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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Zorba at least had some involvement in Rimworld, no idea to what extent. But he did have an excellent story about the psychology of game design from his work on the game. I wish I had the link, but alas I don't.

This?

Not what I was thinking of, though that is interesting (I don't think I read it before). Basically the story I remember Zorba telling was this:

At one point in the development of Rimworld, sun lamps were on 24h a day despite the fact that plants can't actually grow at night. That annoyed players, who felt it was silly for the game to charge them power around the clock for sun lamps that weren't even having an effect for half the day. But what the players didn't know, is that was a deliberate design decision - sun lamps were intended to suck down power as a cost for how useful it is to be able to grow plants inside a mountain or whatever. So, in the end, they wound up making sun lamps shut off at night but doubled the power cost during the day. Same game result (arguably even more punishing for the player since they needed to have higher peak power), and the players were much happier with it.

Ah, yeah, that was pretty good. Link is at here.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks for the link!

Reminds me of the WoW example. In the beginning of world of warcraft there was a system to penalize people who played too often and incentivize logging off. After gaining a certain amount of experience in a session you'd get a 50% experience penalty. Players hated it and rebelled. Blizzard's response was to half player experience but give a "rested" bonus doubling player experience for the a certain amount of a experience. Essentially the same system. Players loved it.

Yeah, that's another great example of the same phenomenon. If memory serves that came up in whatever thread Zorba shared the Rimworld story, as well.

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