What makes a game addictive?

As the experiment has progressed and a couple of members have voiced boredom or annoyance with Warhammer, it has become clear that most of us are not addicted. In the beginning we were throwing around questions like "Will we be able to quite once the experiment is over?" and "How will playing an MMO affect our social lives and academics?" We assumed that we would be to some extent immersed. But the majority of us aren't, and the once daily blitzes asking if anyone wants to play have steadily declined.

Why is this? Are we too busy to play? Maybe, but even when I don't have anything in particular to do it is hard for me to motivate myself to make the walk to Sudikoff just to log out of the real world for a couple of hours. Games like Warhammer are to a certain extent successful because of the capacity for escapism that they grant to their players. They let you forget about the difficult or ambiguous things you are dealing with in reality, replacing them instead with fictional struggles with clearer outcomes and achievable victories. Games that do this well- like World of Warcraft- attract millions of players and keep them immersed. Warhammer, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have been as successful. 

Sure, in the beginning Warhammer was fun. It was new and exciting and it sure beat my other homework assignments. But the more I played the less interested I was in playing more. The novelty had worn off and it was only when we were playing in big groups that I felt any pull to plug in and play. The social aspect of playing with other people kept it from becoming a purely escapist act. I went to the lab a couple of days ago to try to figure out why I wasn't so interested in playing anymore. As I mechanically killed my way through a field of manic chaos humans, it occurred to me that the reason that Warhammer fails as an escapist mechanism is that it just isn't as compelling as real life. That was why I only ever wanted to play with large groups- because it wasn't the game, but the company that interested me. My real life was so much more interesting to me than Ragnaarok's fictional quest for... well, what exactly I'm not sure. 

And that is definitely a BIG part of a the problem. The goals in Warhammer are so nebulous and undefined that it really takes an active interest in the status economy of the game to provide incentives to level up and play. The narrative is vague and functionally almost nonexistent. The world is shallow and undeveloped. The mechanics of leveling up are excessively repetitive both along the course of a character's development and between different character races, and all the while the ridiculously short respawn times hammer in the message that your actions have no real effect on the gameworld. For the escapist then Warhammer has little to offer that the real world does not already satisfy. Who wants to leave reality just to be bored to death by the repetitive grind of killing unvanquishable mobs and completing the same 3 quest types over and over again?

The most fun I've had so far has been the handful of times that we've done Warjamming related things like the peace protests and addiction counseling. These were the only times when we got a response from the game that different from the predetermined action and response cycle of questing and scenarios. Its fun to subvert the developers intentions and see people's responses but it takes a lot of effort and organization to achieve noticeable effects. I couldn't hold a peace protest on my own, for example. No one would care if one person stood on Peace Island. But when there are 12 of us if definitely makes an impact. 

I'm not sure exactly what combination of elements makes a game addictive. I talked about narrative, world development, and the importance of feeling like you make an impact which is what I like in an MMORPG type game, and which I think Blizzard mastered. But Snood is also addictive and it has none of these qualities. There are a lot of ways to make something addictive- not all of which, it is important to note, make the game fun necessarily- but Mythic doesn't seem to have hit on that critical combination yet. As noted in a previous post, however, Mythic has left itself a lot of room for development and improvement. 

What do you guys think? If Mythic asked you what would make the game better, what would you tell them?