an astonishing number of apparently-profitable video games for the interactive telephone are simply spreadsheets with interior timers, whose fundamental interactions are so unpleasant that I believe they actually prolong the play experience; they begin with a tutorial, show you how to tap tap tap, and promise that at some point, perhaps once the tutorial is over, they will be fun. before long, there will be so many timers running, completing, yelling that they need to be tapped to collected, tapped three more times to set up the next timer, and then you should figure out whether you have tapped enough of these things to fulfill the “quests” or “orders” coming in or if you need to wait / tap some more first… so many of these running, with playful animations and sound effects, descriptions of items and actions that have no material bearing on the nature of what you do… at no point, not even at the beginning, and certainly not once the workload piles up, is this ever “fun.”

I’m far from the first person to note and describe this. It’s well-known enough to have become a decade-long genre, worth investing a real art budget into, because there are people who want a reason to keep touching their phones when the rest of their reasons have temporarily run out. Or just because a notification has come in, prompting a tap, a wait to load, a reward for returning for yet another day, and a series of taps to collect and wind up the timers again. Laborers on our behalf, these timers, playing the game for us; here, in this game, manifested as servile goblins hatched by you to work endlessly. In others they are dwarves, animals, and humans of varying levels of chibi detail. You set them to their tasks and then go about your day.

What’s the fantasy? What’s the game? Boss simulator, maybe: you do a bare minimum of coordination and ordering-around, and the diligently-employed rake in the cash which you take in full. A goblin can never quit, as a group they can never unionize, they will simply accrue and continue to crank the numbers higher.

None of this feels profound! I just wanted to write it down. I have, for some reason, continues to trawl the iOS App Store’s new releases every week or two for many years now, downloading and maybe trying out hundreds of games at this point. Anything that sounds remotely interesting, mostly “strategic” or “role-playing” games. And I have mostly seen the exact same 4 games released again and again in different guises, with minor variations on theme, polish, mechanical nuance, and budget. As repetitious as console and computer games could be in the 90s and 00s, even now with AAA games converging on the Ubisoft play-slurry format, this is a mind-numbing pattern indicating that, at least as far as the money people are concerned, these are the games worth making for this format. All of this emerging from the coincident market forces of Apple pushing for zero-cost-up-front apps with no “demos” allowed, and the consolidation of wealth away from a majority of people so that even a dollar or two to try a game is treated like extortion, while somehow allowing sunk-cost post-tutorial $4.99 Starter Packs to thrive.

Again, this isn’t profound. You probably know all this. It’s just… frustrating and saddening to me right now, how vast the medium is, that these games are made and promoted at such a regular clip. Oh well. I hope somebody who wouldn’t have made a good living elsewise is able to afford their rent comfortably, something I haven’t been able to do in over a year. I’m thinking about what kinds of game to prototype next, approaching the end of this first big project, and wondering what actions to start with, what will be interesting to me as well as to others, without requiring 5 years of development. That’s part of why I look at new games; I want to know what’s being released, and played, by the vast majority of players who have phones and maybe don’t follow the “big game” news, which seems like a very small portion of the addressable game-playing world.

I can see how these games work. I don’t want to make one like it. But my mercenary instincts have grown while my artistic pretenses have diminished; I need to make something that might make money. I wonder what that’s going to be?