It’s funny to look at a game like Transport Tycoon, and then to come across a game like Idle Miner because in essence they are the same. Get resources from A to B, and wait for your fortune to grow, to do more.
With Transport Tycoon you build your first railway line between a farm and a factory, or between an iron ore mine and a steel mill, and a factory. You can also build post and bus networks between parts of a town, or between villages and towns.
As your network grows, so it helps farms, mines, towns, and factories to grow. The longer you play, and the wealthier you become the more ambitious your transport network and infrastructure can become.
When you reach a certain level of wealth, you can sabotage your rivals. One way is to buy exclusive rights for a town. The second was to build a train depot by a rival train station, tell your train to go, and ignore the “don’t go” traffic signal and run into the rival train.
Another bit of mischief was to put a train line to block the road and get a train to run along. You can guess the rest.
Having said this, the game was serious. At the start you have to be patient, and you need to play for hours and hours and hours. In fact you can easily spend the entire day, if your parents allowed you to, back in the day.
We speak about games and addiction today, but today game design, especially on mobile phones is awful. I’ve been playing Idle Miner but you have almost nothing to do. Mine five times, make a little money, pay for a supervisor for the mine, a second for the lift, and a third for the warehouse. Keep upgrading when you can.
That’s the game. You have four or five basic actions and that’s it. The irony is that because the game is designed for addiction and compulsion you can play this game for hours, for days in a row.
The irony is that if you play 30 seconds once per day, you progress a tad slower than if you play for an entire commute, or while you’re waiting for a meal in a restaurant while sitting alone.
You can be compulsive, or minimalist, and the result is the same.
I notice that plenty of mobile games are designed this way. They’re designed with hours and hours of repetition rather than real game control and game play.
With Sim City or Sim Farm, or plenty of other games, including Transport Tycoon you were in an open world, of sorts, where you established routes, learned about logistics, and with time made real progress. You made real decisions.
Now you press upgrade, upgrade, combat, heal, upgrade, upgrade, wait for resources, upgrade, and on it goes, for years in a row.
It’s like Clash of Clans and Hay Day. At the start they were fun, but over a decade or more the games have become notification nightmares and dull. As some play to win, and you play to play, so you fall behind. You have plenty of tedious things to do, but at the same time you need to wait for hours in some cases, with both games. That’s why they stopped being “sticky” as I call it.
The irony with games like Idle Miner, Hay Day, Clash of Clans and more is that the same is happening with us via the Apple Watch, Garmin Connect and more. We’re playing a game with our own bodies.
With Apple we complete rings, and we get rewards for filling challenges. With Garmin Connect and Strava if we run distance A during a certain day, weekend or month we get a reward.
Meanwhile Coros and Suunto are less likely to make us play the same game. With Suunto you get milestone badges, which is not quite as bad.
The worst gamification I saw was with Waze before it was bought by Google. With Waze the game was our driving. We were rewarded for driving along roads that had not been confirmed yet. If you’re taking a détour, when running, cycling, or walking, that’s one thing, but in a petrol car, that’s entirely different.
The cruellest irony is that we wasted real petrol on that game, only to benefit Google.
My point is that when we played Transport Tycoon and other games we were learning, we were creative. We might have spent hours on the game, but we had real control. Today’s games are absurd. Power washer on Apple Arcade is a perfect final example. It uses a huge amount of processing, it heats the phone, and makes it vibrate. Any outsider will watch us and think “What is this idiot doing” and the answers are “killing our battery” and “reducing the battery health of our phone”.
We’re not playing games anymore. For me playing affects the game, where we can fail, or succeed, but with Idle Miner we can’t fail. That’s why it isn’t a game and why it is absurd, but relaxing to play.
And that’s without speaking of the “play to watch ad games” that want us to pay to stop seeing ads, but then make it so that we need to pay to progress after a certain level.
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