Incremental Games

 I wrote a post a few years ago about the essence of a game. The basic gist of it was hypothesizing about what makes a game a game, and more importantly, what makes it enjoyable. Basically, in answer to my own question, we have seen mobile game companies leverage certain game mechanics, which might not exactly be dark patterns but are at least closely related. Basically, we know that people respond positively to certain types of stimulus, and so we can design games to provide this stimulus and keep the dopamine running, which makes people continue to play.

The mobile gaming scene, of course, uses this in nefarious ways to get people to spend money on what I consider to be "dumb stuff". I try to be nonjudgmental about others' choices, but when it comes to these specific types of microtransactions in mobile games, it is really hard to see the positive benefits that the purchaser is receiving. Still, I don't want to ruin anyone else's good time, and I am sure it would be easy to judge the way I spend my money (mostly scratch off tickets and dinners at Medieval Times), so let's instead look critically at the mobile game developers and the way they are tricking people into spending money.

Anyway, the reason that I bring this up is that one of my favorite game genres is incremental games, which rely on many of these same dopamine producing tricks to make button clicking and number growing into a game. The main difference here is that in general the incremental game community, at least the part centered around the r/incremental_games subreddit and to a more distributed extent, the galaxy.click website is firmly against microtransactions, forced ads and dark patterns in games. Basically, while the underlying mechanics might be similar, the intentions are pure in the latter case, and are manipulative in the former. 

What is interesting, though, is that for an at least moderately popular subgenre of gaming there is very little written about it. I am going to make a big assumption and say that games that are not monetized provide little incentive to media outlets to provide coverage as there is no obvious financial benefit. Imagine me yelling capitalism while doing jazz hands right now. 

Anyway, I have been thinking of writing about the incremental games in some detail for a while now, and over the upcoming weeks I think I will try to put bits and pieces together to come up with a coherent history and explanation of the genre. Happy clicking! :)