I played the farm game like @Gaagaagiins and @MoH for an hour this morning while waiting for my car at the mechanicsā.
My progress was saved as well and it did a fine job of killing that time for me, but this might be the worst game ever made. I forgot that you basically have to guess at which direction to go to get the things you need, and that the farmer npc upgrades are so expensive that itās hard to feel like you can afford to get them if you want to progress. Lots of things like that were annoying the hell out of me, but I kept playing.
My car wasnāt ready yet, but I did stop of my own free will. I had to use the restroom after about an hour and I thought to myself āif I close the game, will my farmers continue working while I pee?ā Then I decided it was time to turn the game off either way.
Farm land is just a grapes of wrath simulator. You are right that these games are uniquely insidious, though. I remember one day I woke up really early before work to do something productive and ended up just playing farm land with that hour or two as the sun rose.
Iām off work due to injury at the moment so weāre in a similar boat. The digging game did get me a bit; thankfully thereās only a few hours of āinterestingā gameplay before, like you said, it becomes a total slog. I used to get really mad at myself for playing these things, and that shame just made it worse and harder to stop, because I felt like my being caught by such a stupid trap meant I was too stupid to be doing anything else. Now, Iām able to approach them with a bit of a clearer mind, which means that basically as soon as my attention is diverted to anything else, I have the clarity to say, āWell, Iād rather be doing literally anything else than playing this stupid game,ā which thought allows me to just exit the tab.
But also, beyond my Enlightenment, it does help that the digging game is particularly dumb, and further that I donāt really get exposed to these games during my daily life. To my mind, the greatest and most intellectually stimulating of these games ā not to mention maybe the only one thatās not mind-meltingly ugly ā is Universal Paperclips, which Iāve played through 3-4 times. I donāt even mind when that one gets me, because it actually involves solving an ever-evolving series of problems, rather than just making you feel like you are. And also, it ends within a reasonable time-frame.
I contend that there is an almost catergorical difference between shit like Farm Land, idle games designed to make you psychologically weak against the prospect of sitting through an ad to keep the dopamine drip going, and actually good and well designed incremental games like Universal Paperclips, an excellent game about understanding an increasingly complex network of interdependent systems and then streamlining them for oneās own pleasure. Itās not even just about ads but about how much the game actually wants you to play, to figure out its puzzles and to progress in order to find out what it has in store for you or even just to find out what happens (and Universal Paperclips is an excellent example of one that actually has an actual narrative).
Incremental games tap into some of the same psychological urges as slop mind control games but so much more in a way meant to interest you and engage you and create a fulfilling arc through its mechanics and narrative, and the best ones endeavour to feel rewarding for both digging in deep and managing everything closely, as well as stepping away and letting the system youāve designed build up resources so you can spend them all in one fell swoop, obtaining some powerful new upgrade or unlocking a new layer to play the game on. The best ones understand and provide both instant and delayed gratification, essentially.
Other examples of games in this genre that are excellent are the two candy box! games (best enjoyed as a duo), a dark room for another example of a game with an interesting evolving narrative like Universal Paperclips. For a very stripped back and self aware example there is Prestige Tree, which really all but lays bare what incremental games are all about and plays the hits in a nigh-unbearably sharp focus, but in a way that also comes from a deep understanding of what is so fulfilling about all of it. Itās an incremental game for incremental gamers in the same way comedians can be a comedianās comedian.
I played shark game a while ago and from what I remember it was pretty fun until a certain point, in a way where it felt kind of like it was still in an unfinished state. Might be worth checking it out to see if it has been improved/completed. I would
I enjoyed Stimulation Clicker which someone else linked on here not that long ago, which is more of a social commentary and almost a satire of these games, but in that funny way where it is still a good example of its subject of satire. It certainly makes that sort of point better than Cooke Clicker, which I contend isnāt an incremental game at all, but an almost mean spirited satire of idle games that thinks itās an incremental game.
I have a great fondness for games of the incremental genre and have played many of them throughout the years. In fact I was just playing another one all day yesterday by the name of DodecaDragons, which unfortunately after initially showing promise didnāt turn out to be that good, so I canāt recommend it. It ended up having a very poor balance between delayed and instant gratification after a certain point, or, at least, there is a significant dry spell in at least one section of the game where it goes off the rails in that respect. It becomes increasingly clear youāre going to need to sit there, waiting to do the same thing every minute or so to do the same sequence of decisions over and over again to start to progress again, because only regular micromanagement is going to overcome needing your growth to continue always exponentially (by the way this is my main criticism of Cookie Clicker, too). Essentially though DodecaDragons starts out good but eventually doesnāt cleanly separate the engaging aspects of flitting between linear and exponential growth and finding solutions to growth optimization that involve understanding things. Despite these games all really being about sitting at your computer and watching numbers go up, they should ideally never feel like a grind. If an incremental game feels like a grind or a slog, itās because that particular section has been poorly balanced or not fully thought out, imo.
I really ought to split this off into its own threadā¦ might do so soon
I fear you may have fallen right in to that meme picture of the miner turning around right before breaking through that last bit of wall and hitting the diamonds. That game certainly had a slump phase, I agree, but after that a whole bunch of automation tools are provided and it goes bonkers again. It ends up where the player is juggling whatever the most recently unlocked resource is manually, while setting up everything else to go off on its own.
Do we have a thread anywhere for talking about idle/incremental stuff in general? Iāve played a few recent(ish)ly
I just loaded it up to see wherever it was that I left off, and in this spoiler-free part of my post Iāll just say that I had to zoom out to about 65% size to fit everything vertically on my screen.
probably impossible to read screenshot
here's a screen grab, at that zoomed out level so it can fit on my screen. an indication of where it goes / how much more there is.
was shopping for a wallet cause the one i have is falling apart and i was looking at one from carhartt and iām happy to report itās cheaper through tractorsupply.com than through carharttās website
This very good joke from this very funny guy by the name of @MoH reminds me of an anecdote I read about in a biography of famed Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev; I think I have shared this before on the forums but whatever, itās so good Iāll take any excuse to repeat it.
Prokofiev was a bit of a Boy Wonder, downright Mozartian in his precociousness. Wrote a teeny tiny little kiddie opera at the age of 10 and all thatāI think Mozart was 12 when he wrote his first one, Bastien und Bastienne, but only scraps of Prokofievās first, The Giant, survives. This precociousness also led to him going to the Moscow Conservatory at a much-younger-than-standard age.
Allegedly, he was not popular among his classmates, and not just because of him being a precocious little kid, but him also being an absolute Special Little Boy kind of brat about it. One thing I couldnāt get over when I read it in a biography of his was that he apparently kept a The Document, where he tallied up various performance based statistics about his classmates. So if a classmate of his answered a question wrong in class, he was keeping a fuckinā spreadsheet about it.
File sharing is for the people. Torrenting should be the only way anyone downloads any thing. The state should mandate seeding and maintaining ratios. Sorry if that is too authleft for you
