The Perils of being an N4G Contributor: Part 1. Addictiveness

When you pass the test your original thought is that you’ll just post a couple of interesting, unique stories a day. That whole idea goes right out the window as soon as one of your stories gets fully approved and appears on the front page.

You’ve just got 130 points (100 for the approval, 30 for the submission). That’s equal to 13 comments and you don’t have any of the risk of your speech bubbles being taken away. Do the math. It becomes far more “efficient” to submit stories then it is to make comments!

Then of course there’s the prestige of seeing your story on the front page. But wait! People are starting to read it, they’re even making comments. All this activity because of what you did. The temperature starts going up, you keep refreshing, it’s still going up. It’s pink, its red! You’ve just got yourself another 100 points.

Points, need more points! So off you go trying to find more stories, scouring the web, refreshing pages, reloading RSS data feeds all to find yourself a new and interesting story.

But that’s when you realise (that’s the British spelling for all you Americans!) there’s a whole bunch of other contributors all doing the SAME thing with the same craving for those points. Unless you’re lightning quick, you’ll find that the new story you’re just about to submit was already submitted just a couple of minutes ago.

But it’s not just new stories. All the pending stories you’ve got you’re still keeping an eye on. Looking at the number of approvals (you need 5 to make it to the front page). One story’s been stuck at 3 approvals for a whole hour. You’re getting desperate, so you start sending messages to your friends to pop by, check out the article, and (hopefully) approve it!

One of them gives you their approval, but it still needs one more to get to 5. So you go off and check your articles. Oooh! Someone’s made a comment, you check it out and then you add your own. Check back with the article, still at 4 approvals. Oooh! One of your articles has gone up to 80 degrees, it’s gone pink. Close but not close enough, yet.

Then you go off and do something unrelated, i.e. a non gaming website. But after 5 minutes you gotta come back, you just NEED to know! Have I got the 5 approvals, has the pink turned to red, has someone replied to my comment?

But it’s no good, you’re eyes are hurting, you’re hungry and you’re tired, you’ve been at the computer too long. It’s dark outside, it’s time to eat your dinner and then to go to bed.

But just as you’re about to climb in, you can’t resist it. You quickly switch on the computer, just a few minutes, check up on the articles.

TWO HOURS later you go to bed! Finally you can sleep and relax, then the dreams come, all your articles getting over 100, no wait, over 1000 degrees, hundreds, no wait, thousands of points being added to your score.

Relax, it’s just a dream … or is that a nightmare?

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If you found this interesting let me know, and I’ll write up the next part, Paranoia.
Cheers!