I’ve been reading a book called “The Stuff Games are Made Of”, which I got a few months back in a bundle, expecting to put off reading it until the death of the sun. The book is a collection of anecdotes from games played and created by its author, and discussing what value they brought to the world of games. The chapter I read yesterday on the train was one about the usage of time. Typically when we play games we don’t want our time “wasted” - we want exciting gameplay, we want it now, and we tend to complain about anything slowing down the pace of the gameplay unless it’s absolutely vital - but the book discussed the opposite idea: what about games that intentionally waste your time?

“The Artist is Present” is an art installation where artist Marina Abramović sat down in the New York Museum of Modern Art and invited people to sit with her. They did not speak, did not move, and were instructed to keep eye contact for the whole duration. Hundreds of people lined up for this experience for the mere privilege of sitting silently in front of a woman in a red dress, an experience so impactful that it was adapted into game format by the book’s author. The game forces you to open it during the visitation hours of the actual MoMA (otherwise the doors to the museum are closed and you can’t go in), and then wait in a virtual line to see Miss Abramović. The line takes literal hours to get through, and if you leave your computer to go take a piss you might get shoved out of line by virtual denizens annoyed at you holding them up. The game is a piece of art that talks about time; an exercise in patience and restraint. An exercise which I do not get.

I could not wrap my head around intentionally waiting so long for what I percieve to be literally nothing, but reading about this game made me think of other, less “artsy” games which also force you to wait for no real reason: Animal Crossing New Horizons will only allow you do a set amount of actions per day before telling you to log off, some MMOs and mobile games only allow you a small taste of what the game has to offer per day before starting to penalize you in terms of XP and progress (or force you to fork over cash), even games like Dark Souls or even the Legend of Zelda make you patiently wait for an opening in the enemy’s defenses for long, long battles. So what is the point of wasting your time in such a manner? Why do games make us wait?

The first and most straightforward reason we should discuss is pacing. Casual, laidback games do not want you to grind through all of their content in a day because their content was designed with a calm enviroment in mind. They force you to let go of the gas pedal and experience them in their intended playspace: if you have an entire day to do a mere three quests, why blaze through all three in five minutes? What’s the rush? You can knock those out in a jiffy. Just slow down, smell the grass, and enjoy what we have to offer. Even more action-packed games might want to let you take a breather so you don’t suffer an aneurysm from all the colors and soundeffects they thow at you every second.

The second one would be suspense. As movies and theater figured out before us, a moment of peace can paradoxically increase the audience’s tension as they’re forced to take in everything that just happened, and consider what may occur. If you’re shown the shadow of a monster in a horror movie, and then we cut to a scene of our protagonist being completely unaware of what’s about to happen to them, every single second that passes becomes agonizing as we wait for the inevitable. So why would the director rush the process? They wait. They let you ferment in your horror. And then BLAM, it happens. This is why you’ll frequently find small moments of quiet before or after massive explosions of violence in games: Megaman X is a fast paced platformer in all aspects except for the transition into the boss room, which is significantly slower than the rest of the game’s pacing, to let you imagine what the upcoming boss fight may be like.

The third reason is one I am not sure how to phrase politely, but I’d describe it best as sunk-cost creation. Some games just make you wait a long time to make you feel like you did more than you actually have done, without actually making you do all that much. To quote Arin Hanson discussing Ocarina of Time:

Waiting is not a difficult thing to do, but it creates the illusion of difficulty, because it takes up your time, and that’s all it does. A fight feels like an ordeal when you have to devote a decent amount of time to it, but it’s not hard.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s the only use of waiting, but he does raise a good point: something taking up your time is seen as inherently valuable because we see our time as being valuable. Therefore we backwards-reason that if something took up a lot of our time, it must be equally valuable to all that investment we put into it, otherwise we’re just a bunch of suckers right? It’s a powerful bias we have ingrained into our brains, which seems to be the drawing point for many games which intentionally waste their users’ time, like the aformentioned “the artist is present;” In the book the writer keeps talking about how merely waiting was tantilizing because he felt like whatever he’d find at the end of the tunnel would need to be a form of reward for how long he waited.¹

I noticed a similar thing occuring with a game I was recently recommended: Cookie Clicker. Cookie Clicker is the skinnerbox to beat all skinnerboxes; you do nothing in this game other than see a number go up. The first 20~ hours are just you clicking a cookie, then buying something to click that cookie for you. You only might get to play a minigame if you wait for 24+ hours for a Sugar Lump to spawn, and then you specifically use that sugar lump to purchase one of the handful of upgrades that create a minigame. This game sounds horrible if you haven’t played it, and it possibly sounds horrible even if you have played it, and yet it has (as of time of writing) an overwhelmingly positive reception on steam with nearly 70 thousand reviews. I have friends who personally have 200+ hours on this game alone!

I’m not trying to shit on this game, to be clear - if you like it, good for you, legit - but I do not understand what’s the appeal here. I’m trying, I have the game open on right now, and I do not get it at all. I’ve been told that “it’s a game you leave in the background and occassionally check on it” but what am I checking on it for? It’s just number go up, isn’t it? Many games are just some elaborate “number go up” scheme, sure, but how does this one specifically manage to snag people for this long? It has no other gameplay mechanics, no minigames… what is it?

If I had to venture a guess, it would be its usage of time. Getting anything in Cookie Clicker is an ordeal of hours where you have to leave it running and occassionally check in on it. You invest hours, computing power, you possibly leave your laptop or PC on while you go do other things, so it feels like you’re doing more than just seeing the number get bigger. You invested time, so the cookie matters more than it did before.

Now is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. It’s been said that a game is just a vehicle to transmit an experience to the player so it doesn’t really matter what gets them to the point of enjoyment, but I think it’s important to understand this idea to see whether or not your player is actually having fun or do they feel chained to the computer. There are many gameplay mechanics and systems that increase a player’s retention (the time they spend on the game before dropping it) but do not actually improve their opinion of the game, and while this can be useful if your goal is to chug as many ads as humanly possible at the user (like half of the mobile industry right now), if done without proper care it can make people recommend against playing this game to others. And as a player, it’s good to know a game is playing you, so you know whether or not you’re truly having fun, and whether or not you want to keep playing a game.