(Did you already read Part 1 of this series of posts?)

When I began my foray into social games two that I immediately gravitated to were City Story and Zombie Cafe. As a big fan of the old SimCity games and a zombie lover (ewww…), these two seemed like a great choice to kick things off.

Both games featured a fun theme, pleasing aesthetic design, and an easy-to-use user interface. Thousands of other players played them, had rated them favorably in the app store, and they were hovering at the top of the popularity lists for games. How could they not be great?

I uninstalled them both after a few days of play.

Why? The devil here was in the details. The details, in this case, being the (mis)use of a mechanic I’ve seen in so many other social games:  Time

In City Story, you use coins to build new buildings. Once you have some buildings (e.g. factories), you use some amount of coins to start off the production of some type of widget.  After a variable amount of minutes or hours, you can then retrieve these products, usually generating more money than you had used to create products. Production Money + Time = Production Output.

In Zombie Cafe, you use some amount of money to start off cooking a recipe. After a variable amount of minutes or hours, you can then retrieve this meal and start serving the dish to customers. Again, we see a simple equation take place: Production Money + Time = Production Output. As with City Story, as a gamer, it is our hope that the the output we get is worth more than the money and the time we invested.

These games layer some additional mechanics to drive this operation (e.g. build 3 of X type of products, keep food on the tabe for customers or your cafe rating decreases, etc.). As a player, you must rinse and repeat this interaction over-and-over to meet these (or similar) goals.

I suspect the use of a time mechanic evolved for two primary reasons:

• When gaming within social networks such as Facebook, the passage of time doesn’t feel like a major expense – you are coming back to check on your social network anyway… why not take a few minutes for a game?
• For less patient gamers, you can conduct micro transactions to circumvent this time barrier. This provides a route to income for the developer/publisher.

As I’ve explored social games, I’ve learned to live (often begrudgingly) with the time mechanic. I have no illusions as to their impact and why they exist.

But for today, I want explain how the implementation of the time mechanic in the two above examples drove me away. What is surprising is how simple my concern is, and how easy it would be to fix.

In both of these games: Failure to monitor and conform to the game’s time mechanic while not playing the game is penalized.

In City Story, if I don’t collect the products my factories built within an arbitrary (and for me, unknown) period of time, they would be “ruined” and unsalvageable. I lose the money I invested and have to start again. I have to wait because time is an insurmountable barrier – unless I want to invest real money via micro transactions to circumvent the barrier. Of course, just the subtle negative feeling you get from not retrieving your goods in time is frustrating just by itself, the “financial” impact within the game notwithstanding.

In Zombie Cafe, if I don’t get my prepared dish off of the stove and onto the serving table, it burns and is unusable.  Again, my failure to conform to the game’s timetable of when I should play it penalizes me. I’m asked to play the game when it says it should be played, not when I say it should be played.

In both of these games, the time mechanic is playing with you, instead of vice versa. I’ve played many other games where your end product doesn’t spoil… it just sits there and awaits player interaction. Sure, you lose out on the opportunity to be utilizing that resource to develop the next product, but at least you are not wasting previously invested time and money. In those cases, the time mechanic is in effect, but it is in effect within your control, and not vice versa.

What are our game design take-aways?

• As is the case with all interaction design, a good experience puts players in control of their actions and provides them with a clear understanding of the outcome of their actions. When we are playing a game, we exercise influence within the game. When we are not playing the game, most reasonable people assume that their lack of inaction wouldn’t (shouldn’t) have consequences. In both of my examples, the game punishes the player for not playing by the rules of the game – even when those rules shouldn’t be in effect because the game isn’t being played! And no, push notifications are not an acceptable solution to out-of-game interaction.
• Challenge is important to games (as I’ll discuss later), but insurmountable challenge or unreasonable/unknown punishment is regarded as unfair by the player.  Since the joy of a game is the subtle battle of learning the systems and mechanics in play (even if most gamers wouldn’t think of that process so literally), a system that is not discoverable by the player will be regarded as unfair, confusing, and flat-out un-fun. Challenges should be within scope and understandable.

I suspect that as the social gaming matures, designers will learn how to move past the use of time as a barrier or punishment. Time is a cheap, quick-fix mechanic to drive challenge. Game designers can do better.