Dungeon Runners’ High - Addiction and Reward-Based Behavior in Online Role-Playing Games
By Dale • Mar 16th, 2008 • Category: Weekly FeatureDungeon Runners is about as fun as a drug addiction. It’s an unabashedly grindy dungeon crawler that owes its roots to Diablo while desperately trying to ripoff World of Warcraft. As far as freely available, massively multi-player, online role-playing games without subscriptions go, it’s better than a lot of what I’ve played in the past, but it’s still not great. It’s meager; it’s mediocre. It does manage to rise above the average in a few areas, however: the game’s terrific sense of humor can be found nearly everywhere from the naming of weapons to the kind of non-player characters you meet. But then other areas are rather low: I constantly keep a helmet on my level six warrior — not for the armor points, but because he’s so ugly that I can’t stand to look at his pouting grimace anymore. So, why do I keep playing?


