video games ~ ice cube analogy

[kossai]

manage to find this post again ! ... through reddit , as tumblr continue to be useless in find tumblr posts .



transcript for accessibility - image is direct upload to this journal so hopefully will not break , this just feel too lengthy for alt text .

original post by bidoof

what farming games in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i'm not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i'm underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won't produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

addition by saccharine-tar of screenshotted tags without credit

i think about this post so much. whenever a gacha game makes me feel pressured to waste time on a bullshit event i think: am i enjoying this or am i making ice cubes? and then i quit the event lmao

end of transcript . and definitely agree with that set of tags there ! not really into any gacha-based games anymore , set aside occasionally pop out some songs in project sekai , but this is such good way to think about tasks in games , particularly ones that do have microtransactions , whether or not gacha . 

sometimes these tasks can be genuinely fun if slow down , as personally find with candle runs in sky cotl - very rarely do full candle run , and limit that to when truly save up for something specific , but do love to hop around world , maybe goof around with some people or come across newbies to help . other times these tasks just not fun at all , like fight and grind hard to stay on some sort of leaderboard - might push so hard as to self-neglect and still end up with nothing to show because someone else will always push harder , if not just hack and cheat to top ! 

ice cubes . fantastic analogy . 

Comments

[dismallyoriented]

Another heuristic I've used to see whether I've hit my limit on a shitty mobile game is "Am I spending more time watching ads to make the game go faster than I'm actually playing the game?" Which was the case with one of those Merge Items games that I followed for a good while - realizing the sheer volume of ads I was burning through to get the cooldown timers finishing was what finally broke me out of the timewaster habit loop I was in (and realizing the game was essentially just a series of cooldown timers in a trenchcoat). If the main way you interact with a game is just to get through it faster, you may not actually Like the game (speedrunners excepted)

[kossai]

not so much in personal repertoire anymore as generally play ad-free games from computer , but good one as well !

think difference in types of speed would be kind of like , do speed come from skill and engagement with game mechanics directly ? even really ridiculously fast speedruns that skip over lots of game elements have setups that take some kind of skill , and stakes if fail , which is why people find fun . cooldown timer with optional ad break is not exactly challenge , except perhaps of patience !

[stepnix]

[glancing at fresh notes about gacha upgrade currencies] very fair reminder