Not long after my post about the game DJ Rivals, I fin­ished the main part of the game and hit a metaphor­i­cal wall. There was no more story; I’d bought every item in the store and mas­tered the game’s hard­est moves. The game tries to offer replay value via pro­gres­sively harder mis­sions based on those ear­lier in the game, and via bat­tles against human play­ers of com­pa­ra­ble level. The lat­ter offers noth­ing to play for apart from in-game money, which I already had in abun­dance, while the for­mer offers only the elu­sive car­rot of 100% com­ple­tion, which dan­gled too far dis­tant for me to want it much.

So I stopped play­ing — which is prob­a­bly fair enough. I’d played it, enjoyed it, fin­ished it and stopped. But it got me think­ing about the num­ber of games I’ve played that don’t end.

Zynga’s Far­mville is per­haps the most well-known exam­ple I could give. At the begin­ning, the game is about design­ing a nice farm, plant­ing the most effi­cient crops, com­ing back to har­vest them and plant­ing some more. This is fun. Then it’s just some­thing you do. Then it’s annoy­ing. Then you start con­tem­plat­ing spend­ing real money on in-game items to auto­mate the process. At this point it’s clear that plant­ing and har­vest­ing crops is not the game — the game is hav­ing a big­ger and bet­ter farm than your friends. And the only way to achieve this, assum­ing you weren’t lucky enough to start first, is to be more devoted to the game or spend more real money than your friends do. (It shouldn’t sur­prise you that these are both things that make money for Zynga.)

A case of esca­la­tion of com­mit­ment (or com­mit­ment bias) can kick in, whereby the player has invested enough effort in the game that even though they are no longer enjoy­ing it, they can’t bear to quit. And this only gets worse over time, because unlike most non-social games, Far­mville and its kin don’t have an ‘end’. There’s no story to fin­ish, and because the mak­ers of the game can eas­ily add more, higher-level items to acquire or quests to ful­fill, there is no 100% com­ple­tion to aim for. You quit, or you play forever.

I am no bet­ter than the rest as regards being sucked into these games. Tac­tics in Bat­tle Sta­tions only extend as far as click­ing a but­ton and upgrad­ing your air­ship within one of a few effec­tive builds, yet my char­ac­ter made it to level 85 before I quit, real­is­ing that the rate at which new shiny equip­ment was added to the game out­stripped the rate at which I could acquire it. Starfleet Com­man­der is a good strat­egy game in its own right, but after hav­ing reached the end of the tech tree, I found noth­ing worth­while to aim for. The same flaw has turned me off Back­yard Mon­sters at level 36, too.

More­over, all of these games suf­fer from a time delay mechanic that increas­ingly is enough to put me off a game (Dun­geon Over­lord, for exam­ple) all by itself. Now, part of the aim of all these games (from the cre­ators’ per­spec­tive) is to get users return­ing reg­u­larly to play — and view ads. To achieve this, every game I have men­tioned — and count­less thou­sands of oth­ers — have in-game activ­i­ties that take time of the order of hours or days. This, I think, is my main prob­lem with them.

In the vast major­ity of tra­di­tional com­puter and con­sole games, there is a con­cept of a gam­ing “ses­sion”. The player sits down to play the game, plays con­tin­u­ously, and stops when he or she is done. But the major­ity of the new breed of social games aren’t like that.

They begin with a rush of activ­ity, much like other games. You put the first few build­ings down in your base, plant the first few crops, start and fin­ish research­ing tech­nolo­gies within a few min­utes. At some point, you choose to stop. But the game hangs its car­rots just out of reach. “Sure,” it says, “you can stop. But your build­ing is only half an hour from being fin­ished. And once it’s fin­ished, you’ll be able to do this and this, and build this, which only takes a few hours…”

In the early stages, it grabs you back when you might pre­fer not to be play­ing. Later on, by con­trast, it switches around to per­haps the more annoy­ing mode. More advanced things tend to take longer to build, research, grow, or what­ever — pos­si­bly many days. So you’ll sit down for your gam­ing ses­sion, you’ll do your five min­utes of for­mu­laic click­ing, har­vest­ing your crops, plant­ing new ones, then… then you stop. You can’t do any more; you have to wait two days before you can play again. In two days, you spend five more min­utes click­ing the same things, then stop again.

Once upon a time, I enjoyed these Face­book games, and I thought I still did. But yes­ter­day, I logged in to do my five min­utes of click­ing, and realised all of a sud­den that it was exactly the same five min­utes of click­ing I had done the day before and the day before that. I was grind­ing towards a non-existent goal, per­form­ing mind­less tasks in search of a sense of com­ple­tion that I knew would never come.

I thought, “why am I doing this?”, and it dawned on me that I didn’t have an answer to that.

I love play­ing games, and pre­sum­ably always will. But I think I, and pos­si­bly oth­ers, need to get bet­ter at judg­ing the enjoy­a­bil­ity of games in this casual, social age. Cer­tain kinds of game and cer­tain games com­pa­nies are now remark­ably good at exploit­ing sunk cost and com­mit­ment bias, and in order to only play games that we enjoy, we should eval­u­ate the game bet­ter, and decide ear­lier when it may be time to quit.