It’s been interesting thinking about this (plus previous article), while playing Eco.
Eco is not free to play – it’s a single $30 purchase (early access). But you join / create a realtime multiplayer world where you and your companions have 30 realtime days to bootstrap your technology from “stone age” to “powerful enough to destroy a meteor that is coming to destroy your planet.” (While having to make tradeoffs about pollution, which affects your ability to grow food)
The game involves proposing and voting on laws, creating currencies and trading, and various forms of collaborating.
The game has _definitely_ wormed it’s way into my thinking in a way that would be quite bad if it were longterm. It all feels adjaecent to what you’re talking about here.
It so happens that a lot of the crafting runs on timers, but this isn’t a problem. (The crafting is queued in a way that resolves Davis’ problem elsethread – you can queue things beyond your current resources, and have them automatically start once you acquire those resources)
The issue is more of a combination of:
there is a game-ending meteor coming in 30 days, and the world is realtime with multiple players, so every moment spend not playing is making some sacrifice.
there’s a sense of “keeping up with the Jones” – if other people are playing more than you, they will have more stuff. A few aspects of this feeling bad
The usual way it feels bad in real life: seeing someone else with a bigger, cooler house than me makes me go “aaaah I wanna bigger house”
The size/quality of your house dictates how much XP you get (which happens passively, which allows you to get new skills, which allows you to build the next tier of resources).
The people who have invested in the most resource production are the ones who actually get to shape the overall server strategy.
Other people are depending on you, so it’s not just about your experience, but also about whether the server will have enough food, lumber or iron tomorrow (which will compound over the 30 days)
I often have a sense of wanting to spend “10 more minutes” (which turns out to be more like an hour, or two) of building better infrastructure, or setting my prices better, or building more house, because if I didn’t do it today I’d be in a worse state tomorrow.
Once, I logged off for the night… and then realized I had left my store with too-low-prices that’d result in me not having as much money tomorrow.
I’ve gone back and forth one how healthy I think the game is. It’d definitely be scary if it was indefinite.
But it’s quite interesting an exercise in “IF you want to spend 30 days obsessing about something that feels like it has world-ending stakes that are relevant to a community of people, making good decisions together”, well… it’s actually pretty good at that. Your comment in the previous post about “sometimes, you _want_ to think about how to trade time for resources efficiently in a sandboxed fashion” resonated a lot.
Agreed, this. Similar to how I was willing to play the Paperclipper clicker game based on knowing it had an endpoint, it was terribly distracting for a few days and then it was a good memory to look back upon. Whereas a real clicker that doesn’t end… shudder.
This game feels like it’s going to be very life-toxic for its 30 days, *but* then it’s fine, and it sounds like quite an experience. So it’s something worth doing if you can spend 30 days like that. I don’t think I can afford to check it out but sounds like it could be pretty cool.
It’s been interesting thinking about this (plus previous article), while playing Eco.
Eco is not free to play – it’s a single $30 purchase (early access). But you join / create a realtime multiplayer world where you and your companions have 30 realtime days to bootstrap your technology from “stone age” to “powerful enough to destroy a meteor that is coming to destroy your planet.” (While having to make tradeoffs about pollution, which affects your ability to grow food)
The game involves proposing and voting on laws, creating currencies and trading, and various forms of collaborating.
The game has _definitely_ wormed it’s way into my thinking in a way that would be quite bad if it were longterm. It all feels adjaecent to what you’re talking about here.
It so happens that a lot of the crafting runs on timers, but this isn’t a problem. (The crafting is queued in a way that resolves Davis’ problem elsethread – you can queue things beyond your current resources, and have them automatically start once you acquire those resources)
The issue is more of a combination of:
there is a game-ending meteor coming in 30 days, and the world is realtime with multiple players, so every moment spend not playing is making some sacrifice.
there’s a sense of “keeping up with the Jones” – if other people are playing more than you, they will have more stuff. A few aspects of this feeling bad
The usual way it feels bad in real life: seeing someone else with a bigger, cooler house than me makes me go “aaaah I wanna bigger house”
The size/quality of your house dictates how much XP you get (which happens passively, which allows you to get new skills, which allows you to build the next tier of resources).
The people who have invested in the most resource production are the ones who actually get to shape the overall server strategy.
Other people are depending on you, so it’s not just about your experience, but also about whether the server will have enough food, lumber or iron tomorrow (which will compound over the 30 days)
I often have a sense of wanting to spend “10 more minutes” (which turns out to be more like an hour, or two) of building better infrastructure, or setting my prices better, or building more house, because if I didn’t do it today I’d be in a worse state tomorrow.
Once, I logged off for the night… and then realized I had left my store with too-low-prices that’d result in me not having as much money tomorrow.
I’ve gone back and forth one how healthy I think the game is. It’d definitely be scary if it was indefinite.
But it’s quite interesting an exercise in “IF you want to spend 30 days obsessing about something that feels like it has world-ending stakes that are relevant to a community of people, making good decisions together”, well… it’s actually pretty good at that. Your comment in the previous post about “sometimes, you _want_ to think about how to trade time for resources efficiently in a sandboxed fashion” resonated a lot.
Agreed, this. Similar to how I was willing to play the Paperclipper clicker game based on knowing it had an endpoint, it was terribly distracting for a few days and then it was a good memory to look back upon. Whereas a real clicker that doesn’t end… shudder.
This game feels like it’s going to be very life-toxic for its 30 days, *but* then it’s fine, and it sounds like quite an experience. So it’s something worth doing if you can spend 30 days like that. I don’t think I can afford to check it out but sounds like it could be pretty cool.