Gamifying Work
I'm totally fascinated by games that successfully gamify busy work. I've got an insanely addictive personality, and occasionally I'll find a busy work "game" that completely sucks away my free time. Let's look at some of them!
Plants vs Zombies:
PvZ has some of the most addictive gameplay I've ever played, but what made me end up playing for days was the stupid garden minigame. You could grow plants, and I became obsessed with growing one of every plant. Usually, you would earn a random seed and hope for a new one, but they had a mechanic where you could buy a seed with a specific chance of getting a new plant. For me, this meant powergaming the earning mechanics so that I got as much gold as fast as possible to be able to afford those special plants.
Progress: Took me weeks, but I eventually "caught 'em all"
Dragonvale/Gizmonauts:
I play Gizmonauts, but Dragonvale is the more popular one. These games are city-builders, and you earn gold by populating your city with levelable robots. What's made me play for so long is their "special" bots. Special bots can only be built by breeding specific types of robots, and only then the breeding is a very rare chance. (Any bot can also be bought using an in-app purchase special currency, but their currency packs are prohibitively expensive for what you get in return.) On average, a breeding takes about seven hours. So far they've released five "special" robots, one of which is a VERY random drop (1/160ish chance). Everything is purchased using in-game gold, including weed management, land upgrades, and habitats.
Progress: I play for about ten minutes every day, and I have every special bot and am level 38/50.
Tiny Tower:
This game devoured my soul. Tiny tower is the simplest game on this list, but easily took up the most of my time. It's so pixelly, I couldn't resist. In it, you build a tower floor-by-floor, and fill it with workers/residents. Building up to the top floor is easy (just takes a lot of time) but what really drew me was the job mechanic. Every new resident you bring into your building has a "dream" job and a level. The top level is level nine, so I became obsessed with filling my tower with level nine dream jobbers. Hard mode, essentially. To bring a new person into your tower, you have two options: 1) Every thirty seconds or so, a new person will want to take the elevator to a specific floor. If they land on a residential floor with an empty space, they move in. If they land on a retail floor, they disappear. 2) Use up a single "buck" to instantly move a randomized resident in to a floor. You get about 7–20 bucks a day depending on how much you play, or you can buy hellaciously expensive "packs."
In the early game, when every elevator run had a high chance of hitting an empty residential floor, the elevator was a valid way of getting new residents. But around floor 100/160, if you had a bunch of full residential spaces it became way too low of a chance that the new possible resident would want a ride to that specific floor. So it became a game of grinding out the free bucks, and rolling for the exact person you needed. In the end game, I had only two spots left, both in the same retail store, and grinding those two dream job level nines took me over a month and over 1000 "bucks."
Progress: Completed hardmode, will never play it again.
I'll probably write more later. Games like Pixel People, the Steam Trading Card game, and Puzzle & Dragons deserve a writeup too.
