As I get older and — when I’m working, at least — find myself with less time on my hands to devote to gaming, I’ve found myself having to make tough decisions about what I do and don’t play. Having taken a step back from my beloved Final Fantasy XIV and found myself surprised at how little push I’m feeling to go back, even if a new content patch were to drop tomorrow, I find myself feeling disinclined to check out things that are very obviously timesinks and nothing else.
This doesn’t mean I’m not interested in long games; on the contrary, the games I tend to gravitate towards tend to be Japanese role-playing games that are often in excess of 100 hours in length, and I don’t begrudge them being that long, particularly as I’ve come to enjoy the pursuit of Platinum trophies in many cases.
No; I’m referring more to games that either artificially constrain your progress, or which don’t feel like they have a real point to existing beyond being something to do with your hands if you have nothing better to do.
MMOs certainly fall into this category, but these at least have a skill-driven aspect that makes them satisfying: the best gear in the world won’t let you clear Alexander Savage in Final Fantasy XIV if your skills aren’t up to the job.
No, I’m largely referring to mobile games here: a phenomenon that I’ve been becoming increasingly aware of in recent years, and which was painfully obvious when I took a casual browse through the Google Play store earlier today and found nothing whatsoever that I wanted to download and play on my phone, for various reasons.
By far the most common type of mobile game we get these days is based on the “gacha” principle, whereby at regular intervals or by spending in-game currency, you have the opportunity to “draw” new “cards” (I put that in inverted commas because sometimes they’re units, characters, weapons or whatever) and add them to your collection. You can then form a “hand” of these “cards” and use them in whatever the game’s core mechanic is — usually some form of combat. Between fights, you can generally use additional, unneeded or weak cards to power up your main cards, allowing you to take on stronger and stronger challenges as you go.
A lot of these games are well-presented and initially appear to be reasonably fun. But there’s so little depth to them that I find them ultimately unsatisfying — particularly when, as with something like previous favourite Brave Frontier, the mobile game that I’ve spent the most time with, they become extremely time-consuming to play for very little feeling of reward.
When I play a game, I like to feel like I’m achieving something, at least partly through my own knowledge and skills. I like the feeling of progressing against a difficult encounter, beating a difficult dungeon, clearing a complicated quest. And while many of these mobile games do pay lipservice to a feeling of progression through any combination of advancing through a linear world map, levelling up your character or levelling up your characters, I never, ever feel like they’re rewarding anything other than persistence — and, in some cases, a willingness to pony up cash to guarantee the best possible draws.
These games pale in their unappealingness when compared to the new sensation that is “idle games”, though, the appeal of which utterly eludes me. My wife Andie has been “playing” Clicker Heroes recently, and I don’t understand why; I tried Sakura Clicker a while back, and despite me clearly being its target audience, found it utterly tedious and pointless.
For the uninitiated, an idle game is one that you start playing and then don’t have to do anything with, outside of occasional upgrades and suchlike. In Clicker Heroes, for example, killing monsters earns gold, which allows you to hire heroes, who automatically deal damage to monsters, allowing you to just leave them to it while you go off and have a big poo or something; you can also upgrade your heroes in various ways, largely by throwing more money at them. The sole appeal element of these games appears to be making numbers as big as possible — which, as an RPG fan, I do totally understand the appeal of — but the trouble is, I personally don’t feel any sense of accomplishment from making those numbers get bigger, because I know that I haven’t really “earned” any of those rewards through anything other than remembering to check in on it every so often. I’m sure there is some sort of appeal factor that I’m missing somewhere along the line, since I know numerous people who spend a hell of a lot of time playing Clicker Heroes and its ilk, but… well, I just don’t get it, and not through lack of trying. Sorry!
To return to my original point, the feeling that my gaming time is precious has only grown over the last few months in particular, and so every time I find myself tempted to download a new mobile game, or try out another clicker game to see if I can understand why so many people are seemingly addicted to them, I hit a new mental checkpoint in my head that reminds me how many unplayed games stretching back to the PS1 era I have on my shelves, and suggests that I should probably work my way through those rather than wasting my time on something that has no real sense of closure or completion.
With that in mind, I’m heading back into the world of Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2; gotta get through that before V-II arrives on the 12th!
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