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This is a good article, and I very much agree that the second trade-off is the really dangerous one. I play Clash Royale, and I enjoy the game, but it does str

This is a good article, and I very much agree that the second trade-off is the really dangerous one. I play Clash Royale, and I enjoy the game, but it does strongly exhibit these qualities, I definitely notice that ladder play is consistently irritating, because (being a decent player) I'm always stacked up against players with higher level cards at the same ladder level as me. So, most of the games I lose are against less skilled players with stronger cards, which is frustrating, and most of the games I win are vs less skilled players as well, which is better than losing, but not as much fun as winning against an equally skilled opponent. The only way around this is to reach the 'top' of ladder, where everyone has maxed out decks, which requires a lot of grinding or spending money. Tradeoff one in action. More pernicious is tradeoff two though. There are myriad timers in the game to unlock various rewards; if you want to take advantage of everything you're playing something like an hour to 90 minutes a day on average, but it's spread out in little 3-6 minute chunks so it feels like less—but you're having to log into the game very regularly. This aspect is not fun, and it can tend to keep it back of mind all the time, just like the article describes. I deal with it by just not worrying too much about optimizing everything, but that's mildly irritating too. If it gets too much so, I'll likely just stop playing. Really do miss the pre-FTP days though, when you bought a game and then you owned it and could get the full experience without any of this bullshit.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Back in my high school days myself and a few of my classmates used to play OGame - a poor man's 4X space MMO in a browser, or more accurately, a glorified rock-paper-scissors with a ton of timers (previously we also played AstroWars, which was the same, but simpler - the HN vs Reddit UX way of simpler). Since construction, research and fleet navigation were all "click, wait 30 minutes to couple hours for completion", every break we'd rush down to the computer room to log in and manage our space empires. We were also playing during computer lessons, and of course at home. The game was extremely addictive but also grindy; it was fun primarily because we could talk about it together and compete against each other. Now to my point. That was all before the iPhone, and it was already significantly affecting our school and after-school life[0]. I can imagine how much worse it would have been if we had Internet-connected smartphones with OGame on it, and if the game would send us push notifications about finished timers. This is, however, the reality today's high schoolers find themselves in. I wonder how disruptive timer-based games are to their education. -- [0] - At that time, we though it cool that our friend from one class up had once stayed up to 02:00 AM just to log in to AstroWars and send his fleet somewhere. Subsequently, many of our nights were disrupted by very late or very early actions in AW/OG.
- mdrzn 7y ago
  oGame, so many memories. I kinda wish there was an app based version to play in closed universe with friends.
tempestn 7y ago
Comment acknowledging that I typo'ed a comma in place of a period above, and sadly can no longer fix it.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Back in my high school days myself and a few of my classmates used to play OGame - a poor man's 4X space MMO in a browser, or more accurately, a glorified rock-paper-scissors with a ton of timers (previously we also played AstroWars, which was the same, but simpler - the HN vs Reddit UX way of simpler). Since construction, research and fleet navigation were all "click, wait 30 minutes to couple hours for completion", every break we'd rush down to the computer room to log in and manage our space empires. We were also playing during computer lessons, and of course at home. The game was extremely addictive but also grindy; it was fun primarily because we could talk about it together and compete against each other. Now to my point. That was all before the iPhone, and it was already significantly affecting our school and after-school life[0]. I can imagine how much worse it would have been if we had Internet-connected smartphones with OGame on it, and if the game would send us push notifications about finished timers. This is, however, the reality today's high schoolers find themselves in. I wonder how disruptive timer-based games are to their education. -- [0] - At that time, we though it cool that our friend from one class up had once stayed up to 02:00 AM just to log in to AstroWars and send his fleet somewhere. Subsequently, many of our nights were disrupted by very late or very early actions in AW/OG.

mdrzn 7y ago
oGame, so many memories. I kinda wish there was an app based version to play in closed universe with friends.

tempestn 7y ago

Comment acknowledging that I typo'ed a comma in place of a period above, and sadly can no longer fix it.