop loot (most of them between 2 and 5 items). On average (let's say a boss drops 3.5 items and there is 7 bosses in the dungeon), the raid (this is what the player group is called) gets 24.5 items, about one per player. So if the group is very very lucky, which means that only items drop, which players still require (and the possibility is about 0), and they do not fail to kill any bosses, it would take them about 15 weeks (almost 4 months) to get all the gear they need out of this dungeon. This gear then is required to enter the next, more difficult dungeon, in which the gear acquiring repeats. It's kind of a funny coincidence that Blizzard, the developers of WoW, patch the game with an additional dungeon about every 3 months...
• Collecting stuff: In WoW there's a lot of things to collect: sets of gear that look nice, pets and mounts, reputation with certain factions in the game, ... The list goes on for a pretty long time. Collecting stuff is typically an occupation for people who have good gear already and can't improve their gear at the moment because they already killed every boss of a dungeon in this week and have to wait for the next week for the dungeon to reset.

There is still some other stuff I could go over (Player versus Player, exploration, achievements etc), but I think you get the point: This game is designed to keep people playing forever and spending their whole time on doing so. At this point, i would like to quote Kripparrian, a very famous WoW, Diablo and Path of Exile player who streams his gaming: "I need a game that I can play every day, all day long!". This is exactly what WoW, and not only WoW provides. A game you can play all day for a huge period of time without ever reaching an end because there is no end. About every 3 months there is a new patch which adds some content, about every 2 years there is a new Add-On which increases the maximum level (and by this renders all items, which were collected before the Add-On useless), adds some new areas to the world and some new features to the game which people might find interesting (new character classes/races, new mechanics etc.).

The main difference between Super Mario World and World of Warcraft is, that Super Mario World was designed to give people some good hours of fun, while WoW was designed to take up all your time, even if it's not that fun anymore. For a quick personal reference: It took me about 15 hours as a young boy to complete Super Mario World while i spent more than 170 days of pure gaming (that's 4080 hours!!!) to "not complete" WoW.

You can see these structures of design in most of the modern video games, even in first person shooters and strategy games. Most of the time, a ladder system is provided in which you can progress by winning matches. Therefore you get rewarded with new weapons, some cosmetic aspects like equipment colors or a new avatar for the loading screen.

I am convinced that this is not a coincidence - today's video games are meant to make people addicted in order to secure the software company's profit for a long time. The players are just a means to make money, do not think that the game producers care about the gamer's social life or health.