Busywork is not Fun [Design]

It’s important to give players enough to do. Especially in videogames where the focus is more sport- and single-player oriented than in table top games, your game really needs a lot of actions to occupy a player’s time. But of course it’s not just about the quantity. Does every game action cause a meaningful change in the game world? Do most of them?

If so, then you are on the right path. The wrong path is actions which do not cause meaningful change. There are a wide variety of meaningless actions that games incorporate but they all share a common trait:

Meaningless actions oblige the player to crank a handle that the game could easily be cranking for them. Such actions are busywork, and busywork is usually boring.

 

Sisyphean Gameplay

The story of Sisyphus is that of a wily king brought low. He must push a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it fall back down, for eternity. His punishment is being made to go through the motions ad infinitum without prospect of variation or strategy on his part to finishing the task. Sisyphus is essentially doomed to waste time. Busywork is his curse.

As a part of the change in industry obsessions from gameplay to engagement, developers often create behavioural game designs composed of busywork. They oblige the player to do things that the game could easily be doing itself, so that the player is cast into the role of a janitor or a rat in a maze. Busywork lengthens interaction with a game, can be policed using an energy metric to oblige return scheduled gameplay, and so your engagement stats rise. More hours played equals more attention which equals more fun and more likelihood of transactions.

Right? Nope.

The fallacy is this: More attention does not equal more fun. What it means is more time with eyeballs staring at the game, but it says nothing at all about the quality of engagement that the player is experiencing. In most cases, busywork design creates low-quality engagement because all it actually does is test a player’s tolerance and patience.

Aside from the very young and those with addictive personality disorders, players realise after a while that they are being made to wait or wander around. They don’t particularly relish the feeling but they stay in the game for a while in order to get to the good bits. They will maybe even transact (buy virtual goods) in order to skip the tedium to get there. They won’t like you or your game as a result, but some companies may be inclined to think ‘So What?’

Well, unless you have a locked-in audience like Zynga or Activision arguably do, you are quite likely to lose players to a better competitor if your attitude is So What. Players are tolerant of busywork only while there is no credible alternative, and when it shows up they leave. MySpace to Facebook, Yahoo to Google, PlayStation to Wii, PCs to tablets and so on. Players want meaning, not timewasting.

What is meaning in this context? A meaningful action is any which the player takes that causes a deliberate change in the game world.

Players want to take meaningful action. They want to craft their farm, lay out their city, defeat an enemy, beat a high score, solve a puzzle in short to cause significant change and feel the difference of action versus no action. What game developers who create busywork are actually doing is confusing wins with meaningful actions. The busywork design essentially says this: If you hang around long enough, I will let you take a meaningful action every once in a while.

It seems okay to make a player jump through a hoop 100 times in order to be able to do something fun, and there are to be plenty of examples of games that do this. It’s not really, however, and players push back. They try to game the game (as it were) to get past the busywork. They figure out the quickest way to grind, the fastest way to get more energy, the most immediate way to overcome vacuuming (see below) and then that is what they will do.

Players will try to outwit the game itself, as though the imposed busywork is a system to be solved, rather than play the game as intended. This leads to all sorts of unintended consequences, including finding breaks in the game logic, employing cheat codes, hacking, creating dummy profiles and so on. Whatever the tactic may be, players will always try to subvert busywork rather than play in the spirit of it for the simple reason that it’s just wasting their time not to.

Nobody likes to be jerked around.

 

Types of Busywork

Busywork is any action that could conceivably be automated or skipped entirely. Here are some examples:

Traveling: Walking, driving or flying from one encounter to another across a map is pretty common in massive multiplayer, roleplaying or sandbox games. The game makes the player go from point A to point B in real time, and depending on the game it can become tedious.

Grinding: Part of the fun of any game is mastery, and repeating a lot of similar challenges helps with that. In racing games, for example, you will often have multiple races run around the same track while you try to win, beat lap times and other players. This is good.

Grinding, on the other hand, is repetition with little variation, challenge, and over hundreds of identical encounters. It dispenses with the improvement aspect and simply insists that the player should keep cranking the same handle over and over and over. This is bad.

Harvesting: Harvesting is busywork which involves collection, watering and other similar maintenance actions. The player arrives into his game and the first thing he has to do is click to collect crops, and coins arising from them, sweep up rubbish, fix broken things in the game environment and so on. It doesn’t extend (improve, get more interesting), and tends to become overbearing as the game expands. This is especially the case if the game actions are metered by energy (or similar) and that energy does not keep pace with the player’s progress.

Vacuuming: Vacuuming is a kind of busywork seen commonly in adventure games. The player is a clue-hunter and when he enters a scene there are many potential clues and objects for him to find. In the designer’s mind this should translate into a kind of game immersion that gets the player involved in the story, but what actually happens is the opposite.

Players instead scan the area methodically. In 2D adventure games this means that they move their mouse left to right, in a series of rows, until the mouse suddenly highlights on an object. In LA Noire the equivalent is for the player to walk around the walls of the room and then inward in an ever decreasing spiral until their joypad vibrates, like someone vacuuming a bedroom. All it does is lengthen the game time.

Talking: The player enters a town and there are a number of characters to talk to. In some games the dialogue is selectable, so the player can guide himself through the conversation and learn more or less as he wishes. In others it is hard-wired. The experience of talkie sections in games is actually more like flipping switches in a large room to find out which one activates the overhead light.

Talking is essentially an activation and permutation exercise in which the content matters a lot less than getting to the right on/off combination which lets the player proceed. Talking is not a deliberate game action that causes change. The player is simply asked to choose X or Y repeatedly and with the sensation that the game will steer toward Y anyway. So it’s busywork.

Obligation: One of the persistent myths around social games is that because they are on social networks, they must involve a lot of social content. In actuality they involve a significant degree of forced contact between players to allow them to proceed but it is entirely token as far as the sociality of it is concerned.

Many social games oblige players to invite friends, send each other requests, give each other gifts in the hope of reciprocity and other behaviours. The game is simply telling the player to complete rudimentary tasks and wait before being allowed to continue, which is classic busywork.

Looting: Slot machines, Bingo, Roulette and other luck games require the player to do nothing more than pull a handle or pick a number, with the prospect of a reward at the other end of this activity. The same action exists in other games, such as the loot drop in massive multiplayer games, where every once in a while the player receives a special reward for killing another orc.

It is fashionable at the moment to think of these occurrences as rewards. A more apt description, however, is looting. While the game may well adjust the levels of loot depending on various factors, the busywork of looting is simply the rolling of a die repeatedly and hoping for a 6.

 

Minimising Busywork

I, like many players, have enjoyed driving around Liberty City, talking to random characters in Fallout 3, hunting for clues in Blade Runner and I even found the chain-harvesting of goods and rent in CityVille oddly fun for a while. A little busywork is perfectly fine and can give the player a chance to soak in the game world, making the high points of the game that much higher because they are punctuated and paced.

Busywork and meaningful actions are also sometimes interchangeable purely depending on their context. Riding around in the desert to go from one mission to the next in Red Dead Redemption is busywork which is occasionally interrupted by random events. However riding into a new area to chase down an enemy is meaningful because it changes the world. The map expands, the enemy is killed, a new mission is unlocked and the player wins.

What I am arguing for is minimising busywork. Do I really need to walk all the way around the Citadel to find characters to talk to in Mass Effect, or could the game shortcut that process significantly? Do you really have to include manual harvesting for every last plant in your farm game, or could you include an automated farm worker who collects the crops when they are grown? Do I really need to vacuum every last corner of a room looking for clues, or could you include a visual aura around each important one?

Often the answer to these questions is an emphatic no. They are not needed, and they are just cruft. While the ideals behind them may be noble or ignoble, cruft is still cruft and should be excised where possible.

One way is to simply skip the content. Moving on with the game, reducing those cut-scenes to the bare essentials, getting the player to the next level minus the preamble and so forth are examples of this. However not all games are nor should be intense action simulators or strategy games, so sometimes it’s more about minimising rather than removing the busywork.

Choosing the right control scheme, for example, can soften busywork significantly. LA Noire could be a much smoother experience if the vacuuming behaviour wasn’t reliant on limited third person controls, for example, and the prominence of the somewhat pointless notebook function were reduced.

A third option is to streamline reward collection. In God of War the player’s rewards often do not need to be manually collected. They will travel toward him. Many other games oblige the player to walk over and pick up each individual object, and so they are comparatively sluggish.

Incorporating writing into the game rather than in discrete parts is a fourth option. Why stop play for a staged branched-dialogue sequence (as roleplaying games insist on doing even though it’s never fun) when you could use alongside dialogue instead? It’s much better to impart the feel of the game world without the comparatively egotistical design choice of making players stop to listen to your bad writing.

There are many more ways to minimise busywork. The common trait that they share is to automate that which can be automated to get the player back to causing deliberate change as quickly as possible. If you make your players jump through needless hoops, conduct pointless conversation, harvest endless crops and so on then just what kind of experience do you think you are actually delivering to them?

I guarantee it’s not nearly as high minded as you’d hope.

 

The Busywork Test

Ideally what you should do is go through of every type of game action in your design and consider the following questions:

1. Does the action cause a deliberate change the game world?
2. Does it permit significant variation?
3. Does it lead to a win?
4. Does it lead to a death?
5. Does it open up a new game area or impart a reward?
6. Does it costs the player anything? (including time)

If the answers are mostly no (or yes for the last one), then it’s likely that the action is busywork, and you should take steps to minimise it.

 

(today’s image came from Noel Natter’s blog)

Comments

[Brian Shih]

I'm curious if you can expand upon your views about Zynga (and Zynga-like) games. I agree that people playing the ville games may be locked in due to their network, but how do you explain the same rise of games on the iPhone?

In other words, games that basically copy Farmville (Tap Zoo, Tiny Chef, etc) are creating the same kind of busywork experiences, but without the audience lock-in, yet still massively succeeding.

[Tadhg]

Hi Brian,

I think it's pretty simple. There's three broad reasons why they work in both formats.

The first is that the games are free. It really can't be overstated how much this makes a difference to game distribution. Whether it's FarmVille or Tap Zoo, the same applies.

The second is that they both get access to a notifications system which serves as a way to pull players back in. On Facebook it's Notification Requests , Emails and Counters, whereas on iPhone it's Push. The basic function (nudging players) is the same though.

The third is visibility. On Facebook it tends to be the case that a successful beachhead app can make it geometrically easier for a second app to be up-taken because the Facebook interface sucks at discovery for the average non-technical user. They really only see the most recently accessed games on the home page, and when they enter their game they see the browser cross-promotion bar. Advertising also plays a massive part in app uptake, and Zynga in particular were always willing to spend big in that area where their competitors didn't.

A similar practise exists on iPhone games, but on iPhone you also have the added bonus of the iTunes home page, and if you can get your game installed onto someone's phone then chances are it will stay there. A lot of iDevice users don't really know how to uninstall or rearrange their apps, so once you're in their line of sight you have a beach head.

The thing to remember is that there are hundreds of other games using the same gameplay formulae as the successful ones, but failed. Looked at in terms of numbers of releases, the success rate of social apps is just as bad as any other kind of game, but if you do manage to get that beach-head then with the right advertising, cross promotion and visibility strategy you stand a strong chance of being able to float many releases and be successful.

[Robert Massaioli]

TL;DR: Optional busywork is what you really need and that also aids replayability.

I agree that busywork is not fun but I have a slightly different view that relates strongly to the replayability of a game. Lets use TES:Oblivion as our example, most specifically the 'Fast Travel' feature. The feature is there so that you can skip vast swathes of walking running and jumping if you choose to and just get straight to the action. The point here is that you can play the game without fast travelling and enjoy the scenery and find new and interesting places on the way. Or, if you find that is too much Busywork, then just fast travel to where you need to be. All in all I think this is the right was to do it: you can have busywork in your game, but give the user the option to skip it completely if they want to. The 'autorun' feature in most RPG's is another good example of this, you have alot of land to run over so the game is nice enough to say "okay, just press this button and we will keep running for you until you reach your destination"; once again giving the player the option whether or not to engage in busywork.

This style of optional busywork aides replayability because it means that in the second run through the player can skip many many parts of the busywork and just get straight to the parts of the game that they thought were fun. I do play Oblivion again for that very reason.

[Joe Cooper]

I don't know that that actually qualifies as busywork. When I played Morrowind, I preferred to walk through the wilderness and eschewed Strider use specifically because I felt that being in the wilderness, dealing with monsters, the logistical challenge, finding ruins and being in a dangerous situation _was_ the core game.

But they have a skip-that feature because of the quest system; someone may have something specific on their minds and prefer to step over the wilderness to get to what they're doing.

The dialog, at least in Morrowind (the hideous face art, writing and bad voice work in Oblivion and limited personal time made me skip that one) didn't have much of the busywork either. Click click and you see the writing, no branching nonsese.

The prime example of busywork in the game would be moving inventory items, and in Morrowind they added buttons like "remove all" (from a body) and they take steps to mitigate these.

The fast walk and striders are an example of adding a skip-that feature to something that SOME players MIGHT consider busywork SOMETIMES even though it isn't exactly so.

In short, the ES games were very mindful of busywork and worked to alleviate it even when only a subset of players might consider something in the way.

Fast walk is far more akin to games like Mario RPG which have "Choose location" style maps than optional busywork.

[Austinat]

Very good topic.

One could argue that the latest crop of WoW dailies is nothing but busywork too. The Baradin Hold rewards are stretched out so thin and the time needed is much bigger than in previous expansions (e.g. to get a Netherwing drake or to get stuff from the Shangrila ogres or what their name was).

I would argue that sorting things in an inventory isn't really busywork but part of the fun, at least for me. I enjoyed doing that, be it party min-maxing in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale or trying to put as much valuable stuff in my character's bags in TES: Oblivion.

[Joe Cooper]

Inventory isn't necessarily busywork, no, I kinda glossed over that. I used to spend time doing that and even enjoyed it. Sorting your inventory according to your situation and plan is something only the player can do and takes some thought an the decisions matter.

But if you want to take all from a chest, you don't have to click one by one, there's a button for that so that the computer can smooth the process for you. This is the mindfulness I refer to.

I don't know much about WoW but they are reportedly hitting some hard times also so if they changed from non-busywork to busywork, that might be related.

[Ian Sturrock]

I'm probably going to keep harping on about the whole intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards thing (possibly forever), but one of the core issues with busywork is that it's almost always an extrinsically focused activity. Which is the same thing as saying it's not fun, I guess. You don't do it in a game because it's intrinsically enjoyable -- you do it solely to achieve another, largely unrelated goal. In terms of your Seven Steps to the Epic Win article, the big problem with busywork is that though it may have actions, loops, and dynamics, the wins in them are so trivial as to be practically non-existent -- you don't really get any great "win" buzz from them, just a relief that you can get on with the game proper.

[Piotrbugno]

Very interesting reading, as usual.

I agree with Robert Massaioli: the best solution is optional busywork, because sometimes it's part of the fun.

On Mass Effect 2 I fast skip through boring dialogues but I enjoy for the fifth or sixth time the best ones (mostly involving Krogans!) because they contribute to the game's unique atmosphere.