Today’s video is sponsored by Squarespace
- to build the site of your dreams today, go to squarespace.com/snoman and use the code
snoman for 10% off your first website. Let’s go! Oh, hey, sorry guys give me one second. I gotta reach the level of chocolate chip sensae. Okay...and we’re good. Whenever I think of clicker, or sometimes
called idle or incremental games, I get really confused. They're essentially the most bare bones experiences
when it comes to actual gameplay, you just click numbers to watch those numbers go up
and then wait for other numbers to increase so you can click more numbers - so why in the
world are these games so addictive? I’ve seen countless people, myself included
get sucked into the same trap time and time again - why do we keep playing them knowing
they’re so inherently shallow? Let’s talk about it. Oooh, golden cookie! In case you’ve never played a clicker game,
they’re called that for a reason - your only mechanic is to click things on screen
and you’ll be doing it a lot. Most all of these titles follow the same structure
- you start out with nothing and need to click your way to the first upgrade which will automatically
start clicking for you, and you build from there until you have an army of enhancements
so you don’t have to click at all to gain resources. These increase in power but also jump exponentially
in cost the further you get, so eventually this leads to major progress walls where you’ll
have to wait for your currency to get high enough to purchase the next upgrade. This is where the monaker “idle games”
came in, the longer you play the more you’ll have to wait, so many people just let them
run in the background while they do other things until they can play again, and then
repeat ad nauseum. Now many clicker games get around this becoming
boring by introducing a “prestige” system that allows you to completely reset your progress
to the beginning but with a permanent buff to your click power, so you can get back to
your original state much faster and beyond to higher heights from there. On top of this, several games include little
bonus clickables that appear on screen for a limited time which allow you to have an
extra boost to your productions, while others keep collecting even when the game is turned
off, so if you go to bed and come back in the morning you’ll have a nice pool of money
to spend. Either way this system has drawn in huge audiences
that keep coming back day after day to watch numbers rise, with no other purpose than that
alone. And nowadays it’s spawned countless wikis
and thousands of different iterations, complete with memes and terrible art assets galore. Who puts corn on a pizza?!? How did something that started as a joke to
make fun of grindy game mechanics turn into an industry behemoth that’s so alluring? What caused me to drop over 60 hours into
Adventure Capitalist without even realizing it, it just doesn’t logically add up! Well we’re about to get scientific up in
here. Strap in Snobabies. There’s a few different psychological elements
going on in clicker games, but let’s start with the most obvious - we as humans love
reaching goals. If there’s something you’ve been working
toward, it feels good when you finally achieve it, and at an even more basic level we just
like watching numbers go up. They did experiments on animals in these things
called operant conditioning chambers, or Skinner Boxes named after their creator, to see if
giving a piece of food would encourage the animals to keep doing a desired repetitive
action, or in some cases punished them for NOT doing so, and wouldn’t you know it,
of course they kept doing the random simple task, because they got a treat out of it. In gaming, we see this all the time - besides
obvious comparisons like slot machines or loot boxes, this is also why achievements
are so effective - it feels good to be rewarded for your actions, and instead of only getting
that feeling of satisfaction when beating a game, this is taken to the extreme in incremental
games because you gain achievements all the time, in fact it seems to be what the entire
system is based on. So if you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing
much in your real life, whether you’re just bored or simply going through the motions,
you can boot up an idle game and feel rewarded over and over again, and with very little
effort needed. Progress feels good, even if it’s in a silly
video game. But in addition to this you’re dealing with
our need for closure and something called the Zeigarnik effect, coined by a psychologist
named Bluma Zeigarnik, but you can just call her Ms. Z for short. She basically found through her research that
people remember incomplete tasks better than ones we’ve completed - And I’m sure you
can attest that this is true. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve beaten,
but I can definitely remember the ones that I haven’t. The games that bested me stick out like a
sore thumb in my brain that desires order. We want goals and tasks to be completed, so
when they aren’t we will put in the effort to finish them - this is why you see people
like The Completionist or those satisfied when they get another platinum trophy. There’s a sense of relief when you achieve
your goals. So with all that considered, are clicker games
really all that bad? Is it hurting anyone to have games that focus
on those aspects of our brain? Well, from a game design perspective, I would
argue that yes it is, and for two major reasons. 1) There is no ending to these games and 2)
it uses real time as a mechanic. Let’s break it down a little bit. So yes while you can complete various tasks
throughout your playthrough of an idle game, without an actual win state or end in sight,
there will always be that sense of lingering desire to play more. It will never go away because there is no
final accomplishment. You can see everything the game has to offer,
but your numbers will keep going up until they simply don’t mean anything anymore. Eventually it feels like the only reason you’ll
keep playing is because of the sunk-cost fallacy where you’ll tell yourself “I’ve already
spent so much time building up my stats, it would be a waste if I quit now” and even
if you reset with an added prestige bonus, that feeling of satisfaction will quickly
become more and more fleeting as you realize the entire experience is ultimately pointless. But even from a more tangible design aspect,
it’s my opinion that using real time to drive your progress is a manipulative practice. The hilariously ironic thing about idle games
is that the best way to play them is to actually NOT play them at all. If you go away and focus on other things and
then come back after not playing for awhile, you’ll have a much larger amount of resources
to spend than if you sat there and watched it the entire time. Now I’m not talking from an optimal strategy
perspective, but simply from a perceived enjoyment point of view. When you wake up and come back to your game
that’s been collecting money all night, you can spend it on bigger upgrades than if
you kept buying smaller things as they became available. And if you stop playing entirely for let’s
say years at a time, you can come back to an inconceivable amount of cash to blow, but
what you’ll find is that when you take away the real time limitations by doing this, the
entire game design philosophy falls apart. When I was in high school, my dad and I used
to play Mafia Wars on Facebook, back when games were the main reason people made an
account at all. And we were having a fun time with it until
one day my dad got a weird glitch and when he opened the game it had given him an obscene
amount of money, way more than he could ever make normally. But instead of being excited about this, what
he found was that the enjoyment of the game had totally gone away. Without the slow progression and building
up of his assets, the game had lost all of its allure in one fell swoop. This is where games that actually get this
stuff right really shine through. When I first booted up Stardew Valley, I realized
it did everything Farmville tried to do but infinitely better because it had taken out
any element of real-time waiting. If you wanted to keep playing, grow more crops,
or gain more resources you just could right away. There was no asking your friends to help water
your garden, or waiting 24 hours for green beans to sprout, it was balanced around playing
at your own pace - you know, like what a game should really be about in the first place? It’s your time and enjoyment after all,
not Zynga’s. Plus, when you start dealing with real world
minutes and hours, it only invites other predatory practices to join in, like microtransactions
to speed up the process or buying a leg up to reach the next plateau even faster, which
not only feels slimy just to talk about, but in the case of clickers defeats the actual
purpose of playing the game in the first place! Edmund McMillen even made an incremental title
himself called AVGM. The goal of this game was to click the lightswitch
over and over until more items appeared in your room. It took more and more clicks in between each
item as time went on, eventually reaching upwards of 10,000 clicks to beat the game. And what do you receive for finishing the
gauntlet of doing nothing but clicking a lightswitch for over 30 minutes? The revelation of what the title actually
stands for - Abusive Video Game Manipulation. At the end of the day, that’s really what
it is. Do you have to play them? Of course not, and I’m not saying you’re
a bad person for playing them, I’m guilty of this as well, but when you sit back and
look at the big picture they highlight how many different games can take advantage of
our subconscious desires to steal our money at the worst, but our time at the very least. And to me, in no way can it be considered
good game design. They’ve sort of dropped off in popularity
in recent years, but I’ve noticed the techniques that they employed are still cropping up all
over the place, especially in the mobile game space. It’s no secret that microtransactions seem
to be the mainstream way to get people to pay for your free to download title these
days, but I want to encourage you to support creators who are making actual quality experiences
without predatory practices, and be sure to look out for the next big game that might
try to swindle you behind your back. We’ve come a long way from horse armor DLC,
and have accepted shady business strategies today that would have been unanimously condemned
10 or 15 years ago. I guess I’m just trying to say to be diligent,
and make sure you know what you’re getting into before you click on that next big shiny
cookie. Thanks for watching another episode of Bad
Game Design, I’ll see you guys next time. Stay frosty my friends! Huge thanks to Squarespace for making it possible
to launch my website snomangaming.com! I wanted to make sure you knew I’ve posted
a new editing tutorial on animation that you can check out RIGHT NOW in the description
below. Not only was it super easy to use the tools
Squarespace provides for sitebuilding, but it helped me to create something I’m really
proud of. There’s so many templates and options to
choose from and I had no issue purchasing the domain through them as well. Due to being extremely helpful through customer
support and full of resources to learn from, I had the confidence to try and create beyond
what I thought I was capable of. So if you’re in the market for a website
of your own, you can go to squarespace.com/snoman and use the offer code snoman for 10% off
your first purchase. Buh-bye!
This is something good to keep in mind. While I still play video games, I'm more aware of the games I play and steer clear of ones with these mechanisms. However, it's a slippery slope because one could catch you, so, sometimes, it's just easier and better in the long run to give up video games completely.
- Achievements
- Dailies
- Challenges
- Loot boxes
I don't think games are made so we can be productive :/