> just core essential game mechanics
Controversial; I'm reminded of how Ian Bogost made Cow Clicker as a satire of how reductive clickers were as a game mechanic, only to find people playing it unironically.
Controversial; I'm reminded of how Ian Bogost made Cow Clicker as a satire of how reductive clickers were as a game mechanic, only to find people playing it unironically.
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.
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.