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This paper examines the youngest video games genre, the so called idle (incremental) game, also referred to as the passive, self-playing or clicker game, which seems to challenge the current understanding of digital games as systems, based on a human-machine interaction where it is the human who actively engages with the system through meaningful c...
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Context 1
... games emerged as a satire of social games and an ironic response to the mechanics of progression in role-playing games based on the so called "levelling-up", "grinding" or "gold farming" (Nakamura 2013;Nardi and Kow 2010;Zagal and Altizer 2014), repetitive and oftentimes laborious behaviours, which allow players to achieve new levels and thus advance in the game. In idle games, grinding has become a core hyperbolic mechanics, around which the entire gameplay revolves. (2002), an automated game, which cannot be affected by the player's actions at all, except for "rolling" the character at the initial stages and setting two parameters -race and class ( Figure 2). From that moment on, the game plays itself. After delegating the action of play, the player is welcome to enjoy the experience by watching, deriving pleasure from the systemic changes, or knowing that the game keeps unfolding in the background. One of the most iconic examples of "grinding parodies" is Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker (2010), which was designed as a satire of games such as FarmVille (2009), with minimal or no meaningful challenges for players to engage in. Cow Clicker "distilled the social game genre down to its essence" . Although Bogost designed the game predominantly as a critique of "mindless" social games played on Facebook, it soon turned out that Cow Clicker became immensely popular, despite the designer's early ...
Context 2
... games emerged as a satire of social games and an ironic response to the mechanics of progression in role-playing games based on the so called "levelling-up", "grinding" or "gold farming" (Nakamura 2013;Nardi and Kow 2010;Zagal and Altizer 2014), repetitive and oftentimes laborious behaviours, which allow players to achieve new levels and thus advance in the game. In idle games, grinding has become a core hyperbolic mechanics, around which the entire gameplay revolves. (2002), an automated game, which cannot be affected by the player's actions at all, except for "rolling" the character at the initial stages and setting two parameters -race and class ( Figure 2). From that moment on, the game plays itself. After delegating the action of play, the player is welcome to enjoy the experience by watching, deriving pleasure from the systemic changes, or knowing that the game keeps unfolding in the background. One of the most iconic examples of "grinding parodies" is Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker (2010), which was designed as a satire of games such as FarmVille (2009), with minimal or no meaningful challenges for players to engage in. Cow Clicker "distilled the social game genre down to its essence" . Although Bogost designed the game predominantly as a critique of "mindless" social games played on Facebook, it soon turned out that Cow Clicker became immensely popular, despite the designer's early ...
Context 3
... games emerged as a satire of social games and an ironic response to the mechanics of progression in role-playing games based on the so called "levelling-up", "grinding" or "gold farming" (Nakamura 2013;Nardi and Kow 2010;Zagal and Altizer 2014), repetitive and oftentimes laborious behaviours, which allow players to achieve new levels and thus advance in the game. In idle games, grinding has become a core hyperbolic mechanics, around which the entire gameplay revolves. (2002), an automated game, which cannot be affected by the player's actions at all, except for "rolling" the character at the initial stages and setting two parameters -race and class ( Figure 2). From that moment on, the game plays itself. After delegating the action of play, the player is welcome to enjoy the experience by watching, deriving pleasure from the systemic changes, or knowing that the game keeps unfolding in the background. One of the most iconic examples of "grinding parodies" is Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker (2010), which was designed as a satire of games such as FarmVille (2009), with minimal or no meaningful challenges for players to engage in. Cow Clicker "distilled the social game genre down to its essence" . Although Bogost designed the game predominantly as a critique of "mindless" social games played on Facebook, it soon turned out that Cow Clicker became immensely popular, despite the designer's early ...
Citations
... Proposed by philosophers Pfaller (1996) and later (Žiżek 1997), interpassivity is often used to understand the enjoyment of delegation to other agents, either human or nonhuman. Previously, interpassivity has been applied to explain a variety of media-related phenomena, such as video-recording TV programmes without ever watching them (Žiżek 1997), using canned laughter on behalf of TV audiences (Žiżek 2003), and engaging in idling games to avoid the responsibility of active play (Fizek 2018). While scholars have argued that interpassivity as a theory 'never really caught on in media' (Taylor, cited in Gekker 2018, 223), the growing role of automation and delegation of cognitive capacities to non-humans (Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner 2011) has brought this theoretical concept to the spotlight, making it a useful framework for examining why individuals use automated features. ...
The popularity of automated features, such as autocorrect, reflects an interesting paradox in digital media use: while users appreciate the interactivity afforded by these media, they also seem to enjoy passively observing the system perform the interaction on their behalf. We aim to understand this paradox by using the concept of interpassivity and exploring the primary gratifications users seek in automated features. Following the research methods in U&G research, we first conducted three focus groups to generate a list of 66 gratification items, which were subjected to exploratory factor analysis in a survey study (N = 498). Results show that convenience, user control, and user profiling are three distinct gratifications of automated feature usage. Furthermore, user control is universally desired across features, and user profiling motivates the use of all automated features. We discuss the implications of these findings for U&G research and interface design of automated features.
... Quite the contrary, the implementations of comics aesthetics in different game genres and the resulting forms of agency employed in them are much more diverse than one might imagine. And while agency still remains a somewhat unspecific and evolving conceptwith some research identifying (inter)passivity as a significant factor in the enjoyment of digital games (Fizek 2018)it allows to distinguish between the ways in which players act in these games in nonobvious and non-trivial ways. A broader, more systematic study of these phenomena, particularly in a more longitudinal, transhistoric perspective would, of course, render the diversity and intricacy sketched here in greater detail. ...
... We agree with those who state that the traditional categories of "activity" and "passivity" need to be reconceptualised when applied to the digital playground (Mustola et al., 2018). Even the seminal notions of "interactivity" and/or "interpassivity" (Fizek, 2018;Gekker, 2018) seem to be ineffective in explaining why children are more silent during digital games with respect to traditional games, particularly because children during digital games express the same levels of engagement, agency, and participation as those experienced during the traditional/material games. In other words, we do not believe that the production of PS decreases during digital games because children are more passive, and, thus, the digital playground should not be conceptualized as an "interpassive" setting. ...
Preschoolers spend much time with digital media and some are concerned about impacts on language development. Private speech (PS) is self-talk children use during play, representing a necessary form of self-regulation. This study examined whether modality (material vs. digital) matters for children’s PS. Twenty-nine White 5-yr-olds (52% female) completed the Tower of London task twice - once as a material version and once on a tablet. Children used more PS on the material than digital version of the task (d=0.46). During the material task, the typical pattern of increased PS as difficulty increased appeared. However, during the digital task, PS declined as difficulty increased. Digital games may inhibit children’s use of PS for self-regulation, having implications for executive function development.
... Keogh has keenly contested the idea that videogames are necessarily interactive media, critiquing Game Studies' focus on action, and noting the frequency of waiting and observing narrative cutscenes, extended animation sequences and even cautious hiding in agonistic games (2019, 976-7). Even more radically, Fizek and Gekker have drawn on Pfaller and Žižeks' concept of interpassivity to argue that in some genres, players delegate their enjoyment (Fizek 2018b), and even that players can resist playbour by rejecting interactivity (Gekker 2018). Through their work we can see the condition of 'interpassivity' present in kinds of distracted and bored player, building on Pfaller's definition of the 'antiideological' refusal of interactivity: 'the pleasure in letting others [here the game] consume (instead of work) in one's place' (2017, 1), allowing us to 'opt out' of playbour and, as Žižek has it, use digital space to 'gain a minimum of distance' toward our fantasies by externalising them (1998,511). ...
... Keogh has keenly contested the idea that videogames are necessarily interactive media, critiquing Game Studies' focus on action, and noting the frequency of waiting and observing narrative cutscenes, extended animation sequences and even cautious hiding in agonistic games (2019,. Even more radically, Fizek and Gekker have drawn on Pfaller and Žižeks' concept of interpassivity to argue that in some genres, players delegate their enjoyment (Fizek 2018b), and even that players can resist playbour by rejecting interactivity (Gekker 2018). Through their work we can see the condition of 'interpassivity' present in kinds of distracted and bored player, building on Pfaller's definition of the 'antiideological' refusal of interactivity: 'the pleasure in letting others [here the game] consume (instead of work) in one's place' (2017, 1), allowing us to 'opt out' of playbour and, as Žižek has it, use digital space to 'gain a minimum of distance' toward our fantasies by externalising them (1998,511). ...
Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ (Nintendo 2020) huge popularity has previously been attributed to escapism prompted by the singularity of lockdown life (Frushtick 2020; Zhu 2020), resonating with analyses which have been quick to frame lockdown as a radical historical caesura in experiences of work and leisure (Harari 2020; Krastev 2020). However, Adam Chmielewski and Fernanda Bruno argue that lockdown can be seen in relation to continuities in neoliberalism’s alienation, isolation and hyperconnected domestic digital labour (2020; 2020) - a condition of prolonged and displaced anxiety I term ‘ever-lockdown’ - necessitating a more nuanced account of Animal Crossing’s ambivalent mix of busywork and relaxation. Rather than escapist utopia, consumerist dystopia (Chang 2019), or softened capitalism (Bogost 2020), I will consider Animal-Crossing as providing absorbing boredom in which intense interactivity can be interpassively (Pfaller, 2017) withheld in a time of demanding and destabilising crises, facilitating a subtle, affective sense of place amidst the ‘ever-lockdown.’
... These conversational decision trees are similar to finite state machines in their assessment of game states and determination of subsequent actions (Johnson 2014: 12). Often these encounters merely offer two variations of the same answer, an illusion of or play with agency within games that Sonia Fizek describes as 'interpassivity' (Fizek 2018). Why does this work as at once an entertaining screen media experience, the sustenance of a satisfying relationship with a nonhuman entity, and an effective instantiation of AI? Partly this achievement is as a popular media experience due to the quirkiness and charm of the writing and characterisation. ...
Amidst the excitement, predictions, investment and fear that have attended the development and application of artificial intelligence in recent decades, an important factor has been largely overlooked. Since the late 1970s popular media culture and its lived experience have brought AI into the everyday spaces of commercial and domestic leisure. Software agents, figured as monsters, aliens and racing cars have tracked A* algorithmic paths across arcade screens, finite state machines sensing and responding to their players' movements and actions. And with less graphical flair, conversational agents played out a million ludic Turing tests, parsing simple commands in the navigation of text-based adventures, tracking through dialogue trees, and conducting talking therapy as simulated psychotherapists. A-Life evolutionary algorithms and simulated insect colonies have migrated into the everyday through games such as Creatures and SimAnt (Kember 2003, Parikka 2010a). Yet games as games feature in the grand narrative of AI and robotics only as a small set of systems that mark certain thresholds in cognition and complexity, waymarkers towards a putative Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or even Singularity. DeepBlue, AlphaGo and the Atari-playing DQN algorithm are the three most celebrated examples. That nearly all other games, the cultural and lived contexts of their playing, and the procedures and cultures of play in itself are overlooked hints at some telling assumptions and omissions in dominant discourses and predictions for AI. Game AI offers an alternative, less-linear and teleological trajectory for the emergence of cognitive and creative possibilities, bringing to the fore dynamics and ecologies of distributed agency, relationality and processuality in emerging cultural and material environments that could be described as intelligent (Suchman 2007), posthuman (Hayles 1999), or postnatural i. To do this, I will focus on the simulation of animals in particular. If game AI unsettles the prevailing teleological assumption of the ever-more convincing simulation of human intelligence, then artificial animal-like-or zoomorphic-movement and behaviour further destabilise anthropomorphic dreams and nightmares of AGI. It suggests an alternative way of grasping existing and emergent human-nonhuman relationality, an ethology of new kinds of behaviour that are shaping the creative and political possibilities of the postnatural environment. [draft]
... In the last decade when mobile platform has been increasingly popular in game market, the autoplay function of the video game has been implemented to mobile games. In tradition, the relationship between a player and the machine (or game software) is that the role of the human is to actively participate in game play, while the role of the machine is to enable, sustain, and facilitate the play [7]. Autoplay is a generic term that allows a program to automatically manipulate a character to obtain items or experience points with no human interaction other than start/stop and it performs repetitive combat without player"s direct manipulation [8]. ...
... With such adaptation, the fun element of mobile RPG has been transformed into a form that enhances the growth of player character and strategic behavior rather than the immediate interactions caused by detailed manipulation by the player [12]. Even the splendid graphic representation of targeting, movements for attack and defense, and the automatic application of skills make the player to watch the battle scene while autoplay in combat is in progress [13] which is a form of interpassivity [7]. ...
... Recently, there exists an extreme form of autoplaying in games called "idle game" [5,7] that has almost no interaction in entire game playing. In a recent research with idle games [5], while the existence of interactions in the game are still meaningful to define a game playing even in such idle games, what forms the interactivitymerely watching or actual participationmight be a matter of opinion that differs between players. ...
Autoplay functions are embedded in most mobile role playing games and mobile multiplayer online battle arena games recently. Theoretically, there are different views on autoplay function in that it may be a ‘fake play’ from the traditional view and it is economical and gives functional benefits for game developing companies on balancing from functionalists’ view. In this paper, we investigate how this autoplay functions are perceived to the Korean mobile gamers. We report that there exists a strong age group effect on it and age 25 is the inflection point. Among 304 subjects including 69 females participated in this survey, the positive perception rate is positively proportional to the age from 36% to 73%. The reasons they choose to play autocombat function are convenience and utilizing sack times but the older groups (over 30) emphasize playing while doing other personal doings. Those who do not use autoplay function sustain the traditional view of game playing in that autoplay is ‘not’ the real game playing and there exists an age effect in that the inclination rate of autoplay function is negatively proportional to the age.
... Idle games even present an entire game genre that does not necessarily require player input (Alharthi et al., 2018a). They "tend to play themselves, making the player's participation optional or-in some cases-entirely redundant" (Fizek, 2018). Hence, idle games can be understood as games facilitating object-oriented play that decenters players while also facilitating distinct experiences through gameplay (Spiel et al., 2019). ...
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers more and more challenge the notion of technologies as objects and humans as subjects. This conceptualization has led to various approaches inquiring into object perspectives within HCI. Even though the development and analysis of games and players is filled with notions of intersubjectivity, games research has yet to embrace an object oriented perspective. Through an analysis of existing methods, we show how Object-Oriented Inquiry offers a useful, playful, and speculative lens to pro-actively engage with and reflect on how we might know what it is like to be a game. We illustrate how to actively attend to a game's perspective as a valid position. This has the potential to not only sharpen our understanding of implicit affordances but, in turn, about our assumptions regarding play and games more generally. In a series of case studies, we apply several object-oriented methods across three methodological explorations on becoming, being, and acting as a game, and illustrate their usefulness for generating meaningful insights for game design and evaluation. Our work contributes to emerging object-oriented practices that acknowledge the agency of technologies within HCI at large and its games-oriented strand in particular.
... At the other extreme, particularly on smartphones and in browsers, we have witnessed the emergence of casual games (Juul, 2010), abstract persistent progressive massively multiplayer asynchronous games (APPMMAGs), which have little story and no vividlyexpressed gameworld (Bouchard, 2015), and idle or incremental games, which incorporate extended periods of just waiting where the player's participation is optional and may even be redundant (Cutting, Gundry, & Cairns, 2019;Fizek, 2018). Such games especially appeal to those who prefer simpler game mechanics and more acceptable, accessible, and flexible gameplay experiences (Kultima, 2009). ...
Increasingly complex gameplay and gameworlds are placing greater demands on players, while grander approaches to help them cope, such as heads-up displays (HUDs), maps, notifications, and real-time statistics, may often create even more layers of complexity, and thus burdens, further detaching players from core gameplay. In this article, we distinguish between ‘intrinsic’ (fundamental to gameplay) and ‘extrinsic’ (peripheral or extraneous to gameplay) game elements, where the latter may be seen to increase burdens on players unnecessarily, subsequently affecting engagement. We propose a framework, comprising core, interaction, and interface layers, that reveals how extrinsicality may be minimised to better facilitate intrinsic gameplay and engagement.
... Waiting mechanics can be applied actively or passively: If actively used, a timer progresses during active game play; whereas passive waiting mechanics progress independent of play. Passive waiting is primarily utilized in idle games, a genre that is characterized by passive and automated game play [37]. ...
... Theoretical Description of Waiting: Similar to blocking through regeneration, waiting mechanics can be used as an incentive to bring the player back to the game through operant conditioning [108] and delayed gratification methods [89]. In particular for idle games, Waiting addresses economy of attention, recurring gratification, compulsive gameplay and elimination of drudgery [37]. Waiting can be viewed similar to blocking, but operating on a smaller time scale. ...
Player experience research tends to focus on immersive games that draw us into a single play session for hours; however, for casual games played on mobile devices, a pattern of brief daily interaction---called snacking ---may be most profitable for companies and most enjoyable for players. To inform the design of snacking games, we conducted a content analysis of game mechanics in successful commercial casual games known to foster this pattern. We identified five single-player game dynamics: Instant Rewards, Novelty, Mission Completion, Waiting, and Blocking. After situating them in theories of motivation, we developed a game in which game mechanics that foster each dynamic can be included individually, and conducted two studies to establish their relative efficacy in fostering the behavioural pattern of snacking, finding significant potential in Novelty and Waiting. Our work informs the design of games in which regular and brief interaction is desired.
