DunDunDunpachi
Patient MembeR
One Saturday afternoon, I beat a game called 'Epic Astro Story' from start to finish on my Nintendo Switch. It's one of those passive civ / trading / lemonade stand games where you add buildings, soak up money, and add more buildings. You can upgrade and research to build more costly shops that use different resources and generate money faster. There's almost nothing to the game. It has a very predictable curve. Worse, it has a small, static map without very many interesting features, making it worthless to replay once you've already filled the map and "beaten" the game. There's a dungeon at the very end where you can do endless battles. I took a team in and beat 50 or 60 battles in a row before I died, and I decided that was probably the furthest anyone had ever gotten in the game anywhere in the world. I've already spent too many words to simply say that the game is mediocre.
Yet I still burned a few hours on it. Why? Was it the videogame equivalent of binge-eating junkfood? Am I turning into a casual? Was the toxic masculinity of my AAA games pushing me into mobile gaming as a psychological defense? Am I a Jerry now?
Then I realized I suffer from none of these things. Epic Astro Story is just your typical mobile game with scientifically-tuned addictive cookie-clicker mechanics to keep the player engaged. I was sucked in because the game -- and tens of thousands of others like it -- is designed to absorb your attention. At any moment, I could be checking something else, tweaking something else, buying something else, and so forth. Despite the railroaded design, I still fell to the illusion of engagement because of how many clicks I was performing.
Meanwhile, I still get bored after the first 45 minutes of most AAA, high-budget videogame masterpieces. Y'know, the ones that make you sit through several scenes of exposition with occasional "breaks" to push the X button a few times and tilt your analog stick up, down, left, and right like a trained monkey, and then it's back to more exposition. Nothing is inherently wrong with these games, by the way.
This got me thinking. Maybe I'm not a Jerry. Maybe I just prefer games with a higher density of player input. Sure, that input could be slack-jawed balloon popping, but it's still more engaging than watching cutscenes wedged between tutorial sequences that teach me how to move my character.
Alone, the statistic would be fairly meaningless. Just because a game crams 1,000 button presses into the first 5 minutes doesn't make it a good game, but at least I would have some idea for how engaging the game is. At least I would have a piece of an overall picture. It would be nice to know which games get right to the action and which games require the player to put down the controller and watch the Show, and I'm not sure there's a better way to do it than simply reporting how many inputs the player does per minute, within the first hour, etc.
Yet I still burned a few hours on it. Why? Was it the videogame equivalent of binge-eating junkfood? Am I turning into a casual? Was the toxic masculinity of my AAA games pushing me into mobile gaming as a psychological defense? Am I a Jerry now?
Then I realized I suffer from none of these things. Epic Astro Story is just your typical mobile game with scientifically-tuned addictive cookie-clicker mechanics to keep the player engaged. I was sucked in because the game -- and tens of thousands of others like it -- is designed to absorb your attention. At any moment, I could be checking something else, tweaking something else, buying something else, and so forth. Despite the railroaded design, I still fell to the illusion of engagement because of how many clicks I was performing.
Meanwhile, I still get bored after the first 45 minutes of most AAA, high-budget videogame masterpieces. Y'know, the ones that make you sit through several scenes of exposition with occasional "breaks" to push the X button a few times and tilt your analog stick up, down, left, and right like a trained monkey, and then it's back to more exposition. Nothing is inherently wrong with these games, by the way.
This got me thinking. Maybe I'm not a Jerry. Maybe I just prefer games with a higher density of player input. Sure, that input could be slack-jawed balloon popping, but it's still more engaging than watching cutscenes wedged between tutorial sequences that teach me how to move my character.
Alone, the statistic would be fairly meaningless. Just because a game crams 1,000 button presses into the first 5 minutes doesn't make it a good game, but at least I would have some idea for how engaging the game is. At least I would have a piece of an overall picture. It would be nice to know which games get right to the action and which games require the player to put down the controller and watch the Show, and I'm not sure there's a better way to do it than simply reporting how many inputs the player does per minute, within the first hour, etc.
