No -- a thousand people fell down the stairs, nine hundred and ninety nine of them found no link between their KPIs and engagement metrics, and the one that did thought that they figured out how the human brain works, instead of just realizing that they were successful for reasons that they likely will never understand or be able to replicate.

And a thousand of those .1%'ers will try a second time, and the .1% that succeed that time will be hailed as geniuses and people will set about copying their open plan offices and terrible management styles in the hopes of replicating their success.

I'm not a data scientist nor a psychologist nor an addiction expert nor ...

But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" (roguelikes, MMOs, MOBAs, FTL) is an extremely strong addiction factor. League of Legends, that free game whose net worth is among the highest of all time.

In real life, you study->grades->job->promote->takeoverworld. Or liftweights->liftmoreweights->liftmoreweights. Or climbmountain->climbhighermountain...

In games, you do that in 1/100 the time and effort. Tap a few buttons and "you win!!!!"

A sweeping statement to the effect of "people don't understand addiction" is basically malicious and I accuse you of being the inventor of gamification or one of their PR folk.

> But I've played some games. I am 137% confident that some form of "level up" ... is an extremely strong addiction factor.

Try playing more unsuccessful games. You'll find that most boring, unaddictive, terrible games that you'll never play more than once have the same leveling up mechanic.

Well sure, we can say there's a prerequisite amount of fun to be had in the first place. Addiction is for pleasure not pain, at least for the average person. Something must not be so off-putting that you don't have a chance to get addicted. For example, a cigarette that caught your mouth on fire would probably not be smoked again. The fact that some (or even most, may be your point) games set your mouth on fire does not mean the addiction factor isn't there. It just means they're more boring than they are addictive in that critical early stage.

So we're going to no-true-scotsman our way out of this?

Nothing is binary; I'm not going to say "either leveling helps a game all the time or it doesn't". Sometimes leveling-up mechanics help a game, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it alienates one set of users and attracts another, and there's no magic formula for when it helps and when it doesn't, and the nature of the leveling-up mechanic itself and how fun that is can vary in effectiveness dramatically. It's like having the user's avatar wear a funny hat.

I'd say that the classic "Cow Clicker" game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker) is a strong counterpoint to what you're suggesting. Meant to be a satire with essentially zero gameplay, the author was surprised when it gained a dedicated following.

There is just something about the "Skinner box"-style of frequent microrewards in games that scratches an itch in the human psyche.

I think cow clicker had novelty and the empty room psych on its side as well. Humans tend to obsess upon things which seem to have a purpose but no obvious one. Nobody bats an eye at the same tree used hundreds of times of a plot important but a single beggar with grey rags instead of brown? They must be more important somehow!

Well before then players of the original Diablo were obsessively clicking cows because of rumors and belief that there had to be something to the cow.