The Waiting Game - Why Weird Games Become Cult Hits - Extra Credits

Every once in a while a fundamentally new mechanic emerges and defines a genre. Of late games like Candy Box, Frog Fractions, and A Dark Room have shown us what might be one of these new mechanics, the mechanic of unfolding. You see each of these games unfolds over time revealing more and more of what the game truly is as time progresses. I've named this episode The Waiting Game, but these games aren't truly about making you wait, at least not in the Farmville reward schedule sense. These games are about starting small, starting with something that belies the core experience and slowly with patience allowing the player to see more and more of what's really going on. Often this unfolding involves time mechanics, delay timers, and other game functions that simply require waiting, but they are simply a means to an end, the prolonging of anticipation. But before I get to that, let's first talk about why this is new, different, and downright weird. You see all of these games defy what is traditional AAA wisdom. In AAA design it's almost axiomatic that you grab the player with a hook. You give them a taste of what the game will be at its

best and then you push them through without any artificial pauses, without any stops, to get them to the point where you can give them the biggest experience you can for the longest amount of time possible. These unfolding games on the other hand take the opposite approach. They start you with almost nothing. They start you with a game that barely even looks like a game, something where there's no play at all. They give you no promise and not even a hint that the game might ever grow beyond this nascent state and yet somehow they expect you to keep playing. At first glance they have no hook. They have no first peak on the engagement curve. So why do they work? Well, because they rely on the aesthetic of discovery in a way that few games do. They make demands of our curiosity. You see these games do have a hook. They do indeed have a first peak on that engagement curve, but it can be deceptive because this hook isn't driven by excitement or adrenaline as our hooks in AAA games so often are. So it doesn't have some big flashy impact on the screen. Instead the change is often a subtle mechanical one. Its impact isn't measured by what it does to the action in front of us, but rather on what it does to us ourselves. Because you see,

these games often start with the ultra mundane, a simple timer going up. But all of a sudden, they'll reveal some small new mechanic. Now you can buy things with your candies. Now you can start building in the woods. Where a dull drab thing was, something unexpected just happened, something a little bit magical, and our senses perk up. And we wonder if there's even more we haven't been shown yet. Imagine you're working in your cubicle when out of the corner of your eye, you think you saw a gremlin or something run by. Something strange and unexpected has happened, and you tune in. You're driven to investigate. It's all the more magical because it's not happening in some fantasy kingdom full of orcs and elves where you'd expect to see weird stuff. These games need to bore you just a little because they need you to have that sense of the mundane so that they can kick you out of it. This is the hook. This is where they engage our curiosity, our need to know. We must find out what all mysteries this game has in store for us. They usually back this up with more mystery, more things to drive us to be curious, to make us want to see the game unfold a little more. It's easy to focus on the waiting these games make you do, but that actually misses the point. The waiting

is just the setup. It's how they kick you out of the mundanity they've created that matters, because that's the white rabbit. That's the moment that demands we dive down the rabbit hole. And once we're down there, these games continue to keep us engaged by continuously surprising us. They introduce mechanics and mysteries relentlessly. They leave us always with the assumption that there's more, that there's secrets yet undiscovered, depths yet unplumbed. They then play a dangerous game and use waiting or grinding to build our anticipation for that next discovery. We just know there's more new features awaiting us, and yet they remain just barely out of our grasp, building our desire for them, making us cry out like little children, "Come on, just give it." And here is the key to the design of these games. They walk a razor-thin line between building us up to a peak of anticipation and revealing newness to us too rarely to keep our interest. If you're thinking of designing one of these games, this is the part you have to build with the most care, as this is the part that will make or break your game. So, think not of these games as waiting games, but rather as unfolding games, with each reveal serving as

another trap for our curiosity. These traps are powerful, perhaps showing us a new vector of play, a new angle on engagement. Before these games, we rarely thought to engage our player through curiosity alone. As designers, we almost never risk boring the player simply to juxtapose that boredom with the possibility of something more. And yet, this proves to be a pretty powerful thing. This is something we can all learn from. These are ideas that we should grapple with to see if perhaps there are things here applicable well beyond the niche of these unfolding games. There might just be. See you next week.