Farmville and Glitch: Exogenous and Endogenous Game Mechanics

[emsariel]

I'm warning you, behind the cut is a bit of an epic post.  I've been playing a game called Glitch lately, and I'm really enjoying it ... despite the fact that so many of its core game mechanics felt invasive, insidious, and irritating when I played them in FarmVille and CityVille.  I was ready for Glitch to be terrible but with high production

Comments

[calloocallay]

This is really interesting! Thanks for the thoughtful analysis.

[emsariel]

You're welcome! I'm trying to more regularly post this thinking and research that I'm doing anyway. Fun stuff!

[oneangryrabbit]

Thanks for posting this! I've dabbled in games with so little intrinsic value that I quickly become aware that I'm just rotely clicking on shit. I've been circling around to the conclusion that the worst games are the ones where the player becomes conscious of the game mechanics in a "Oh, I'm just rolling a die to move this marker to an arbitrary location on a piece of cardboard." or "This game is just making me click a mouse/tap the screen at certain intervals." kind of way. I think it happens more often with games that don't have a compelling narrative (thus speaks the narrative junkie), but I definitely first became aware of this on Facebook, where friends roped me into playing various "games" to help them out and I inevitably found the games boring and dumb. I've really developed a distaste for the "games" where you have a virtual pet that has a virtual room, and players have a daily allowance to collect virtual crap to put in that room. Ugh. They're like some horrible devolution of Pokemon and Animal CrossingI like having my