I haven't played Dungeon Keeper Mobile, and I doubt I ever will. I haven't played a lot of these "free to play" games. If I have free time with nothing but my phone, I'll generally read something on it instead. But then these games aren't for me.
Jim Sterling, in the video, complained about how little there was to do in Dungeon Keeper Mobile. You'd start the game, click a couple times to place down a few blocks or dig or put things down, and that was it; you'd have to wait a couple hours for that task to complete before you could do anything else. That was the "gameplay." Sterling focused on the fact that the game would harangue you to pay some real money to speed up the process. It's a game that seems built primarily to make money off the weak-willed, by making the waits agonizingly long. It's temporarily holding your gameplay hostage, for money.
And I'm going to try to defend them.
Something else Jim Sterling says in the review is that in Dungeon Keeper Mobile, despite ostensibly being a free to play game, you don't actually "play" anything, and that it's not a game. Sterling calls Dungeon Keeper Mobile "free to wait," which is pretty clever; I don't know if he came up with that term or not.
But disregard the whole monetization aspect for a moment here: I think there's merit in games where progress is limited by time instead of skill. That's not what I think Sterling was arguing against at all, to be clear. He was mostly incensed by the crass money extracting aspect of it. But the review is what made me think about this more, and I do think games that ask you to "wait" instead of "play" have their purpose and their audience.
It's not just Dungeon Keeper Mobile that makes you wait. There's Farmville, there's Tiny Tower, there's The Simpsons: Tapped Out and Clash of Clans and Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector. These are all games that have their roots in games like Simcity (there's also a mobile Simcity game of course), but the process is stretched out more. It's takes time to build, and it takes time to build up money or gems or whatever to do that building. You have to wait. And if you don't want to do that, you can pay.
Who are these types of games for, if they're not for Jim Sterling, or me? For some companies, sure, a huge appeal to making these games is to hook in "whales," the term used for the small percentage of addicted players who steadily keep buying in-game things in ostensibly free games and putting money into the developers' pockets, and who make up the bulk of their profits. (More articles on whales here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/chasing_the_whale_examining_the_.php
http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobile-game-makers-try-to-catch-more-whales-who-pay-for-free-games-1431306115 )
But that doesn't mean those games can't also be fun for those that take the "free" part of "free to play" to heart. These time-gating mechanics don't just have only be predatory or exploitative, just like the quarter-munching arcade ecosystem of yesteryear still produced some pretty darn decent games also.
Nolan Bushnell was a key figure back then in the arcade era of the 70s and 80s, and he's cemented in video game history -- founder of Atari, inventor of Pong, he coined an axiom that's still prevalent in game design today: games should be easy to learn, but difficult to master.
What "easy to learn, difficult to master" basically comes down to is this: the game should be easily understood even if you've never played it before, and you should be able to progress quickly at the start, but then the difficulty will ramp up and you'll find later progress before you hit another game over to come more incrementally, and you'll have to feed more quarters in to keep going. Get them hooked, and keep them coming back for more, but if they want to progress they're going to have to master the mechanics, or at least memorize the levels.
Now, exactly how well today's games fulfil the "easy to learn" part, or what the trade-offs or implications of "difficult to master" are, I'm not getting too into here. But a lot of console games these days require a level of commitment of both time and energy, where even starting them up can take a couple minutes before you get into the game proper. And that doesn't translate to smartphones; there's a huge audience out there that doesn't want to bother with any of that. They don't particularly want to master, or even really learn; those sound an awful lot like work, doesn't it?
These people want something more low maintenance. So having a game that mostly just asks you to tap a few buttons every day or so for just a minute, that works. Maybe that level of interactivity doesn't seem all that engaging compared to Dark Souls, but they're not looking for engagement, they're looking for a brief distraction while waiting for their lunch to arrive. Once they've installed these types of games, they'll always be there in the player's pocket; the game doesn't need to lure them back to an arcade in the mall. So what these games ask of players is different from those arcade games: players don't have to try, all they have to do is... do. There are decisions that can be made, but they're low stakes: you can decide what to buy, where to put it, what tasks to do, but you can't get a game over screen, you don't ever have to start over. And the game instead limits "progress" by parcelling out rewards not for skill mastery, but through the simple passage of time.
Even looking at mobile games that require a bit more "skill", Angry Birds or Puzzles and Dragons or Fruit Ninja, choosing to play those games requires commitment, a decision, because you have to choose to start up another game and commit to finishing a level or round; it's being stuck at a supermarket looking at the seven different types of balsamic vinegar, or being unable to choose from your Steam Library what game to play next.
Instead, if there's something that just asks for two minutes of your time every six hours or whenever you get around to it, to just check in on your farm/city/cat collection? Why wouldn't that be appealing, to people who are just looking for something to fiddle with briefly? These games have permanence. You're not just beating a high score, or you're not just rewarded with progress, you're rewarded with... rewards! Your virtual tower gets a barber shop, and next time you check in, it can get a restaurant.
These games, instead of asking for skill mastery, instead of asking for you to actively use your time to learn their intricacies, they ask you to invest only passive time. You wait: you work, you do other things, and you check back in when you come around to it, when you have the free time, and you choose where to put the new . You admire your burgeoning village, check your income, start some building projects, ogle your next unlock, and then you're at your stop, and you put your phone away and go off on your merry way. And over days, weeks, months of real time, your little town is built up, takes shape, and flourishes.
It's a low-intensity project: it's a jigsaw puzzle, it's a potted plant you coax from seed to bloom, slowly. But the entry level for these games is even easier than either of those, because it's just virtual space on your phone, with no up-front costs. Your town doesn't die off if you forget to check in on it. You can ignore it if you want, grow sick of it and return to it after a month or two away. And soon you grow a fondness for this little virtual thing of yours, that you put time into, but in minutes over months, not hour after hour, and in order to create something, not in order to beat it.
We're seeing games change with the delivery system. The earliest Mario games, those still followed arcade game design principles, with their 1-ups, their count-down timers, and their game over screens, despite there being no quarters in play to extract from the players -- that had already happened beforehand, when the game was bought.
Ratchet and Clank was the first platformer I remember that dispensed with that game over screen entirely; you die, and the screen goes dark briefly, then you just start off a bit further back in the level, none the worse for wear. Why have game overs and design games around that conceit any more, now that the machine is in the player's house every day, instead of at the mall or at the back of the convenience store? That's a question that was now being asked. And why should smartphone games follow implicit rules about what games have to be?
With everything connected, with consoles, computers, and phones all with on-line ecosystems right there, we're seeing different types of games emerge, and we're seeing different revenue models along with that. The seemingly increased focus on monetization schemes over "fun" is disconcerting, sure. And unfortunately, it seems like the mobile game market won't support non-free price points, so the few willing to pay (a lot) will have to bear the development cost for the free riders, and the games are going to be developed with that in mind. The mechanics of waiting itself, though, I still think there's something there.
We're seen games move beyond "easy to learn, difficult to master" by now, and we've seen them move back. We've seen games trying to tell stories, be sandboxes, challenge perceptions instead of skills, teach and provoke and simulate and stimulate, and we've seen games become more complicated, bigger, more cinematic, and also shrink, strip down, and go back to basics.
There are already so many ultra-intense games out there are meant to challenge, that throw down gauntlets, that require time and energy and work to progress. So why can't we also have some games for those who wait?
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