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[FuzzYspo0N]

Something I have been looking a lot deeper into, and have found little discussion about online. As in, discussions about what motivates players in these 'button heavy' or dialog focused games. Where older simulation games required a lot more strategy than current games to succeed - I am breaking down what the players are hooked on.

I can speculate (and you should too), but I am also looking for discussions online, topics about motivating factors for players and the intrinsic details of the genre for these type of games.

Anyone seen any? Or care to discuss?

[alastair]

I don't have much experience with this genre but from looking at a video of those mobile games for a minute, my guess is that they're probably just filled with busywork/grinding where there's always something to upgrade (and the upgrade/item/etc lets you get more money so you can get the next thing). But I doubt they have much resistance/risk/failure in them, which will result in gamers quickly finding them boring and tedious.

Which is pretty much why I find Minecraft so boring: its so easy to escalate in power unopposed (the combat/enemies are trivial), anything you make with blocks has basically no use which makes the game feel lifeless (other than to show other people lol) since the monsters are dum, and then there's the tedium of collecting blocks lol.

[C.A. Sinner]

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=20641.0

also i think the kairosoft games (game dev story etc) are a separate category because they're relatively linear/railroaded and have a set goal.

[mirosurabu]

They are strategy games, just really basic ones.

You would do no wrong by turning them into proper strategy games.

[FuzzYspo0N]

  Pretty good reading there, somewhat tricky to follow but it does break down some of the things I have been speculating on. One of the links has a really cool visualisation of dynamic engines, something I was looking into as well. Definitely worth looking at as well.

So, C.A. Sinclair and mirosurabu, that is kind of why I linked these in as well as Sim tower. Sim tower has a couple of things that it relies on (mentioned in that linked thread, as well) plus if I recall there was a dynamic engine loop as well, where you feed money into upgrades (but going upward).

I brought Tiny Tower into question the management thing because there are components that are management based - i mean, the term is fairly vague overall (since 'manage' is defined already, and overarches a lot of genres and games i suppose) but the focus is on managing something (in Tiny Tower, you manage the tower as a whole, the health of the employees and stores, stuff like that).

The discussion is leaning more toward what that other guy was questioning, what makes these games compelling. Definitely certain people find them more compelling than others, but there is an element that brings you poking back at it, because its busy work. Those busy work things don't really inspire me, but thats why I brought Sim Tower and Game Dev Story in as well). Tiny tower is mainly busy work but the feedback loop is totally dead after a short time since you are waiting eternities for pushing a single button. That's if you don't subscribe to their actual model (impatience tax, paying to speed up their lame design).

[zovirl]

I think it is instructive to look at where the conflict is in the game. In the original SimCity, for example, there are growth problems like pollution and crime which show up as your population grows. (There are also disasters -- earthquakes, fires, godzilla, etc. -- but these never seemed to hurt much unless you were already screwed.) Once you figured out how to build profitable neighborhoods there was no more conflict and the game got less interesting. Another way of looking at this is that there are dominant strategies that will work every time.

In the board game Dominion, you're also building a dynamic engine but the conflict is much stronger/more compelling. It comes from A) racing your friends...you have to get points faster than your opponents and B) direct attacks from your opponents forcing you to change your strategy.

I think you are right in your assessment of TinyTower: a lot of the conflict there feels like it was added not to increase fun but to increase their profit. I don't find that very compelling personally.

I think injecting more strategy into the genre would be good.

[FuzzYspo0N]

Actually thats a good comparison, I was playing a lot of Gears of War : The board game. It has a LOT of opposition, the game feels really harsh when you first play ('All wreches move 2 closer to you, if one lands in 1 range, they attack. if there are no wreches, spawn 2 wreches at the nearest hole') All 3 of the components of the IF THEN ELSE blocks are often very negative for the player (its less of a dynamic engine though) but its an interesting comparison -

See this is where i started defining the genre in my head. A management game is usually very hard to succeed. How many games of Sim Tower or Sim City ended in horror really early on? Spending all your resources early, not enough power which means no income. Too many condos not enough elevators or just general bad planning. These games were unforgiving in allowing you to screw it up really badly. And often they had an interesting hook - the Loan. Where you end up being down on funds, you are offered a short straw solution to attempt to fix the problems. This i can see is really compelling. 'Maybe i can save this game' is definitely compelling to me. The Loan idea was cool because it was a last attempt for some. It could lead to success, and finally hitting the 'pay back loan' button was quite rewarding.

Thats kinda how I felt it should be. You shouldn't just win. Its very hard to fail at Game Dev Story, so far I could only stagnate. In Tiny Tower there is no concept of losing. Their 'punishment' for not having stock on every floor is a handful of bitbook messages complaining about working. They never leave the apartments or the building. They never burn things down. There is no negative anything in the whole design. Its geared toward abusing the people willing to pay to 'fix' the state, or to wait around for state to deteriorate. The game is a lot more fun early on  - or if you just refuse to build high and focus on maintaining the lower floors.

After some discussion yesterday, there was some interesting words had about compulsion and the desire to not leave things unfinished. This feels a lot like what Tiny Tower is pressing on.. The mechanical nature of scroll+tap to restore state - becomes immensely tedious past 30 floors due to timing issues. This means that people who pay at all to speed up state, probably get pretty high pretty fast. Their compulsion means they check back, and fixing state in a later game can take 3~5 days of 'wait and do nothing' time . Thats if the floors haven't unstocked themselves already, forcing you to start the loop while still trying to resolve the first one. Its totally based on making you attempt to keep things at a positive level.

Then there are the smaller stategies (that appear to have 0 impact on things). Keeping all people in their dream job means what? Do you suddenly get better upgrades or maybe more money but its not significant enough to matter. There is so little strategy. I think it would be bunches more interesting if you could actually fail and had some strategy to master. Mastery is a great thing in games.

[C.A. Sinner]

the problem is if it's too competitive and goal oriented the game loses the "experimenting with a system" aspect that is part of the appeal. imo there's a marked difference between a "management game" and a generic strategy game with e.g. city building as a theme. dominion is a great example of the latter. it's an amazing game but i never feel like i'm actually building a city when i play it. it doesn't try to believeably simulate its theme but uses it as a loose metaphor for some pretty abstract mechanics.

in my opinion a good management game should be a "simulation" first and a "game" second. meaning you design some kind of openended simulation without any set goals or success/failure states and then implement "gamelike" elements on top of that (success, failure, long-term and short-term goals etc.) but always keeping the core simulation intact.

[Trevor Dunbar]

I get hooked on big numbers and min/maxing systems. I've spent a lot of time trying to create the ultimate rail system in transport tycoon for example. It's also hypnotizing to just watch 100's of trains running and doing their own things at the same time.

You should reduce the amount of maintenance players have to manage in these games, because too much is really just infuriating.

In Transport tycoon having trains breakdown constantly and having to constantly replace them is no fun. It's also no fun trying to replace an entire rail system to a new version like Mag-Lev technology.

In Theme Hospital it's absolutely no fun having a curing machine breakdown then blowup and ruin that part of the hospital permanently AND kill whoever was inside the room at the time. It's also no fun managing the heating through radiators because they don't heat enough and it's in a stupid radius, then the game is constantly yelling at you for everyone freezing despite you put like 40/50+ radiators all over your building.

[rek]

You should reduce the amount of maintenance players have to manage in these games, because too much is really just infuriating.

Eventually. When you've successfully crated a city of a couple hundred thousand, you shouldn't have to toil with the minutiae of a brand new village – it should be automated by that point (but you can go in and mess with if it you really want).

[Xecutor]

I'm working on some kind of 'SimDungeonVillage' design right now.
And what I decided to try is 'trigger->action system'.
There are resources to gather, and production chains to organize.
But! Instead of manually ordering villagers around, player can add triggers like:
trigger: amount of wood less then 20
action: gather 100 wood at area <some area>.

trigger: amount of tries in are <some area> less then 50
action: plant 150 tries at area <some area>.

Basically player needs to assign jobs for villagers, configure triggers,
and then order where to build what, and finetune after things change significally.

[ryansumo]

I get hooked on big numbers and min/maxing systems. I've spent a lot of time trying to create the ultimate rail system in transport tycoon for example. It's also hypnotizing to just watch 100's of trains running and doing their own things at the same time.

Dude, have you tried Cities in Motion?  I totally nerded out over that game.  It takes the transit aspect of simcity and makes that the entire focus of the game.

What drew me to that game, and city building games in general, is that I live in a very shitty city.  So in a way creating an efficient transport network or city is like wish fulfillment for me.  Things are also run so inefficiently here that I think I've developed a mania for trying to make things as efficient as possible.  Interestingly that's actually what I feel is the main weakness of Cities in Motion, which is that it focused too heavily on the business aspect and not the efficiency aspect of the game.  I didn't notice traffic really improving after I'd laid down my transport networks, which disappointed me.  They tried to alleviate this by giving you missions from citizens (for example student wants a monorail to connect to his school) but this was rather shallow and didn't make me feel like I was building an efficient network.

I'm keen to see what other comments people come up with here, as it's actually one of my long term goals to build a game like this.

[C.A. Sinner]

You should reduce the amount of maintenance players have to manage in these games, because too much is really just infuriating.

Eventually. When you've successfully crated a city of a couple hundred thousand, you shouldn't have to toil with the minutiae of a brand new village – it should be automated by that point (but you can go in and mess with if it you really want).

how spore should have been designed

[Archibald]

I'm a great fan of these games, both as a player and as a designer. I always categorized these as strategies. In Civilization you manage a nation, in SimCity you manage a city, in SimTower you manage elevator system in a building. Sure, there are some differences, but these all touch the same part of my "gamer's soul". I can't see myself liking strategy games and not liking management games.

I think you should play SimCity more. It's kind of like the basic game of this genre. If you get why it is fun you will understand why all the other ones are fun too.

I guess, you might be confused because there is not as definite goal as in strategies (management games are generally open ended), also you basicly don't lose. But it does not mean much, nor change much, you are simply maximizing your "score" (so it's more like a fuzzy winning condition (how well you did) as opposed to binary 0-1 (lose-win) in strategies).

Also one interesting note, Civilization was originally meant to be very similar to SimCity, it kind of evolved to become a turn based and involve more player's actions and less watching But that's it, in its core these came from the same root.