We all have at least 1 game on our phone. So what is the reason that makes you open this game every time you are bored? Why haven’t you deleted it from your phone yet?
I don’t do that. I usually have games on my phone that I actually want to play, then I play them, then they are no longer on my phone. (unless I forget / don’t bother to delete them or something)
My state of mind before playing is not that I am bored, is that I would like to play some game now.
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What is the feature that allows you to reopen the game tomorrow?
Allows? Do you mean makes me want to reopen?
It being an interesting game I genuinely want to play?
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Asking people why they do the thing is the same as asking rats in a maze why they are trying to get the cheese. They dont know, there is a smell and then they are hungry and next thing they know they’re trying to get the cheese.
Not really. I don’t have any games on my phone.
I mean, manufacturer probably preinstalled some garbage, but I killed what I could.
Who has time to get bored?
Personally, if I would only think of playing a given game if I’m “bored” then it’s not going to get played. In part because I’m not bored very often at all, and in part because I’ve got a backlog of games I’m eager to play and haven’t had time for yet.
The last time I had a mobile game which got played regularly it was a word game with interesting and stimulating puzzles. It got played during evenings as it was a combination of challenging / relaxing (depending on the level), and also during commutes. Being designed for short play sessions was definitely a major point in its favor because it naturally fit commutes, and it was also a good fit for times when I wanted to play something but didn’t want to commit to a significant session by starting a PC / console game.
So the factors for me were:
- Mentally stimulating
- Challenging / relaxing
- Potential for short play sessions
But I don’t know if I’m your target audience at all. That was years ago. The mobile games I’ve played most since then have got maybe 30 minutes each, and all of them only got installed in the first place because friends worked on them.
Just in case you have not seen this - that’s a highly topical video on player motivation:
I mean, what makes you reopen this game tomorrow?
That I haven’t finished it yet and would like to?
They go to that cheese because the rats are hungry. So what are we hungry for?
Thanks for your feedback. In fact, similar factors are still effective. People want to relax and clear their minds in games.
I will definitely be watching. Thanks.
So it’s important for you to finish unfinished missions in a game?
You say “similar”, but the terms I used are so ridiculously broad that they’re not useful. I mentioned “stimulating”, “relaxing” and “challenging”, which could apply equally to Horizon: Forbidden West, Wordle, Final Fantasy and HayDay. Clearly, the “challenge” in each of those games is drastically different to the challenge in the others.
You need to drill down quite deeply into this stuff to get something useful out of it. When I’m immersed in it I can easily play a game like Horizon for several hours, but HayDay can’t keep me interested for 5 minutes. Why? They’re both “stimulating”, “relaxing” and “challenging”, but they’re not really “similar” in any practical way.
Missions?
If it’s a game I like and it has more stuff to do, then I would like to do that stuff until I either run out of stuff or stop enjoying the stuff, whichever comes first.
I’ll use Arknights as a primary example since it’s basically the only mobile game I play. To give a brief explanation of the game itself, Arknights is a tower defense game with permanently upgradable units.
- A breadth of options
There’s basically always something I can be doing in the game. There’s about 50+ story missions and a bunch of side missions in the game, and each one can be replayed. Because the game uses farmable resources to upgrade units, I often find myself replaying old missions and changing my strategies to be more efficient or to use new units I may have acquired. The reward structure is fairly consistent, meaning it rarely, if ever, feels like a waste if I’m just playing older stuff.
On top of that, there’s frequently event missions that come up that give me more things to play, often requiring me to employ new strategies that I’ll have to figure out. There are also missions that are swapped out weekly/monthly. I’m never at a lack of stuff I could do in the game, and there’s enough there that it never really feels repetitive.
- Personality
This one is key. Each unit in Arknights is a character, and each character has a story, their own personalities, and these things are often reflected in the story materials those characters get but also their abilities in game. One character may have a severe infection that dramatically increases the power of some of their attacks, allowing them to inflict magic damage (as opposed to physical) despite using swords. Because of this, they also have ranged sword attacks, giving them different kinds of combat viability compared to standard melee units. Another character may be an experienced mountaineer and uses a grappling hook to pull enemies towards them. Everything is cohesive.
Each character also has their own story, usually explored in their unit profiles, but sometimes in events in the game itself. Because the characters are developed in this way, it makes it easier to develop an emotional attachment to the ones that fall more into my personal tastes. I come back because I think they’re neat as much as I do the gameplay.
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No punishments or nagging
If, for whatever reason, I decide to take a break for a while, I never feel like the game is nagging me to come back. This is a massive problem in mobile games and a reason I avoid almost all of them. If I log in after being gone for a long while, I’m never met with “you lost X resource” or whatever because the only resources that expire are ones that you’d make use of while actively playing. These are things that basically amount to stamina restore potions so you can play more of the game, which brings us to… -
A generous stamina system
I hate hate HATE when a game lets me play maybe one or two rounds before going “okay buddy, that’s enough, it’s time to pay up.” In Arknights, I can usually play about 5-10 missions a day, depending on what stages I’m playing. The game also gives you stamina potions if you complete certain tasks, most of which come about from normal play. I can also use regenerating “practice mode” vouchers that allow me to play stages to figure them out without spending any stamina. -
It never feels like it’s wasting my time
I save this one for last but it’s arguably the most important one. When I play a stage in the game, I’m always making conscious decisions. I’m observing the layout and thinking about what I have to do next. I’m thinking about what kind of enemies I’ll likely expect to travel along certain paths before they start coming out at all. Are they going to be casters? Snipers? Flying drones? Are there going to be a lot of fodder units coming my way or are there going to be a handful of really powerful ones? What abilities do they have? What abilities do I have at the ready?
The tl;dr of all this is that it has to be a good game before it’s a good mobile game. I have to be able to go “sure, I’d play this” before I even think about the context of what a mobile game is and how they play. I do not even want to think about the “mobile” part because most mobile games suck.
Cheese keeps rats from dying. So they’ve evolved to like the sniff of cheese. If cheese did not keep them from dying, they wouldn’t like the sniff of it. That’s how natural selection works. When they sniff the cheese, without any words passing back and forth inside their smooth little brains they know - that sniffy thing goes in my mouth, then I feel good. All things like to feel good. Rats, jellyfish, trees, bugs. Everything wants to feel good.
Humans also like the sniff of cheese. Because when you sniff cheese, then you know there is cheese to monch. And when you monch the cheese, then you’re gonna feel good.
But humans are significantly dumber than rats. A rat knows what is real cheese and what is not. A rat would never chase a sniff that wasn’t a real sniff. If a rat could talk and somebody handed him a phone that had a game where you try to get cheese, he’d say, “that’s just a piece of plastic. There is no real cheese.”
But humans have the ability to lie. Lying isn’t an outward thing only. It’s also inward. So humans can lie to themselves. They can look at the plastic and make themselves believe it is cheese. So when they thumb the little piece of plastic and it lies to them that they got the cheese, they take that lie and believe it and deep inside their large complicated wrinkly brain they reroute that little jolt of electricity and send it to the “I got the cheese” node. Even though they didn’t actually get any cheese. And no cheese even existed in the first place. But nonetheless, all the same processes that would fire if there was in fact real cheese and the person did in fact sniff and monch the cheese, are firing.
Cookie clicker is your perfect example. There is no real cookies, there is no money, but you thumb the plastic and it keeps lying to you, "you got the cookies, you got the muneez… and there’s even more!" and people know that getting cookies and getting muneez will make them feel good, so they just keep going.
This is the only genre of the game that ever existed. All other permutations are only that - permutations. Some appear more complicated, and some use different avenues to get to the same outcome, but ultimately the same processes are triggered.
So if you ask a human why they are trying to get the cheese, they’ll tell you a bunch of nonsense that has little to do with reality. THey are too dumb - they overcomplicate everything. If the rat could talk, they’d tell you the truth. “Got to get the cheese.” Why? “Monch the cheese. That’s what we do. What is why?”
You’re not seeing the forest for the trees here.
People play because they find playing in entertaining in some way and would like to be entertained more.
And you single out a single element and attempt to pin the reason to play onto that element.
It is like saying “People eat this food because it has salt in it”.
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Thank you for this nice feedback.