kopi-pasted

Hello, I'm one of those young people mentioned in the post and I'm partially responsible for our current topic.

My take is that the distinction between "fun" and "motivational manipulation" is blurry in a lot of forms of entertainment, and this blurriness is significantly more apparent in incremental games compared to other forms of media. As much as I don't like to admit it, I think that most modern games (especially abstract ones such as The Prestige Tree) mostly consist of "motivational manipulation".

That being said, I still think there is still fun to be had in this genre. My personal belief is that the fun in incremental games comes from the organic (or at least not tightly forced) discovery of the intricacies of the mechanical systems these games present. The problem is that very few games manage to handle this discovery well. I've also found interacting with the communities surrounding these games to be an enjoyable experience.

As to the notice, I think it's an okay idea but I don't have any strong preference on any one condition (there are a lot of factors to take into account). My primary doubt is whether the notice will work well since people may be reluctant to seek help and could easily switch to an equally manipulative entertainment outlet that doesn't contain a similar notice.

It's not as interesting as I make it seem. At the end of the day, it's just a flat multiplier. It'll take a few weeks or even months of somewhat involved play before you start reaching the point that the completion tokens start noticeably changing the game's pacing. The game itself is not that much fun to play without this system.

I like it for the reason that the dev didn't seem to have accounted for people grinding that bonus after completing all released content - but I'd expect that most people would not feel the same way.

My favorite implementation of a prestige mechanic is actually Ctrl/Cmd-C's completion token system, simple and boring as it may be.

This system gradually makes you build up a multiplier which increases polynomially over the course of your playthrough. It can get big enough to break the game's intended pacing, but you build it up slowly enough that you can see it slowly crumbling. In other games, behavior around prestiging is tightly controlled (this can be seen in the game's chapters). That's still the case here even with absurdly large multipliers but the feeling that you are supposed to do this is less present.

It's a power fantasy in which you feel you are defying the developer's intentions for how the game should be played. Eventually you quit because you have so much power that getting more requires giving the game constant attention (and by that point, a multiplier of 2x doesn't feel like anything anymore).

I don't remember how exactly I was introduced to incremental games. There were two instances in my life which could have been my first introduction to them. The first was Tap Titans on my iPad. The second was the discovery of websites dedicated to hosting Flash games through one of my cousins playing an incremental-adjacent game on one of those sites. I remember the first happening when I was in 1st grade, and I forgot when the second occurred.

Incrementals and games that took heavy influence from them were the first games that I really got attached to. I had played incremental games on many platforms. At first, I played them primarily on Flash games sites such as Armor Games and Kongregate. I had also played a lot of incremental games on my phone, although most of these games were filled with advertisements and microtransactions. For a time, I played some games on Roblox which were very incremental-adjacent. Most of the games I played back then I now consider to be mechanically (and narratively) shallow.

I consider my proper introduction to incremental games as a genre to have happened near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemics. I was searching for Swarm Simulator since I was acquainted with ScaryBee's version, and found myself surprised that there was a web version. And I also found myself surprised that there was apparently a subreddit dedicated to these sorts of game. It was from there that I became properly acquainted with the incremental genre, its community*, and the diversity of the genre.

*I have never actually interacted with users on the subreddit. However, I joined the Discord server during the Reddit API changes strike and was active there.