I recently started playing an online game I saw advertised online. I know how addictive these things are, but I decided to “play with fire” anyway.
As a precaution, I decided to not make a browser bookmark of this game, ever. I registered using a throwaway e-mail address. Also, I never told anyone that I was playing it. That way, when I decide to quit, nothing would push me back—it would only require one decision, not repeated temptations and decisions. And… I played for a few weeks and then I quit. And after a few days of not playing, I don’t feel like starting it again anymore, so I guess my strategy worked.
I will not mention the name of the game here. Anyway, it was the type of game where you build stuff, collect resources, and research new stuff; with many things to unlock. In the game there were three important resources, let’s call them X, Y, and Z. By making better or worse decisions, you could make more or less of the resources X and Y; and I spent some time optimizing for that.
With resource Z, however, the basic way to get it was to play the game regularly. If you logged in at least N times a day, you got M points of resource Z per day; you couldn’t get more for playing longer, but you would get less for taking breaks longer than 1/N of the day. In addition to this, there were also some other ways to get resource Z, but this extra amount was always smaller than the amount you got for merely playing the game regularly. There was no smart strategy to at least double the income of Z. So, whether you did smart or stupid things had a visible impact on X and Y, but almost no impact on Z.
Of course the resource Z was the one that actually mattered, in long term. Your progress on the tech tree sometimes required X and Y, but always required Z. And, of course, the higher steps on the almost-linear tech tree required more of the resource Z.
So, regardless of whether you did smart or stupid things, you advanced in the game at a pre-programmed speed, which was gradually getting slower the longer you played. In other words, pre-programmed fun at the beginning (unlocking a lot of stuff during the first day, trying various things), pre-programmed increasing boredom later. Completely unsurprisingly, resource Z was the one you could also buy for real money. But even if you would decide to spend a certain amount of money every week, you would still get the same boredom curve as a result, as the constant income of resource Z would have diminishing returns the further you progress on the tech tree. The only way to keep constant levels of fun (assuming that unlocking new things on the tech tree counts as fun, even if they are mostly the same stuff only with different numbers and pictures) would be to pay ever increasing amounts of money.
After realizing all this, I still kept playing for a few days before I finally stopped. (I never paid anything, of course.)
Exactly. This seems to be a popular model of design, where mostly nothing beyond checking back in periodically will ever be the long term limiting factor if you are playing in any reasonable way. The game that inspired this post does not make this mistake, but it does a similar thing where it offers rewards to everyone over time that dwarf anything a player can otherwise accomplish in their first few weeks—you still have to play to utilize what they give you, but mostly you’re stuck with their gifts until reasonably far in.
I recently started playing an online game I saw advertised online. I know how addictive these things are, but I decided to “play with fire” anyway.
As a precaution, I decided to not make a browser bookmark of this game, ever. I registered using a throwaway e-mail address. Also, I never told anyone that I was playing it. That way, when I decide to quit, nothing would push me back—it would only require one decision, not repeated temptations and decisions. And… I played for a few weeks and then I quit. And after a few days of not playing, I don’t feel like starting it again anymore, so I guess my strategy worked.
I will not mention the name of the game here. Anyway, it was the type of game where you build stuff, collect resources, and research new stuff; with many things to unlock. In the game there were three important resources, let’s call them X, Y, and Z. By making better or worse decisions, you could make more or less of the resources X and Y; and I spent some time optimizing for that.
With resource Z, however, the basic way to get it was to play the game regularly. If you logged in at least N times a day, you got M points of resource Z per day; you couldn’t get more for playing longer, but you would get less for taking breaks longer than 1/N of the day. In addition to this, there were also some other ways to get resource Z, but this extra amount was always smaller than the amount you got for merely playing the game regularly. There was no smart strategy to at least double the income of Z. So, whether you did smart or stupid things had a visible impact on X and Y, but almost no impact on Z.
Of course the resource Z was the one that actually mattered, in long term. Your progress on the tech tree sometimes required X and Y, but always required Z. And, of course, the higher steps on the almost-linear tech tree required more of the resource Z.
So, regardless of whether you did smart or stupid things, you advanced in the game at a pre-programmed speed, which was gradually getting slower the longer you played. In other words, pre-programmed fun at the beginning (unlocking a lot of stuff during the first day, trying various things), pre-programmed increasing boredom later. Completely unsurprisingly, resource Z was the one you could also buy for real money. But even if you would decide to spend a certain amount of money every week, you would still get the same boredom curve as a result, as the constant income of resource Z would have diminishing returns the further you progress on the tech tree. The only way to keep constant levels of fun (assuming that unlocking new things on the tech tree counts as fun, even if they are mostly the same stuff only with different numbers and pictures) would be to pay ever increasing amounts of money.
After realizing all this, I still kept playing for a few days before I finally stopped. (I never paid anything, of course.)
Exactly. This seems to be a popular model of design, where mostly nothing beyond checking back in periodically will ever be the long term limiting factor if you are playing in any reasonable way. The game that inspired this post does not make this mistake, but it does a similar thing where it offers rewards to everyone over time that dwarf anything a player can otherwise accomplish in their first few weeks—you still have to play to utilize what they give you, but mostly you’re stuck with their gifts until reasonably far in.