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Having spent the amount of dough on it I would a small-scale system, I still look back at my FarmVille time with fond memories. I fully admit that it happened to hit a niche I just particularly enjoyed, and combined that with a meta-game (crafting a World to represent something that its individual items were not intended for - going to so far as to construct three dimensional structures out of two-dimensional set pieces) made it so that as far as I'm concerned, it earned every dollar. The wait-till-you-get-it reward structure, no matter how it may have been built to feast on my weaknesses and tendencies, still did not detract from an overall enjoyable experience, and instead actually added to it. Getting a rare drop is a good feeling in Diablo, just as getting a rare item is a good feeling in FarmVille.
Oddly enough - when I had reached my limit, or simply had enough of the play experience that it provided (and sixteen months is a plenty - for any game), I walked away from it both with no regrets and no withdrawals. A completely clean break.
This all being said, I fail to have picked up in this Extra Credits episode the specific good functions that can be utilized by these devices. It was discussed that the idea itself has pretty much been fully explored, at least offering no real new territory for it to prowl on, and then closed by citing that most of those that use it today absolutely abuse it for a short-term monetary reward. I must be completely honest, outside of wondering how my veggies were doing on the farm, which I still fully admit plays entirely into my susceptibility, I fail to see how preventing someone from playing a game in any way acutely benefits it.
Perhaps by preventing the realization that the same task is being completed ad-infinitum, and thus blowing your mind out on a single play-through (which was stated in this episode), but I cannot see how the real response to this wouldn't be, "Go out and build some actually interesting mechanics!"
Perhaps in the future, when someone attributes some of these design and cool-down styles to actually only being able to influence one of three areas, and if you really manage your time well, maybe you might even complete two, bringing in aspects of reward and punishment based upon your decisions, and in the end still allowing the player to continue playing, while operating within a real-time type scenario.
Either way, tonight, before coming on here to check out the episode, I spent five hours playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms II on the NES with my Dad. It is a game that magically writes and rewrites an epic era of Chinese history, allowing characters to tell their own story, and the whole story as a whole simply based upon which territories they end up occupying. Every battle is a tense struggle between life and death where tactics play the ultimate role, seeing who can out-wit their opponent, read the map, understand the flows and characteristics of certain rulers, and cultivate plans that sometimes take dozens if not hundreds of moves to pull off. This game was made in 1988. For an 8-bit system.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, and we're discussing how treating the majority of gamers like cheese-addicted rats locked in a button box may actually have some workable applications for the future.
If you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to go visit the grave site of our higher expectations, and have a quiet weeping moment all to my own.
People would come in and pay upfront for 5 hours. And the only thing they would do is play facebook games. One woman would bring her baby in with her. That kid never got any attention unless he was screaming, and then she would yell at him for making a scene.
Once you hook someone on something, any kind of "limiting" ceases to have meaning as they will simply find their fix elsewhere.
# paweaboo Talk about the animu's with friendly people on SLASHnet.
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
And while it's not my favourite mechanic in the world, evidence would show that it's more than a "short sighted cash grab" that you implied. Data from the biggest social gaming companies in the world show that it's one of their largest cash sinks, and games that are built with pretty much no other sinks are frequently in the top grossing sections of the iTunes App Store. Wooga did a talk at GDC Europe a few years ago that revealed in their games wait mechanics accounted of about 4/5ths of their revenue. And they were the 2nd largest social gaming company.
I don't want to be the advocate of energy systems, but I feel we shouldn't dismiss them as being used wrong. They work alright as retention systems, and extraordinarily well as cash sinks.
In some of the old browser games, before social gaming, they were primarily competitive. Many of these browsergames had some function that restricted how much you could do, especially how much you could attack other players, WITHOUT a monetization option to skip those restrictions. In those cases, I think, the time restrictions existed not to make money, or to get the players habitually into the game, but to maintain game balance and prevent people with far too much time on their hands from just dominating the whole game.
Kingdom of Loathing and other older browser games like Urban Dead have the classic regenerating pile of moves that once you spend all your moves you have to weight for 24 hours to get a set number back.
While they have definite limits as to how much they can pile up, encouraging daily play, they are also frustrating to try to play hour by hour throughout the day, even the ones that like Urban Dead regenerate a turn every hour rather than give you 24 or however else many all at once after the set time interval. And because they are set on a single clock for everyone, rather than from 24 hours after your play, you could conceivably play all your day's KoL moves 10pm-11pm, kick back during server downtown, and then play the next day's 12-1, and not be compelled by efficiency to play the game again until the third day; when you could do that doubling all over again and essentially get everything out of the game, leaving nothing on the table, by just playing once every two days.
The limit of moves is essentially a limit to how strong your character can get, how much progress you can make, preventing you from using multis to make all of the things on an alternate character account that has been piling up moves for weeks, which would happen if moves could pile up indefinitely while you were, say, on vacation. And because these energy systems were often designed that way, for in-game balance rather than to compel the player in any specific way, they are far less effective at habituation; with for instance both the games I mentioned relying on the communities built around them to keep you going back rather than a gnawing habit.
One wonders how things would be different if Facebook games actually utilized the fact that they are on on a social network to actually be more effectively and compellingly about the community, allowing people to create their own schedule just as people with a MMORPG clan do. But instead of creating compelling worlds that cause people to build communities around them, they seem instead to simply be mechanisms; and thus instead of early browser games like KoL, their ancestors seem more to be the Vampire and Werewolf and Mafia type bug-your-friends games, almost the exact opposite of the community-building, socially bringing people together rather than annoying and using them for meaningless points and other achievements things like Farmville and so forth.
(Soul Silver): 4383 4318 1528
Lv 85 Tauren Shaman Lv 85 Worgen Druid
"I am playing for 30 min or 4 runs at a level"
Then after playing so far it would progress to playing it like any AAA title and hours would fly.
With Farmville and its ilk the equivilent my friends went through was multiple accounts, but then eventually that burnt them out on the game, but being a skinner box/efficiency game they played it long after that for the relationships and habits the game got them into. Peggle never did that for me.
Strange though, I finished all the Peggle games, but they never finshed what they were doing in Farmville.
At the very end of the article is a link to a review of the Sims Social by the same author where he talks about the same themes in more detail, as they relate specifically to that game, since it's one of the most laser-focused examples of that school of game design.
One of the points he makes, either in that article or the review (I forget which) is how with FPSes and other action games, a lot of the numeric balance comes through playtesting and very minute tweaks. Like "This gun feels like it shoots a bit too slow", so they go into the spreadsheet and change it from 15 bullets per second to 17, and find that it "feels" better playing. Thus in action games you tend to end up with a lot of weird, seemingly nonsensical numbers because they were balanced organically. Meanwhile, in social games, you see a lot of nice round numbers, like 5s and 10s. They might be obscured behind other numbers, but when you start looking at ratios like gold:score or something, you end up seeing a lot of very deliberate looking patterns emerging.
The implication there is that social games are designed from the get-go with certain numbers in mind - rather than testing the game and seeing which numbers feel the best, they pick numbers based on whatever they feel will bring in the most return for their effort; whether you define "return" as player retention or money spent per player or whatever, the key is that in these types of games, the game company comes first.
The article I linked explains the more sinister aspects of "monetization" and that skinner box design better than I can, but the point is that it's very deliberate and a LOT of psychological research has gone into it. There's a reason why companies like Zynga are making crazy amounts of money with games whose appeal hardcore gamers just can't understand.
So either you have to spend 20 hours of gameplay and 100000s of in game money trying to have a medium digimon without spending your cash or risk $7 a pop trying to get a medium egg from the cash store. usually you either end up spending 20 hours or $20 on a single in game monster which is bloody freakin' INSANE.
So after realizing the absolutely gawd awful waste of time this game was because Joymax (the most misleading game company name ever) is run by greedy morons that don't know how to host a decent MMORPG I uninstall the game. Its only too bad the hatch rate is so bad combine with how overprice eggs are because I'm a big digimon fan but can't honestly as an adult waste my time or money like that for virtual creatures. Its pretty bad when one of the biggest digimon fans in the western world ragequits a digimon game because of greedy poor gaming bullshit.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot another part of it. In order to maximize your monsters you need an item called "evoluters" which again are extremely hard to get ingame so you usually end up spending $20 getting enough to fully strengthen your monster so you can actually get far in the game.
So to recap it will probably take you 40 hours or $40 or some combination of both to get a SINGLE MONSTER to the point where its useful on a game that's suppose to be free to play. Its as big of bullshit as it sounds.
But if it's really just a tool to create gaming habits, then why do you have to log out in an inn, cantina, etc in order to take advantage of it?
For the same reason you had to stand in the zone outside an instance spamming LFG for hours originally. The design was predicated on unnecessary delays being a part of content extension.
It was the hardcore players who cried and claimed that this was a penalty for them. Why should they earn exp half as fast as someone who only plays on the weekend? The base exp rate that they had already been working with didn't get changed (to the best of my memory).
Ultimately like any game mechanic in beta testing, the rest system got changes and tweaks to improve it. The biggest change was that they allowed players to earn rest exp in different places. Originally you only gained it while logged out inside of an inn. You can now earn a little while logged in, by simply standing idle in a city. If I am not mistaken, you even earn it at a very slow rate when logged out anywhere in the game world. Rest became more accessible to the players who played daily, even if it wasn't quite as much as people who were logged out for days at a time.
Perhaps this could be further improved. Maybe allow players to "buy a room" from an innkeeper to instantly gain a big chunk of rest exp. That would make for a great way to bleed some of the gold out of the economy.
But, I just can't agree with this idea that WOW's rest system is one of these "hook the player" energy mechanics. I have never felt that the game was forcing me to only play on the weekend.
On the other hand... Final Fantasy 14 last I was aware had this mechanic where you can only gain exp for something like 8 - 16 hours per week. THAT should have been mentioned in this video.
edit: but as for the facebook ones, i agree. they sucked my soul for 2-3 months till i realized how similar every single game is, and how boring that shit is.
last minute edit: wow rested xp being a penalty, i have no idea how giving free xp for being offline can EVER be an penalty, i mean comeon, free thing for not playing?
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
It's evolved over time, particularly after methods were added to get more turns if you give them money.