#fun factor

Games have been pretty much dogshit since they stopped prioritizing "Fun Factor"...

But yeah, it just wasn't as viable to try and hold players in years-long compulsion loops before widespread online functionality and the design/business practices that this enabled: patching, microtransactions, GaaS/Gatcha structures etc. It's not that this wasn't always the desired outcome- the industry even in its nascency attempted to monetize "Neverending Play" with arcades and the design philosophies that formed around coin-based play- only the overhead cost was far greater and the potential for direct profit piddling compared to modern practices. Even MMOs required a relatively large investment in digital infrastructure that ensured only a few could achieve long-term sustainability- Gatcha games similarly come and go every quarter, but the buy-in is a fraction of whatever it took to get The Matrix Online off the ground.

"Replay Value" meanwhile found joint expression with "Neverending Play" in the Roguelike genre. This is critically one of the few pathways to commercial success for indies that lack access to massive digital infrastructures or lucrative IPs- a way of suggesting hundreds of hours of compulsive play (notice how often the phrase "gameplay loop" is deployed to describe specifically player compulsion cycles) with a relatively modest asset base. The same ethos of variety-within-scarcity underlines the popularity of deck-building mechanics and makes their inclusion attractive to developers forced to appease arbitrary ideas of hour-to-dollar value, to slip past the refund window on Steam etc.

So since I have just a tiny bit more spending money I finally bought a few more of my own Redbubble shirts, which caused me to go through and update some of them. The Game Professional Shirt now has more variants, including a “Fun Factor 5″ variant (which is one of the ones I just bought).

I also still have those Halloween Shirts up even though I said I’d take them down once October was over. I actually just bought the super rad pixel skull shirt for myself, though I couldn’t get the graphic tee version (aka the coolest) because they don’t carry that my size.

Anyway! This is your reminder that I have a cool redbubble store full of cool shirts and mugs and whatever. Let it never be said I don’t buy my own products because I just dropped like $50 on two shirts and some stickers.