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Has anybody seen smart breakdowns of the "core essential game mechanics" in play here? I ask because I truly despise this kind of game. Universal Paperclips wa
by wpietri 5y ago
Has anybody seen smart breakdowns of the "core essential game mechanics" in play here?
I ask because I truly despise this kind of game. Universal Paperclips was great: smart, funny, thoughtful. But even at the time I disliked how compulsive it was. And now there's a vast swamp of low-rent "idle" games that follow the same template. The moment something starts to feel like that, I close the window and never come back.
I keep thinking there's something about the raw mechanics that exposes bugs in the human wetware the same way addictive substances do. Or the way gambling does. But the idle games strike me as a different class of addiction than gambling. Not about variable reinforcement, but something else. I want to know what that "something else" is.
- howLongHowLong 5y agoPossibly just an innate impulse to have "a job" and optimize it? Sort of like how our predisposition towards traditionally scarce foods like sugar and fat lead to negative consequences when they're close to infinitely available.
- wpietri 5y agoThat's a plausible direction, but what I'm looking for is then a detailed analysis of what constitutes job-ness. Another possible line of inquiry is mastery. We're a tool-using species and we definitely have some disposition to skill acquisition and skill perfection. A third would be something related to wealth acquisition. That idle games burst through the diminishing returns curve by continually upping the game, overriding a mechanism that keeps us from over-focusing. And I'm sure there are more possibilities. Which is why I'd love to see an analysis of the game mechanisms, as I think it would narrow the hunt.