Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Good point. Things start to get clear for me. I assume that you never played the precedent versions of the game, but in the present version, they achieved the perfect balance in rewarding the player turn by turn. I see multiple "levels" of rewards in Civ4:

- Very frequent rewards: you have the constructions on your cities, happening almost turn to turn. Then, to break the monotony in here, you have the wonders, and epics, wich take more turns, but are more "rewarding". As you said, the improvements on tiles are rewarding as well, specially when it comes to resources like iron, or uranium. And, if you are a mocromanaging freak (just like me), you feel rewarded in getting more money and culture at each turn too.

- Frequent rewards: this are the techs; altouhg it really turns me off when techs get to the "future techs". I've found that some long range movements from my military units in the early game are wery satisfying to be completed too. Specially if you're encircling an enemy city. The thrill builds up as you keep guessing if there are enough units to take the enemy city. The city level number and growth fits here too, I guess.

- not-so-frequent rewards: advancing eras (wich change music, and the visual characteristics of cities, tiles and units), getting cities to a new culture level and expanding borders, completing Great People.

- rare rewards: mostly "events", like exterminating another civilization, absorbing key cities form another civ by culture power, launching your first nuke, getting to alpha centaury.

So, i see a lot of rewards, happening all the time. But this is not enough for the addicitive carachteristic i was refering to. By writing this post, i thought and come to learn tath the most important thing is that ALL this rewards are pre-advertised (is this a real word?) and foretold. You see, i counted at least 13 constantly changing infos, turn to turn, that the average player have to pay attention to. These are: gold, research rate, culture rate, unit information, city growth, city production, city stats, religion, other civilizations status, war tides, clock, time and tech advancment. These are information scattered permanently on the screen. And 12 of these (I excluded clock, for obvious reasons) are the addictive drugs, cause you can say at all the times how many turns it will take to finish United Nations, for example. And you keep playing, cause, oh yeah, i'm stopping for dinner, but just let me finish United Nations before saving and returning to desktop. And then you finish it. So it's time to stop playing. But it happens that you just triggered elections! Of course you have to vote on yourself before saving. But, oh, i was not elected... Damned Saladin! And you start working alliances again, and so on.

Do you think we are getting closer to the real addictive component of the game?