Delay

Paying attention to energy mechanics

Zoya Street

June 2014

Published by Rupazero under a creative commons attribution noncommercial noderivatives unported 3.0 license. Find out more at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

With thanks to Brendan Keogh for his advice, and apologies for ripping off his title.

Delay

Paying attention to energy mechanics

Introduction

A history of energy mechanics

Indulgence

Example: Pocket trains

Interview with Ian Marsh

Snacking

Example: Fallen London

Morality

Example: Triple Town

Interiew with Dan Cook

Shame

Monetisation

Example: Candy Crush

Children

Example: Candy Box

Interview with Aniwey

Conclusion

Introduction

Candy Crush Saga is engineered for addiction, but it won’t let you play for long without seemingly turning you away. The game slams on the brakes and asks you to make a choice: pay money to keep trying to solve its addictive puzzles, or stop playing and come back later. You have used up a resource -- ‘lives’ -- that can only be replenished by waiting or by paying.

Around 70% of those who have reached the final stage of the game haven’t spent any money. For most players, Candy Crush Saga is in part a waiting game. This limitation -- known as an ‘energy mechanic’ -- leaves many people feeling aggravated, irritated and even manipulated. It’s common for people to make a comparison to drug dealers offering a first taste for free, and then charging money after chemical dependency has set in.

“The game has no shortage of critics in the traditional games world, who claim it's a cynical, manipulative cash-grabber of a product”, wrote Stuart Dredge in The Guardian.[1] “Candy Crush Saga's a sweet treat in some ways, but one with a disappointingly bitter aftertaste,” concluded a review on Pocketgamer.[2]

This is a story about moderation and excess. It is about fear and security, innocence and ecstasy, money and labour. It is about how we manage our base desires, and what happens when computers start managing them for us.

Different cultures respond well to different mechanics in free-to-play: for example, Americans hate it when players can pay money to gain an unambiguous advantage in a competitive game, but Chinese players accept it as a normal part of life. The success of games that employ energy mechanics in Europe and America could teach us something about our own societies. How does that success relate to broader cultural mores? And why is it so hated by gaming’s design literati?

In a brilliant piece of satire about reviewing AAA titles,[3] Leigh Alexander recently wrote that ‘games are about feeling powerful, and you getting your way.’ This moment of cutting sarcasm is there to reflect that games like Grand Theft Auto V exist within a culture of problematic masculinity, online abuse and consumerist entitlement. This is the culture that overwhelmingly defines what high-budget games are about, how they are made, and what they aspire towards.

What happens outside of the bubble of AAA gaming, if that violence and entitlement are less prominent? What if players don’t assume that they can always get what they want? I will argue in this essay that a complicated tension between indulgence and restraint is at work in many casual games.

Games studies scholars Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson have argued that casual games “be understood in terms of a phenomenology of waiting”. It is the need to wait that sets casual apart from games for console and computer -- the ‘hard core’ designed for ‘gamers’ who personally identify with gaming as a culture.

Casual games are not the only alternative to the AAA hegemony, and they are certainly not the most deliberate  opposition to its norms. Samantha Allen wrote at the Borderhouse[4] about how the restricted movements in ‘queer renaissance’ games (she writes about Lim and Dys4ia in this article, and Mainichi would be another good example) contrast against open-world games such as Skyrim, reflecting the nature of privilege itself: trans women are not able to move through the world as freely as other people. The assumption that games are about getting your own way is challenged, particularly in Mainichi, which eschews a win state altogether and leaves the player with an ambiguous choice between incompatible desires.

The energy mechanic is a rejoinder to gamer entitlement that comes from the other side of the spectrum: it is a normative call to spend less time gaming, and more time being productive. It allows people to play games without letting gaming become them. While queer games foreground their limitations, the energy mechanic simply says that you are not automatically entitled to everything. Getting what you want may take some patience.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/26/candy-crush-saga-king-why-popular

[2] http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Candy+Crush+Saga/review.asp?c=46983&srch=candy+crush+saga

[3] http://leighalexander.net/review-of-gta-v/

[4] http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10113

A history of energy mechanics

Energy mechanics came about through social gaming on Facebook and on mobile platforms in the past few years. It has some logical precedent in turn-based games that limit the number of turns a player can take at a time; this goes all the way back to chess games played by post, and was reproduced through early networking technologies with a variety of strategy games. The limited-turns constraint becomes an energy mechanic when each turn consumes a resource that will automatically refill (or ‘recharge’) over time.

One of the earliest energy mechanics on Facebook was implemented by Blake Commagere’s three games, Vampires, Zombies and Werewolves in 2007. Commagere’s background was in creating “virality” mechanics for social apps. In 2002 he worked on address book program Plaxo, building features that encouraged users with more impressive job titles to invite their contacts to install the program. His work eventually brought him to a team of contractors who were building Facebook’s Causes app in 2007. The weekend after a stressful product launch, he was unwinding with friends discussing their shared passion for comedy horror films such as Fido (2008).

“With Facebook I could make a million people into zombies,” he said to his friends.[5] “Can you imagine that? There’s nothing more viral than a virus.”

Commagere quickly built a simple app in his spare time. “Calling it a game is a stretch”, he said when I interviewed him earlier this year. The only action in the game was inviting your friends to install the app, turning them into zombies too. The more zombies you created, the larger your army. The app was a huge sensation, as were the two reskinned versions, Vampires and Werewolves.

Some people were so enthused by the prospect of commanding a zombie horde that they took to sending multiple invitations to the same friends. Even before hitting Facebook’s built-in limits on how many invites someone can send at a time, players’ hyperactivity crashed the server that the game was running on. This spurred him to put a daily action limit into the game, just to save the pain of worrying about server load.

A few months later, he introduced a levelling-up mechanic and a combat system, allowing people to battle in Underworld-style vampire vs. werewolf conflicts. This, again, led to people crashing the servers through overuse, so once again, he set a limit on fights per day, tied to the player-character’s level. Within hours of setting this limit, one player emailed him with a proposition: give me unlimited fights, and I will pay you $10,000.

Commagere realised that only a few people were willing to pay such a huge sum of money. But he suspected that if he let everybody buy a few extra fights for a smaller fee, then while some might pay $10,000 over time, he’d also have many more people paying a smaller sum of money. ‘Fights’ became a soft currency. Commagere had, perhaps unwittingly, created the energy mechanic. In 2008, a similar mechanic appeared in another popular Facebook title, Mob Wars, which Commagere admitted was “much more polished” than his own games.

In 2009, Zynga launched Farmville, the game which made the company infamous. It came a year after Zynga’s acquisition of Yoville using funding from venture capital, and borrowed much of its design from that predecessor. Even those who admired the game admitted that it was cynical. “Like in real life”, tech journalist Matthew Zuras reflected, “the sole motivator is more money and more growth”.[6]

In Farmville, it wasn’t an energy mechanic that had people riled up, but another way of forcing a delay: players could only harvest crops after they were finished growing, and depending on what they planted, this could take minutes or hours. Miss out on the proper harvest time, and the crops would wither; at this point, an on-screen message would offer to return the crop to full health, if the player spent some money. In 2010, shortly after making famous social game pastiche Cow Clicker, Ian Bogost characterised the unpleasant effects of social gaming as “obligation, worry, and dread over missed opportunities”,[7] which would seem to speak in particular to the dynamics of the wither mechanic.

Zynga tried to acquire the intellectual property rights for Mob Wars the same way that they acquired Yoville. They were rebuffed, but they still went on to launch games that copied its basic design: Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars (Mob Wars developer David Maestri sued them for this in 2009[8]). In these games, players spent energy to carry out missions and have fights, in order to earn currencies which could be spent on in-game items to enhance characters’ abilities. As characters levelled up, players could choose to upgrade their ‘max energy’ so that they could play for longer in each session. Energy could also be bought with microtransactions. When energy ran out, player were faced with the bargain that many subsequent social games would emulate: come back later, or pay for continued play.

Where the energy mechanic is tied to a microtransaction, there are clear parallels to the arcade model, but the need for payment/delay has been partly relocated from player skill or success to the fiction of an in-game economy: there is simply not enough of a particular resource at any given time, and being more skilled will only extend your lot by so far.

Zynga’s Frontierville, which launched in 2010, had a particularly powerful impact on designers at other social gaming studios such as Wooga[9]. It introduced another way for players to earn more energy: doing favours on their friends’ plots of virtual land, so that the game would post a message to their Facebook wall.

Frontierville was another installment in Zynga’s wildly successful series of Farmville spin-offs, but its design team was under pressure to create something more than another reskinning of the same mechanics. Zynga were facing a new set of challenges, not least of which was Facebook’s recent restrictions on what business types called ‘virality channels’.[10] The rest of us called it spam: the endless stream of unsolicited messages about how much progress our friends had made in their Facebook games, which the ~ville and ~wars games had been using aggressively.

Way back in the day, spam was a cheap sandwich filling. It was a way of getting protein into your lunch box without spending too much money. Although it was derived from meat, it lacked the bite of other lunch meats. Most people didn’t like the flavour of it. If anyone noticed you eating a spam sandwich at school, they’d remark on how disgusting they thought it was.

Facebook spam was not simply insubstantial; it was poor taste. People didn’t want to look bad in front of their friends, so they were more careful about how they used Facebook. Developers were getting free advertising out of the social network, but by using this resource so enthusiastically they were poisoning the well. Facebook had to change the way that app developers used the timeline.

On 24th March 2010, about a year after they first gave developers the ability to post notifications from apps directly on people’s personal walls, Facebook changed their policy: now apps would have to ask for permission from users before posting stories to their walls.[11] It was good news for users, who saw less spam and could use apps again without worrying that it would embarrass them. It was bad news for developers, who lost a major source of traffic. Engagement numbers plummetted, with daily active users dropping by half for some apps.[12]

Frontierville was in part inspired by TV series Little House on the Prairie, and used similar narrative themes -- a family to care for, a developing character, a desire to be neighborly as a motivation for action -- to create a persistent world that players would want to return to. The energy mechanic created short session times that, ideally, ended on a cliffhanger so that the player would be keen to return in a few hours. Each action consumed one energy point. Energy was replenished at a rate of one point every five minutes, but could also be earned by tending the crops of one’s Facebook friends, spending money on ‘meals’, and achieving milestones such as levelling up.

Energy was not just into a barrier to further play or a paywall, but a motivation to play more socially and a way of enabling players to ride the high of levelling up by playing for a little longer.

[5] Interview with Blake Commagere, February 2014

[6] http://www.switched.com/2010/08/04/the-farmville-ruse-how-zyngas-creation-ruins-gaming-and-stea/

[7] http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml

[8] http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2009cv00603/212684/1/

[9] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134856/interview_the_secrets_of_woogas_.php?print=1

[10] http://gamasutra.com/view/news/28872/Interview_Reynolds_Pioneers_For_Zynga_With_New_FrontierVille.php

[11] http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=371

[12] http://blog.bottomlessinc.com/2010/03/facebook-throttling-the-last-viral-channel/

Indulgence

At GDC 2012, game designer Richard Lemarchand proposed ‘attention’ as an alternative to the tired old buzzword ‘immersion’.[13] He said that the typical understanding of immersion, originating in virtual reality research, concerned “our going beyond the boundary between our day-to-day world of IRL and into some machine-mediated consensual hallucination”. He argued that this does not accurately describe our relationship with games, and that game developers’ intended meaning would often be better served by the idea of ‘attention’.

Pointing out that Starcraft players often refer to attention as ‘the third resource’, Lemarchand showed how attention is depleted through demands on a player to be hypervigilant, and restored through low-stress activities in aesthetic surroundings. AAA games are often paced carefully in a way that allows for attention restoration after a period of hypervigilance, such as going for a nice hike in the countryside after some intense dungeoneering.

Ben Abraham followed up with a video essay[14] arguing that the lack of restorative movements in a game can make it less enjoyable to play, because it drains the player’s attention too aggressively. This demonstrates the usefulness of a term like 'attention' over 'immersion' -- nobody would believe that a game is flawed because it is too immersive, but a game can fail to provide the right cycle of attention depletion and restoration.

More recently, Brendan Keogh has applied the idea of attention in his analysis of Angry Birds,[15] attempting to make sense of the common assertion that casual games are not immersive. “To be immersed in a virtual world is not to leave the actual world behind, but to stop paying attention to it,” he argues. Angry Birds appeals to players not because of its capacity to distract their attention from other things, but because of its “demand for a precarious balance of co-attentiveness” -- players pay attention to perfecting their performance in the game without entirely ignoring their immediate surroundings.

Keogh argues that interruptibility is essential to this co-attentiveness. He highlights in particular the fact that each stage can be completed in a couple of minutes, and that progress is saved “constantly and automatically”. Like the features that Keogh identifies in Angry Birds, energy mechanics are about interrupting play. But they go beyond just making it possible for a player to interrupt a session whenever they need to, instead actively enforcing an interruption that forces the player to either pay for a longer session or come back later for another quick one.

Energy mechanics help casual games to fit into the attention depletion-restoration cycle of a player’s day to day working life. Metaphors like ‘energy’, ‘fuel’ and the like can be mapped onto Lemarchand’s notion of ‘attention’, suggesting that some resource has been depleted that can only be restored by doing something else for a while. Attention as a refinement of immersion is important for understanding the energy mechanic. But it’s not the only way of revisiting immersion that seems to be relevant here.

When I use the word ‘immersion’, I don’t always mean something like ‘attention’. Often, what I mean is ‘abandon’. When I say I am immersed, I mean that I have lost myself. Not, as Lemarchand and Abraham, characterise it, that I have forgotten who I am, or that I believe I am my avatar. It’s more like I have let go of the bit of my superego that tells me I should be doing something else, that my partner’s feelings will be hurt if I don’t spend more time with him, that this game is kind of racist and sexist and surely there are better things I could be doing with my time. When an experience is immersive, it reduces me to something more base. It’s kind of revolting. And it’s wonderful.

As a gamer, I want that abandon. I want to be so engrossed that I don’t even care about real life anymore. It’s not that the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred by a shift in perception. It’s more like a shift in priorities, or in permission.

The ‘real’ in ‘real life’ is not phenomenological, but normative. When someone tries to tell me to “join the real world”, I suspect that her concern is not that I am delusional, but that I am failing to live within the proper moral constraints. I am not playing my socially-mandated role. I am not behaving myself.

Immersion is not necessarily about perception. Sometimes, it’s about transgression.

When people indignantly describe energy mechanics as immersion-breaking, this is what is at stake. Their permission to transgress social norms, to lose themselves in a self-aggrandising fantasy, has been suddenly revoked. During the play session, the player and the game are joined together in a cybernetic loop, where the player is constantly receiving feedback that affirms what they are doing: “you did great!” and/or “try again.” Energy mechanics break that cycle. In 2010, critic Patrick Mackey discussed poor design of energy mechanics in synchronous multiplayer games (in which the restoration time is counted in minutes, not hours):

“The fact is, people hate running out of resources. People hate not being able to hit buttons. Being out of mana, minerals, or energy is annoying, because once you are out of those resources, you can't do anything anymore. That element is very important: not being able to do anything.”[16]

This suggests that a broader critique of energy mechanics beyond their specific application by the likes of Zynga and King is about a power fantasy being broken. Energy mechanics stop you from getting your own way. Gamers are accustomed to giving themselves permission to indulge, and energy mechanics contradict that.

Maybe these mechanics are designed for people whose superego does not habitually dissolve when they start playing, who are constantly at least a little bit aware that they should probably stop playing soon. The wait mechanic is less offensive if it seems to be saving you from abandon, saving you from your own deviant desire to shirk your responsibilities and play games all day long. What divides gamers from casual players might be the point at which they are willing to feel ashamed of their indulgence. Casual gamers manage their desire differently.

[13] http://gdcvault.com/play/1015464/Attention-Not-Immersion-Making-Your

[14] http://iam.benabraham.net/2012/04/attention-and-immersion/

[15] Brendan Keogh, ‘Paying attention to Angry Birds’ in the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, 2014.

[16] http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/07/15/behind-the-mask-pushing-buttons-is-fun/

Example: Pocket trains

Pocket Trains is a game about upgrading and expanding. The player runs a rail network, directing carriages from one station to another for soft currency, collecting train parts to build more engines, and spending soft currency to build new rail lines for new trains to run on, eventually reaching the farthest corners of the globe.

It is also a game about waiting. Waiting for trains to arrive, and waiting for them to refuel. Fuel can be bought with premium currency, or with time.

A typical play session begins by restoring attention, with low-stress resource-management activities and attractive images of vintage trains in pastoral landscapes. After a minute or two, the trains on shorter journeys start arriving in their stations with a cheerful clatter, demanding what Lemarchand refers to as reflexive attention. By the time you have finished loading up that newly-arrived train, another has arrived elsewhere. What began as low-stress resource-management has turned into a significant drain on ‘executive attention’, which is the word Lemarchand gives to problem-solving and organising. You’re working out whether to expand the storage capacity of train stations, how to transport packages over long distance requiring several connections, and thinking about how to expand the rail network to reach new destinations.

The trick to Pocket Trains is not to get caught up for too long at once. Eventually you are so engrossed in the project of moving things from one part of the world to the other that you start pushing your trains too hard. They run out of fuel, and you are called upon to decide to spend premium currency on pushing them further or to let them sit in the station.

There are times when one might want to buy some extra premium currency to enable longer play sessions -- long train journeys in real life, for example -- but usually it is more sensible to take that notification that a train has run out of fuel as a sign that you and it both need to give it a rest. In an hour or two it will be time to load up the trains again to continue their journeys.

Pocket Trains changes in character depending on whether you are using it to restore attention, or to drain it. If the game is a temporary distraction from an attention-draining activity, then one is less likely to feel the need to buy premium currency. If it is something to do actively while nothing else is happening, then the nature of attentive play will drive you towards a purchase.

Interview with Ian Marsh

Did the 'fuel' system go through other iterations? What changed over time?

Initially we were going to have a fixed trip cost based on distance like there was in Pocket Planes. In Pocket Trains however the player could potentially arrive at cities with no available jobs to other cities on their route, forcing the player to send the empty train off somewhere else in search of jobs. We didn't want the player to pay for these trips so we needed an alternate way to limit trips. The fuel also has the benefit of proving players with a natural stopping point if they so chose. We didn't want people burning out after playing for hours straight!

How do you limit the amount that someone can play at any given time without creating frustration?

I think there are two keys to that. The first is to always provide some simple alternate activity that is never limited. The example in Pocket Trains would collecting flyby coins, bux and crates on moving trains while waiting for others to refuel. The other key is to make the waiting mechanics based on things we're already familiar with in the real world. People accept that vehicles need to refuel, things take time to be delivered, and building things takes time because they experience these things every day in real life.

Snacking

In March 2006, David Gosen had spent a year as acting CEO of a mobile games studio called I-Play. Before that, he’d been managing director of Nintendo Europe. In an interview with Gamasutra, he explained how he felt mobile games were different to the console games he had been working on before. ‘I think mobile is about snacking,’ he said, ‘whereas console [...] is a three course meal.’[17]

The idea caught on quickly. Three months later, he was quoted in a white paper[18] by Juniper Research, an analysis firm that provides consultancy services to most of the major telecommunications companies around the world. Snacking became an oft-repeated idea in the mobile games industry, and later in online social gaming as well.

Some developers have understood the idea to mean that the software they produce is low-value and unsatisfying; they aspire to make something that they can charge the price of a meal for, rather than only being able to charge the price of a snack. In another Gamasutra interview, Nathan Vella of Toronto-based Capybara games said he wanted to make ‘appetiser games’.

‘Some games, we'll call them 'meal games', leave you full when you finish playing them. A game like Flower leaves me feeling so satisfied that I don't really want to play anything else after. Other games are more like snacks, that you play in short bursts around meal games… meal games are comfortably priced at $10 and up, and snack games are priced at five dollars or less. We wanted Critter Crunch in-between the two.’[19]

Others see snacking differently. It’s not about how satisfying an experience is, but the role it plays in a user’s life. Publishing a casual game is not like selling a single bar of chocolate; it’s more like managing the Dairy Milk brand. To be a snack game is to be the thing that people routinely return to whenever they need a pick-me-up. It doesn’t even mean that every play session will necessarily be short; only that you can get a restorative experience of some sort from the game within a couple of minutes.

‘You can have an equally long play session on each platform,’ wrote consultant Nicholas Lovell in 2012, ‘It is about how you motivate the player to return to your game. A mobile player will happily snack for a 30-second experience while waiting for a TV show to start, but if you design an immersive experience, he might stay playing for an hour.’[20]

The use of the term ‘snacking’ outside of the context of food is also seen in social psychology studies of how people behave when they feel lonely or rejected. ‘Social snacking’ describes restorative activities that we do at regular intervals throughout the day to remind us of our friends; rereading emails or text messages, daydreaming or reminiscing about people we care about, or updating our statuses on social media sites.[21] Research has found that social snacking makes us feel less lonely, and helps us to heal after being rejected. People who worry about whether they belong engage in more social snacking behaviour than people who don’t much care about their social standing.[22]

Casual games could be restorative in different ways; while many social games function as social snacking activities, casual games with a weaker social aspect might restore something else; self-esteem perhaps, and certainly attention. By taking a little bit of time out at different points of the day to play a little bit of a mobile game, we get a little bit of something we need. Not enough to nourish us, but enough to keep us going.

‘Snacking’ is an interesting term since it equates games not just with food, but with comfort food. Perhaps even candy.

Queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton discusses candy in her theorisation of the gay child, most vividly in her reading of Tim Burton’s 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Her reading focuses on Johnny Depp’s queering of Willy Wonka: ‘the movie makes the grown queer child (namely, Willy) sit down to dinner with the innocent child (eponymous Charlie) in a way that should make conservatives shudder.’[23]

Johnny Depp has made a career out of channelling a ‘pre-pubescent young lady’ while playing grown men in Tim Burton films -- he discusses this explicitly with reference to Sleepy Hollow in his interview for Inside the Actor’s Studio. ‘I was sure I was going to be fired off that film,’ he remarks. Instead, it became his signature.[24]

Why does it make sense in mainstream culture for Willy Wonka to be queered by Johnny Depp? For Stockton, it’s because Willy Wonka’s engagement with labour and capitalism is already queer.

The story of the chocolate factory is a story of candy as an economy -- an economy in which we actually allow children to participate, unlike that of money and labour. We reward children with candy when they do  their chores, or when they perform well at school. The chocolate factory is a place of labour, but labour reimagined for childish wonder, where child-sized labourers are paid in cocoa beans. When children become productive adults, they stop getting paid in candy (which Willy Wonka’s father warns him is ‘a waste of time’) and start working in non-wondrous factories without chocolate waterfalls (such as Charlie’s father’s job at the toothpaste factory). As someone who never graduated from the economy of candy to the economy of non-wondrous factory labour, Willy Wonka has failed to grow up.

We might imagine gamers, especially game developers, as Willy Wonka figures. Their relationship to labour has been queered by a refusal to grow up. Snacking is normative and adult. Gorging on candy is immoral and childish. Energy mechanics protect normative players from being queered by games.

Stockton’s central thesis is that to grow up queer is, in fact, to grow sideways rather than ‘up’. To grow up is to grow into something of stature, along a set path -- to get a job, get married, and have children of one’s own. Queerness means to grow sideways, to grow on one’s own terms rather than to grow into something else.

To grow ‘up’ is to grow into something that has been elevated, but also kept out of reach. We delay children’s growth into that elevated sphere by keeping them away from the things that they will grow into; we delay their access to the workforce, for example. Queerness, in Stockton’s work, does not apply just to sexual and gender identity, but to race and labour. The strangeness that we read in sideways growth away from normative romantic relationships is also apparent in growth away from normative engagements with other kinds of play.

To say that candy and other comfort foods are queer is to say that they are unproductive, anti-labour, an alternative currency in a parallel capitalism constructed by parents for children. Candy is safe, because it protects children from having to think about grown-up problems of life, but it is dangerous, as every child learns at the chocolate factory -- unable to restrain themselves, the children’s destructive desires lead to total abandon, turning them into ‘self-consuming artifacts’ such as human blueberries and boys encased  in chocolate.

Snacking is normative. It is a management of consumption that avoids interfering with labour. Grown ups aren’t supposed to subsist entirely on candy, nor are they supposed to spend their entire Saturday playing video games. Snacking has come to characterise the ideal engagement pattern for successful mobile games. Not everybody can consume games with the unbridled enthusiasm of gamers, but everybody can snack.

Snacking is a private way of dealing with one’s psychological needs. The mobile game is always with you, always close at hand. The mobile game developer aims to take up space in someone’s inner world, rather than their living room. The goal is to maximise ‘engagement’, often expressed as a ratio between how many users play daily and how many users play monthly. Highly engaged players will monetise and feel good about it, and they limit the need to acquire more users through expensive advertising.

Problems arise when these games are played by children, who exhort their parents to put in the password and buy virtual goods that are real to the child but not real to the parent. Children’s consumption of virtual goods is seen as a danger. Parents are terrified of their children’s excessive consumption. Stories abound of shocking phone bills demanding thousands of dollars. Excessive gaming is itself seen as childish. The adult in thrall of gaming is considered immature -- perhaps another example of growing sideways. Snacking is normative, while overenthusiastic consumption risks leading to total abandon.

[17] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130997/bitesized_pieces_of_mobile_fun_.php

[18] http://www.juniperresearch.com/shop/products/whitepaper/pdf/White_Paper_Games.pdf

[19] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132629/finding_the_sweet_spot_pricing_.php?print=1

[20] http://www.gamesbrief.com/2012/07/designing-for-mobile-for-browser-for-console-understanding-the-use-case/

[21] Deters, F. G., & Mehl, M. R. (2013). Does posting Facebook status updates increase or decrease loneliness? An online social networking experiment. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 579-586.

[22] Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, Gardner Lindzey (2010) Handbook of Social Psychology Vol. 2, John Wiley & Sons, p. 884

[23] Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) ‘The Economy of Candy’, i n Conclusion, Growing Sideways, Duke University Press.

[24] http://www.johnnydeppfan.com/interviews/ias.htm

Example: Fallen London

Fallen London is a universe created by FailBetter Games. It is a dark, Dickensian place where you find yourself in conversation with orphans, duchesses,  artists and investigators. The free-to-play game which first launched in 2009 is built on a browser-based interactive fiction platform called Storynexus. You spend your time darting between bustling streets, mysterious tattoo parlours and smoky dens where bohemians consume ‘honey’, and are in turn consumed by its opiated pleasures.

All games built on the Storynexus platform have an energy mechanic. In Fallen London, this is represented  by a candle that burns out as you consume your allotted actions, and regrows at a rate of one action point every five minutes. Anyone can make a Storynexus game, and in their developer’s wiki they explain the value of the energy mechanic:

“This model has lots of advantages -- it makes your content last longer, encourages players to come back, and leads to any number of mini-cliffhangers whenever the player's actions run out.”[25]

For me, those cliffhangers vary wildly in quality; sometimes my action points run out just as I’m on the verge of busting a case wide open, and I look forward to coming back later that day to find out what happened to the politician’s daughter with a honey addiction. Other times, I was just about to get started with some fictional labour, so there is little to tickle my curiosity. At times like that, I have to remind myself later on that I’m supposed to be playing Fallen London so that I can write about it. My attention doesn’t wander to it naturally.

Developers Failbetter Games say that Fallen London is deliberately structured like a dream, ‘with its quasi-Tarotic cards, unnamed characters and disconnected storylets’.[26]

Like interpreting a recurring dream, playing Fallen London feels like an exercise in making sense of things, and normally those things have as much to do with the world outside the game as the world inside. Not every dream we have is memorable, but every dream is a restorative break from reality that somehow reflects reality back to us.

Fallen London’s energy mechanic means that my fictional character and real self are effectively hotbedding our way through life; I come back to the game when I need some respite from work, and when my character needs to rest I go back to work again. This rhythm means that my relationship with the game is allowed to mature over time. Instead of spending a single weekend pushing it to the end game as quickly as I can, Fallen London has grown with me over the course of a few weeks, as I push my character to develop personal qualities that I find myself lacking in real life.

Giving me a limited number of actions that I can use in any given play session emphasises my own responsibility as the player to create my own story. While it is standard and cliched to talk about player agency when describing a video game, it is rare to actually feel like you’re directing the narrative direction of a game. Fallen London achieves this not through expanding your options, but by limiting them. In the immediate term, I’m not just trying to get past puzzles so that I can access all the lovely things that the developers have made, because I know that I have a limited amount of time to spend in their world. I have to choose my actions carefully, to try and see the most interesting things possible through this small window of time.

[25] http://wiki.failbettergames.com/wiki:how-to-give-playtesters-free-action-refreshes

[26] http://www.failbettergames.com/?p=128

Morality

‘Energy mechanics in free to play are *the worst.*’, indie game developer and former Gamasutra editor Brandon Sheffield tweeted in 2013, ‘people still praise it from a monetization standpoint, but it's just awful for players.’[27]

Indie developers are often the most critical of energy mechanics. Some of the time, this criticism is about a conflict between what is financially rewarding for the developer, and what is emotionally gratifying for gamers.

In a talk at the Children’s Media Conference in 2012, casual game developer Mark Sorrell asked the audience, ‘do you want one piece of chocolate now, or two pieces of chocolate tomorrow?’ He talked about the Marshmallow Experiments, in which children are placed in a room with candy on a table in front of them. The researcher tells the child that they are leaving the room for a while, and that the child mustn't eat the candy while they are gone: if they can resist, the child will be given two candies on their return. Many children failed to resist. Those who are able to delay their gratification have been shown to have more successful lifelong outcomes in their health and their careers. By showing this footage, Sorrell gave two warnings to developers: don’t abuse children’s inability to make the rational decision to delay gratification, and don’t use tactics like energy mechanics to abuse short-term gains at the cost of long-term relationships with customers.

By procedurally enforcing delayed gratification, the energy mechanic threatens that basic assumption of gamer culture that I introduced in the beginning: that games are about feeling powerful and getting your own way. This might be at least part of the reason that indie developers find them so distasteful. Many of them are gamers themselves who just want to be able to get engrossed in a game without being told to come back and play again later.

Developers are also, however, likely to be highly aware of the mechanic’s history with Zynga as a replacement for automatic spamming on Facebook, and an easy road to immediate monetisation. The cartoon villain image of Zynga makes for a good cautionary tale, warning developers against the insensitive application of energy mechanics, and cautioning them to instead practice delayed gratification in their own businesses.

When we see other people overindulging, we find it distasteful. When we do it ourselves, we find ways of managing the shame.

It’s important to seriously consider the moral problems with energy mechanics. It is possible to read them as disingenuous: knowing that the game is built to encourage addictive behaviour, the energy mechanic says, ‘if you really insist on continuing, I’ll have to ask you to pay up’.

‘Nobody likes the guy who always has his hand out to demand you pay the toll to cross the bridge,’ said free-to-play advocate Tadhg Kelly when asked about energy mechanics at Gamesbrief in 2012.[28]

‘Disingenuous’ is a word that assumes intent, which brings up a problem, because by this point the use of delay mechanics is probably not done with a great deal of deliberation by all designers. In an article by Leigh Alexander about the lost potential of social games,[29] developer Kevin Cancienne reflected that energy mechanics had become a ‘one size fits all solution’ for smaller studios too challenged by keeping up with Facebook’s constantly-changing API to be able to spend significant time carefully examining how to make free-to-play work in a unique way that best suited each game.

Energy mechanics are often put in place to enhance revenue by the kind of designer who either tends to see the core loop as the centrepiece of their work and everything else as peripheral, or who just doesn’t have time to do significant creative work on the mechanics that make players return to a game and spend money on it.

The energy mechanic is an afterthought, perhaps even a compromise put in place to balance artistic motivations with economic realities. The designer isn’t necessarily thinking about the psychology of it, only about whether it has the desired effect on the game’s financial performance.

Perhaps energy mechanics are sometimes disingenuous, but by the time the design has been copied and pasted around the block, that disingenuity turns into simple carelessness. The problem is not evil designers. The problem is conflicting motivations.

The energy mechanic serves two different goals: retention and monetisation. In purely technical terms, those goals dovetail at several harmonious points in casual game design, but in terms of the philosophies at work they are at odds with each other.

Retention is about trust. It is about players feeling a sense of affection for a piece of software, such that they’re willing to spend a bit of time with it every day. While for avid gamers an energy mechanic breaks that trust, for other players it enhances it. It says, ‘I don’t want you to feel bad about this later on. Don’t overdo it. Come back tomorrow and we’ll have a great time together.’ It’s the act of a kind friend.

As a monetisation mechanic, it is the opposite of friendly. It says “pay up or get out”. A poorly-worded message can give the player the sense that they have overstayed their welcome. They are reminded in that moment that they are freeloaders. The nagging voice that tells them to stop playing doubles down, adding ‘stop taking advantage of other people’s generosity.’

It doesn’t always feel this way. For example, one thing that often softens the experience of coming up against an interruption in play is the trust that the game will be generous to you when you return. If you know that when you return you’ll be rewarded with a daily gift, you don’t mind being told it’s time to stop playing.

A recent study, published in a paper entitled ‘rational snacking’, revisited the marshmallow experiment to better understand what makes children more willing to delay their gratification. They found that when adults proved themselves to be trustworthy, children were more likely to resist eating the marshmallow. When adults had failed to deliver rewards in the past, children didn’t trust them to keep to their word regarding that extra marshmallow they were waiting for.[30]

The energy mechanic feels okay if we trust the software that we’re interacting with. If you trust someone, then you are grateful when they keep you from yourself, and you trust them to take care of you if you indulge in something together. Without trust, the energy mechanic is meaningless penny-pinching: giving with one hand, and taking away with the other.

[27] https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/397858353566593024

[28] http://www.gamesbrief.com/2012/11/is-the-energy-mechanic-over-gamesbriefers/

[29] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/203912/with_the_luster_of_social_games_.php?print=1

[30] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027712001849

Example: Triple Town

Triple Town’s energy mechanic is not particularly creative, but it was one of the first to make me think more complexly about delays and paywalls.

The game focuses on a catchy match-3 core loop with a twist: instead of matching three items to remove them, you match three to transform them into something greater. Three bushes make a tree, three trees made a cottage, three cottages made a house, etc. It’s a mesmerising puzzle, animated with cute characters that wander around your growing town and remark on what they see there. If I’ve been playing Triple Town during the day, I can see it in my mind as I drift off to sleep at night.

Although you play Triple Town at your own pace, it does take a lot of executive attention to play well. Planning several moves ahead gets the best results. The energy mechanic focuses on turns, and one turn is restored every minute. Often, it is right as I get into a good rhythm and am in the middle of a big master plan that I run out of turns.

I can buy more with a small amount of premium currency (premium currencies can be bought with real money), a large amount of soft in-game currency that you earn back by playing well, or by watching a video ad. However, because the video ad is only available once a day, and the balance between soft currency charge and how much I earn per completed game makes buying more turns not worth the investment in-game, it is actually a paywall.

This can be galling, particularly when paired with the skill with which the game seduces you into a destructive habit. It looks cute and innocent, but before long it has you trapping and killing adorable teddy bears to benefit a colonialist religious enterprise. “Growing up in Maine with friends in the reservations,” developer Dan Cook remarked, “[I wondered] ‘What system would make my ancestors happily do such evil?’ Answer: it doesn’t take much [...] And no-one notices”.[31] To put it more harshly than Cook would probably consider entirely fair: Triple Town is a genocide simulator that generates an addiction to cruelty and then pushes me to pay for it.

Playing Triple Town for ten minutes feels good. It is cheerful and fun. Allowing myself to play for an hour feels terrible. I regret putting so much time into it. But the game is addictive enough that I will play for a long time if my turns don’t run out. The energy mechanic acts as a form of impulse control, taking responsibility for my consumption so that I don’t have to.

Triple Town never directly rewards me for coming back. The game takes a minute to load, and then continues from where I left off as if nothing had happened. I feel a little masochistic, coming back for a journey that always ends in the same place: demonised teddy bears dying in overgrown gardens. But getting there always feels intoxicating, and every time I place my first mansion, I’m glad I returned.

[31] http://storify.com/rupazero/triple-town-is-a-metaphor-for-colonialism

Interview with Dan Cook

You said in an interview with PocketGamer[32] that you're not entirely happy with how the energy mechanic works on mobile. Could you say a bit about when and why you started implementing it, and how you came to feel differently about it over time?

The energy system had several positive outcomes:

●        Triple Town is a very addicting game.  We saw quite a few players using the energy system to moderate their play so they didn't spend hours a day in the game.  So in this sense, the limited turns are a positive feature for some players.

●        Renewing turns helped Triple Town 'lurk' on a phone.  Players would try the game out and then stop playing for a while. But because the turns recharged, the game was always ready to play again. So there seemed to be a high re-engagement rate due to this dynamic.

●        Turns were a dominant motivation for purchasing the game. Once a player ran out, it was very clear to them why they stopped playing and how they might play more.

What were the negative issues?

Despite being the main reason people purchased, energy was not a strong selling point. There's an internal debate, but we may have done better with other upsell systems. In multiplayer games, we've let people play all they want and that has made more money. Strong engagement seems to lead to increased purchases. If your game is a hobby, it seems a shame to actively prevent people from getting involved in the game and with each other more deeply.  The counterpoint here is that single player games require content limiters such as energy system or extra hard levels because they lack the social systems that drive purchases in highly engaged multiplayer games. 

Turns added little to the dynamics of the gameplay.  In Leap Day, play was limited by the amount of resources you created, essentially an energy system in disguise.  However, it felt like there was strong player agency and many ways to 'beat the system'. The reality was that energy per day was a soft cap and increased player efforts had diminishing returns. With limited turns, in Triple Town there was no player agency. There was a hard, arbitrary cap and very little you could do about it.  It is worth noting that the lives system in something like F2P Match-3 games is really just another form of energy system, but one that gives the player the feeling of agency over how fast that energy dissipates (via dying).

If I were to implement an energy system in the future, I'd do the following:

●        Create means of giving the player some agency over energy production so they feel in control.  Soft bounds, not hard bounds.

●        Not rely on energy as the main method for encouraging purchase.  Honestly, I'd instead make a multiplayer game since the monetization options are broader and the social products are more valuable to the players.

●        Use recharging energy-style sub-systems to encourage players returning to the game after a time away.

●        Use energy systems to limit players from overdosing on high burnout or grind-like activities. Players will overeat and make themselves sick of portions of your game. We can identify and moderate such behaviors.

●        Be wary of energy systems that limit frequency of interactions in multiplayer games. These high frequency interactions are how friendships are made.

For what it is worth, none of these subtle elements were completely obvious to me when we started implementing an energy system. Like many design tools, energy is an instrument to be played well or poorly. It is not some fixed pattern, applied blindly with predictable results. The rhetoric about these systems is often so overblown that little useful conversation about the craft of using them occurs. By using the system in an actual game, even though I was suspicious of its benefits, I learned immensely more than I could have by arguing on the internet.

[32] http://www.pocketgamer.biz/feature/40406/colonisation-cloning-and-rethinking-genre-the-making-of-triple-town/

Shame

Why do we feel ashamed of gaming? In a talk at Queerness and Games Conference in 2013, Samantha Allen suggested that at least part of the answer lies in “reproductive futurism”. The mother admonishing her children for spending all their time indoors playing games worries that this pursuit will prevent them from finding partners and having children of their own. In so many stories told in podcasts and on internet forums, the shameful gamer knows that they have redeemed themselves when they spend less time dungeon crawling and more time walking in the park with their romantic partner and/or children. Earlier I said that the idea of the ‘real world’ is normative rather than descriptive. Allen calls the ‘real world’ a ‘heteronormative social economy’ consisting of ‘socially sanitised forms of intimacy’.

That is to say, maybe gaming is shameful because it is counterproductive to childbearing. For all the misogyny in the boys’ club of gamer culture, and despite the ascendant social position of the geek in a capitalism increasingly dependent on the information economy, the geek is still a cultural symbol of failed masculinity: ‘Betas’, as the Amazon TV series puts it. Meanwhile, women in geek culture are dismissed and harassed, called ‘fake geek girls’ because their perceived success at feminine performance is considered incompatible with hobbies such as gaming, or anonymously derided as ‘fat, ugly or slutty’ because their participation in gamer culture indicates a failure to conform to normative femininity. Gaming too much makes us less desirable as heteronormative men and women. It’s little wonder that the games with energy mechanics, a built-in reminder to take us back to the real world and away from self-gratification, are often targeted at a stereotyped image of women as caregivers to children.

In psychology, shame is an example of ‘affect management’. It is a feeling we get in response to another feeling. When we enjoy something but we have been taught that it is wrong, we feel shame. Our drive toward something we need is halted by a complex that developed as we were growing up.

Queer theorist Eve Sedgwick wrote about shame in the context of the cybernetic.[33] Shame is felt when a social circuit is broken between one person and another. Perhaps someone fails to mirror your excited smile as you tell them about a game you enjoy. In that moment, you realise that your enjoyment is not approved of, and you feel shame. Shame operates when a barrier comes down and prevents us from exploring further. Sedgwick highlighted this in the context of a break in the flow of nonverbal communication, but I would argue that we can see it at work in the cybernetic feedback loops between a player and game software. The paywall feels shaming: the game stops affirming your indulgence, and blocks you from exploring further.

Shame manages our consumption of pleasurable things. It tells us when to stop, or at least, when to conceal what we have been doing. Flipping the script on the narrative that told us that those things are shameful feels liberating. Consumerism is often about buying into the reclamation of something that was taken away from us when we were socialised to behave in acceptable ways, or buying our way into a social context where the rules don’t apply anymore.

The most obvious examples of shame-denying consumption relate to sex: not just strip clubs or hostess bars, but burlesque classes, and pretty much any nightclub. Pride events, which transmute shame into its opposite through ritualised solidarity and defiance, have been roundly criticised for their rampant consumerism. As Allen put it in her talk, they “try to sell our own identities back to us”, and they get to do that because those identities were taken from us when we were shamed by a society that repudiates us. Consumerism is used to heal other kinds of shame too: going out for a drink with friends is acceptable, but drinking alone is not; I pay extra for the social context that grants me permission to misbehave.

Shame is not just a private experience. It organises our social groupings: in Gay Shame, David Halperin calls it a “solvent of identities”.[34] Sally Munt argues that specific patterns of ‘affect management’ -- the processes by which we deal with our desires and fears -- form the basis for our sense of cultural affinity with other people. Our friendships and alliances are built with people who have similar ideas about what is shameful.[35]

Most gamers don’t agree with being shamed for playing a game for a long stretch of time. When a game stops affirming their indulgence, the shaming feels aggressive. Games are programmed with patterns of affect management, and the energy mechanic often represents a pattern that is incongruent with hard-core gamers’ values. If there are players who do not feel irritated by energy mechanics, it may be because the pattern of affect management that it represents is reflected in their own value system. They feel a sense of cultural affinity with the game.

[33] Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) Shame in the Cybernetic Fold, Critical Enquiry 21

[34] David Halperin (2009) Gay Shame, University of Chicago Press

[35] Sally Munt (2008) Queer Attachments: the cultural politics of shame, Ashgate Publishing

Monetisation

What exactly are people paying for when they spend money to unlock more energy? How is this different to spending money to play a game in the first place? How is that difference connected to the difference between casual play and hardcore gaming?

To find that link, we have to come back to the idea of attention. To recap: hardcore gamers laud ‘immersion’, which has in some ways about indulgence or abandon, and in some ways about attention. Games that are often described as ‘immersive’ alternate between activities that make high demands on players’ attention, such as real-time combat, and activities that restore attention, such as walking through scenic environments. In casual games, the cycle between attention depletion and restoration happens through the interplay between periods of time spent playing and periods of time spent doing other things such as working.

Casual games are hybrid spaces -- a game space and a real world, linked together through interrupted interactions. An immersive game feels like a separate space, and its complete attention cycle gives it its own sense of pace. This sense that an activity puts you in a different kind of space with different rules is sometimes referred to as ‘liminality’.

The concept of liminality comes from anthropology, and originally referred to rituals. The idea is that a rite of passage such as a wedding puts people into a separate space, where the social order is different and communication becomes highly symbolic. When the rite is complete, the participants leave the liminal space, but they have changed somehow -- think of a couple leaving a church hand in hand after getting married.

More recently, researchers with an interest in marketing studies have highlighted how liminality has been dispersed into a chaotic and ubiquitous state of being, which has then been marketised and mediatised. Processes and experiences that used to be part of these intimate community rituals are now provided through mass-media spectacles and consumerist practices, including digital gaming.

Liminality refers to a space and time that is suspended from ordinary social life, where the rules are different. But the nature of a ritual rite of passage is that it exists as part of a wider normative life path, and the goal is for the individual to be reintegrated into society in their proper role. Since it plays this role within normative social life, the liminal often ends up reinforcing social norms even as it appears superficially to be subverting them.

Researcher Chris Hackley brings this out in a particularly evocative reading of the game show X-Factor as liminal,[36] with Simon Cowell playing the role of trickster or magic man (leading to the witty moniker “Shaman Cowell”). Simon Cowell is a pantomime villain, an authority figure who has come to represent a hegemonic stranglehold on popular culture, and yet at the same time the entire premise of X-Factor is that Cowell’s populist format allows anybody with talent to become famous and successful, bypassing the rigid social structures of education and accreditation. The crucial thing is that Cowell enables someone else’s reversal of fortune, acting in a similar archetypical role to Gandalf or Dumbledore.

Casual games may be becoming a robotic trickster. Software with endearing cartoon characters, carefully optimised to engender a particular set of behaviours from players, functions as a mythical enchanter. Like Simon Cowell, Gandalf or Dumbledore, the app enables a transformation; a ritual change is begun whereby the player becomes something greater, be it a more successful cruncher of candies or a more industrious citizen of Fallen London.

Just like Cowell, the casual game is both powerful and dangerous. The casual game transports the player outside of the norms of ordinary life. When a liminal experience does not conclude with reintegration, disorder and confusion ensue: Turner’s key examples were about war and social unrest. It’s not surprising, then, that many objections to energy mechanics and other microtransaction-enabling game designs rest on some idea that the boundaries between play and commerce have been reconfigured.

Players are faced with different approaches to managing the boundary between the liminal and the normative. You can buy a game up-front, and know that it will have a beginning, a middle and an end, but you also know that it will likely take a great deal of time to complete. You’re giving hours and perhaps even days of your life to the completion of the ritual. Alternatively, you can play a casual game that won’t cost you anything up-front, and that you could play in little bits at a time for weeks and months with no clear end, but you will know that any extended play sessions will be gatekept with a small payment that buys a limited experience of self-indulgence.

The fight between free-to-play and premium is a fight between two different faces of normativity: the liminal rite of passage with a fixed price paid at the start, and the temporary transgressions enabled by microtransactions. Neither proposes an alternative to the status quo; only a brief departure from it, followed by a safe reintegration into society. In both cases, money defines the breathing space around the experience of liminality.

[36] http://www.chris-hackley.com/p/x-factor-selling-existential-liminality.html

Example: Candy Crush Saga

Candy Crush Saga ’s energy mechanic manages to fly under people’s radars, to the extent that some reviewers would say that it isn’t even there. Nielle Johnson, writing for the Examiner, said that it “doesn't subject me to the usual ‘run out of energy’ mechanic so many social games employ”. The difference is not that in Candy Crush you can always play forever. The difference is that in Candy Crush a skilled player will get a longer session length than an unskilled player. “Like an old school arcade game, Candy Crush starts you with five ‘lives’”, explained Johnson, “as long as you succeed in clearing the board, you can keep playing”[37]

In addition to the lives-based energy mechanic, progress through the game’s levels is stalled with another delay mechanic. Allotted play sessions are grouped into ‘episodes’ of 15 levels each, and each new episode must be unlocked by sharing a message with Facebook friends, spending a dollar or completing a daily quest. Players who don’t want to spend money or spam their friends have their progress restricted to one episode per day.

For some players this is no doubt frustrating. For others, Candy Crush’s energy mechanics prevent addiction to the game from becoming unmanageable, freeing them to spend time on other things. Searching internet forums quickly unearths perspectives from people who appreciate having some restraint enforced by an otherwise addictive game.

“I guess I probably am hooked”, said one forum poster, “but I don't pay to play and I find the number of games I can get in the course of a day are enough so I don't need to do anything else to get more.”[38] The energy mechanic means that they get ‘enough’ play time allotted to them in the course of a day. The pay wall comes to represent a point beyond which their relationship with the game would change in significance.

“I find I don't mind the energy mechanic in these games that much,” reflected another. “Honestly, I think I'd burn out if I kept continuously playing. I've got such a backlog for gaming, reading and Netflix.”[39]

These comments seem to ground the energy mechanic in a broader economic issue. There is so much entertainment available at low cost that it’s a little overwhelming, because too many things are competing for your attention at a single time. This is part of the pressure that drives the price point of casual games down to zero. The energy mechanic is not just a way of monetising users, but also allows a game to fit in politely around the rest of their lives.

Candy Crush Saga is addictive, but it takes people’s time in small, unassuming bursts. The energy mechanic is a promise: this game will bring you weeks and months of fun, and you won’t have to give your entire life over to it. Positioned amid dazzling lights, flashy animations, bright colours and addictive gameplay, the energy mechanic can seem like the one thing standing between healthy release and total abandon.

[37] http://www.examiner.com/review/the-casual-gamer-reviews-candy-crush-saga

[38] http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?p=1765126

[39] http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=86970

Children

Stockton says that the child was queered by money in the 20th century. This was the century when, for the first time in history, it became illegal for children to work. The structure of the family changed, so that children no longer shared responsibility for bringing in  money. It is in the 20th century that children in fiction are portrayed as having little understanding of how much things cost, of why they can’t just have everything they want all the time.[40] Because we kept children away from the world of labour and commerce, their relationships with money became strange to us.

Play, so closely associated with childhood, is feaed lost in free-to-play games by designers who want the transaction to come before the interaction, not during or after.

Not only does Stockton argue that children are strange to us; she takes this further, arguing that though we think our main concern toward children is protecting them from danger, deep down we are afraid of them.

One of the things that worries people about free-to-play games the most is what happens when they are given to children. Adults know that a button with ‘buy’ written on it should be avoided, because tapping on it will drain resources that could be used to buy food or health insurance. Children, it would seem, either don’t know this, or don’t care. It seems that everybody has a friend whose child racked up terrifying phone bills by spending virtual money in an app. Government inquiries and stricter app store regulations have underscored the importance of dealing with this problem.

The discussion about this issue is often treated as a question of protecting children from unscrupulous marketers. To some extent that’s legitimate: there have indeed been games such as Playmobil Pirates that are targeted at small children and that do obfuscate the nature of the money being spent, with poorly-labelled price marks and one-click purchases of around a hundred dollars.[41] But quotes from parents themselves make it clear that while children may or may not be manipulated by app design, the person needing protecting from harm is not the child, but the parent: they are the ones suffering the headache of chasing refunds, or just paying extortionate bills.

As Stockton says, we talk about protecting children because we are afraid of them. Specifically, we are afraid of their desire. Adults have learned already to curb their urge to spend money, eat candy, or play games for hours on end. Children are yet to be socialised into the art of holding back, and that causes injury both to themselves and to others.

When we talk about protecting children, very often what we mean is that we want to delay their encounters with things. Bond-Stockton specifically addresses the subjects of sex and money: we protect children from sexual contact, primarily with regard to predatory adults but also with the painful question of when do we tell them about the birds and the bees; and we protect them from labour, introducing them to the world of commerce slowly through carefully managed systems of pocket money and household chores.

Overindulgent video game play is another thing that we try to protect children from. Most people reading this will have had this experience growing up: your parents tell you to get your head out of that bloody machine, ask if you’ve done our homework yet, implore you to go outside and run about. Some of us also remember the frustration of dealing with our parents’ overbearing worry when we did go outside, so that wasn’t much better. Either way, our parents were worried that we would be led astray if we encountered things outside of the carefully managed realms of home and school.

There were of course predators outside of the house, who would try to seduce children or sell drugs to teenagers. But often the harm that worries parents is more subtle. When teenagers start dating, parents worry that their children will be hurt emotionally; they are young, so they have not yet learned to control the desire to lose oneself in a passionate affair. Better that they wait until they are older, because when they are more mature they will be able to handle themselves better.

Likewise, there are predators in the computer. People who trade in image files and virtual currencies, but who pose similar risks around sexuality and unscrupulous trading. But often the harm that worries parents is more subtle. Parents worry that children will become addicted to games even if that addiction isn’t connected with money. They are young, so they have not yet learned to control the desire to lose oneself in an empowerment fantasy.

In spite of all this, there are plenty of parents who beam with pride when their child first learns to use an iPad. Play has a special status in our treatment of children. It is like candy -- it is made for children, but it is also bad for them. To refer back to Johnny Depp’s childlike portrayal of Willy Wonka, his father admonished him when he was physically a child that “Candy is a waste of time”. Willy Wonka’s childhood desire is so strong, it drives him away from home. He goes off the rails, but ultimately arrives at a successful place in his life as a result.

I recently saw a trashy TV show that portrayed some stereotyped hillbillies shirking conventional work to try and find oil in each other’s back yards. When one of them finally hit black gold, they proudly declared, “what doesn’t kill you makes you a fortune.” Failure to behave like a proper adult is risky, but it sometimes leads to the greatest successes.

As an adult, neither candy nor gaming are necessarily always a waste of time. It’s a question of results, and of what you do with that drive to misbehave. Making a career out of something that was once considered self-indulgent behaviour, avoiding authoritarian roadmaps, is a kind of sideways growth that should be familiar to video game designers, particularly the indies who often lead the casual gaming scene. Developers relate to each other in a sideways manner, sometimes even if one person is technically the boss. “Sometimes I get tired of being the chooser. I’m tired of being the decider!” said Tim Schafer in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun in 2012.[42]

Still, indie game developers do worry about how long they can or should spend playing other people’s games, or playing with ideas that might not have commercial potential. Moderation worries grown-ups, even if they have dedicated their lives to play.

[40] Kathryn Bond Stockton (2009) ‘Money is the Child’s Queer Ride’, conclusion to Growing Sideways, Duke University Press

[41] http://www.gamesbrief.com/2013/01/playmobil-pirates-takes-its-name-very-literally/

[42] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/19/interview-tim-schafer-on-the-amnesia-fortnight-bundle/

Example: Candy Box

In March 2013, games journalist John Brindle reported on a game that had turned the assumptions of the “great and good of videogame development and criticism’ on their head, revealing that “devoted gamers ignore in their own games mechanics they despise in the Other’s.”[43]

“We scorn the cows,” remarked critic Mattie Brice later that year, “but we worship the candy”.[44]

Candy Box is a game about delaying gratification; resisting the urge to eat candy, spending it instead to buy lollipops, planting lollipops to reproduce them, and spending lollipops on personal upwards growth. Players must wait for enough candy and lollipops to accumulate before upgrading their character and attempting a quest, and must wait for their character to recover their energy before retrying a failed quest. Energy and other kinds of delay are focal points of the game’s design.

A minimalist browser game, Candy Box is considered an artistic pastiche of casual social games, stripping stereotyped game style to its core mechanics with very basic graphics and no social media tie-ins or monetisation layer. The ascii art style suggests an anti-aesthetic, resisting the trappings of upgrade culture such as higher-resolution graphics and flashier animations. Candy Box pushes back against a multi-billion dollar industry, but not in the way you might expect.

Fundamentally, the pastiche is not about revealing some terrible secret un-fun grind at the heart of all casual games. It caught the attention of the game design literati by being surprisingly engaging. Part of that engagement is the way the game delays character growth -- the game is almost entirely focused on retention mechanics that have the player returning to the game for brief sessions at intervals of a few hours at a time. One might expect these retention mechanics to be empty without other game features, but they feel satisfying in their own way.

Removing monetisation does not make the casual game more transgressive. It just means that it is impossible to spend money to access the total abandon that people fear from candy-like consumption. Candy Box has, however, built into it a mechanism for transgressing the game’s own norms. Choosing to self-indulgently eat all the candies or anarchically throw them all on the ground is a rebellion against the upwards growth that gaming conventions push you towards. Mattie Brice celebrates this ability to resist the game’s normative economy:

“I throw all my candy to the ground. My friends are horrified. They are telling me journeys and whales and all sorts of things their candies get them. By now, their eyes are sunken in, necks craned, looking to the sky for every bit of candy. They live to tell each other the next thing they bought, which will help them find more things to buy.”[45]

The game keeps a running tally of the candies you have eaten and the candies you have thrown on the ground, counting up your anti-economic activity. An ascii-art avatar looks increasingly horrified as the number of candies thrown rises. Your revolt is quantifiable. Your sideways growth is measured. I am a thousand candies’ worth of rebel.

By providing an alternative economy of candy, with its own alternative abandon mechanic, Candy Box protects its players like a parent protects their children. It comments on a real-world economy of desire, while attempting to avoid reproducing it. Abandon is the turning point where the reproduction becomes a parody: instead of monetising the player’s desire to become engrossed in something, abandon is relocated in fictional rebellion against upwards growth.

[43] http://insertquarterly.com/2013/05/22/unwrapping-the-lessons-of-candy-box/

[44] http://www.gamecritics.com/sparky-clarkson/the-year-of-the-games-2013

[45] http://www.gamecritics.com/sparky-clarkson/the-year-of-the-games-2013

Interview with Aniwey

Candy Box seems to be built on wait mechanics. Not just waiting for candies to accumulate, but also the rest time after attempting a quest. Was the intention to begin with to create a game about waiting, or did it come about later on as you were refining the game?

The intention was mostly to create a game that anyone could play. Since we have to wait a lot, we can choose to attempt harder quests quickly or to wait until we become stronger before doing so. This way, experienced players will attempt quests quickly and won't find the game too easy, but less experienced ones will be able to wait and won't find the game too hard :)

Do you think that people usually find energy mechanics frustrating? If so, do you have any thoughts on why Candy Box is not frustrating to people in the same way?

I think that energy mechanics are not frustrating if the gameplay or the story behind them is not too repetitive. I wouldn't want to wait a lot with a level 1 wooden sword just to see this waiting time rewarded with a level 2 wooden sword. If the waiting time is rewarded with surprises and interesting pieces of gameplay, I think it's not too frustrating.

Conclusion

Energy mechanics come from a world where growth can be accelerated with the injection of capital. Silicon Valley venture capital is spent on getting products built quickly, often through casual labour. It’s spent on growing audiences quickly, buying advertising space to attract the attention of players.

In contrast to the paid acceleration culture of Silicon Valley, players are faced with an in-game “ontology of waiting”. They can accelerate past the wait by spending money, but the majority of players will never spend. They will wait, willingly being patient while an arbitrary clock ticks down until they can perform their next action.

Millions of people have been waiting since 2008 for the economies that affect them to start growing again. Powerless to make things happen before their time, the energy mechanic makes sense to people who have studied patience. Energy mechanics are reassuring in that they tell you if you just wait and pay attention, things will go as they were meant to. In games, nobody needs to starve as long as they have a little patience. In the real world, you could wait forever for the fragile economy to grant you stable employment.

Casual games, like the real world, split users between a patiently waiting majority, and a minority who pay to accelerate.

The snacking + microtransactions model is being applied to the use of real-world human energy as well, through casual labour apps like Uber. Although they promise users generous rewards for tiny portions of labour, these apps ultimately demand enormous amounts of time just so that the labourer can make a living wage. In return, customers get instant services, personalised to the needs of the buyer but depersonalised away from any need for unwanted human interactions -- with apps, services can be carried out without the need to even make a phone call.

The real-world’s wait mechanics are being bypassed through snack-sized portions of labour.

How much energy do we have? And how much of it can be bought? More abstractly, many free games generate revenue from the attention of their users, through straightforward advertising or other ways of giving brands a presence in the game’s design. Users’ energy has a value, just as a value is given to the metaphorical energy in the game itself.