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Anticipation and necessary delay between tasks.

Rest assured it's intentional (though it's not my type of gameplay).

It's a mechanism of pacing the game flow. The earliest implementation I've seen of that was in the realtime combat mechanics of the JRPGs. After that it also appeared in RTS as and eventually spread to MMOs and other genres in variation (ie reload time, ie cool down time, etc..).

It's a meme which has served a use and has been adopted and adapted as a tool for game designers. Maybe it's overused, but players naturally can grasp the concept of time to finish and its better to either finish faster or longer things are better.

Other common memes include the power up, the point scoring system, health, etc.. There just a vocabulary which have evolved and survived in game designers and players mind. Someone should do an exhaustive exploration of these memes.

-ddn

People like carrots on a stick in front of them. It may be unfun to you, but game developers aren't trying to sell games to you. theyre trying to make money, and causing millions of people to stay that extra month because of waitplay will get them more money.

waitplay also adds value. It becomes an added type of payment. If I have to wait 30 minutes for item A or 2 hours for item B, item B is probably better. Likewise, this value can carry over to compare to real world objects. I waited 2 hours for this thing, but I worked 2 hours to make enough money to pay for lunch. This thing has similar value to the lunch I ate today.

etc. etc.

This also carries to the games overall value. "I spent 200 hours waiting in this game, it must be worth my time!"

It's sleight of hand that only benefits the developer.

The developer gets to say that you can spend X hours playing their game, without having to add enough content to actually fill all X hours with interactive features.

In MMOs, it means that it'll take longer for a player to experience all the content in the game, which will force them to stay subscribed for a longer period.

Also in the case of MMOs, it also dramatically relaxes server processing if a large number of players are waiting for crafting/fishing/fast travel to finish before they can do anything else.

Paradoxically if people value their time, then making them wait for something means it has greater relative value than something which they instantly get. This only works within a fiction of a game ofcoruse, in real life people want the complete opposite and that is probably where the disjunction lies.

-ddn

Quote: Original post by ddn3
Paradoxically if people value their time, then making them wait for something means it has greater relative value than something which they instantly get. This only works within a fiction of a game ofcoruse, in real life people want the complete opposite and that is probably where the disjunction lies.

-ddn

Or, in a game, if they are forced to wait too long, they'll go play a better game.

The difference between "Waitplay" and "Play" is that while you might be waiting at times in "Play", (Something to build, a spell/attack to be ready again, etc.) you are having fun and engaged in the activity.

Wurm-Online's "Click this menu to do watch a progress bar" is an excellent example of NOT being overly engaging.

Quote: Original post by ddn3
Paradoxically if people value their time, then making them wait for something means it has greater relative value than something which they instantly get. This only works within a fiction of a game ofcoruse, in real life people want the complete opposite and that is probably where the disjunction lies.

-ddn

Your last sentence is not true. It happens in the real world too, except we have things we value more than time like food and water that get added into the equation.

Money is a great example of how time spent on something equates to value. If two people have $25,000 in their bank account and one makes $30,000 a week the other $30,000 a year I'd wager the latter would be less likely to spend his $25,000 because he spent more time making it and that might not equate to the perceived value of a car or new TV.

That is of course unless you live in america...

"waitplay" makes sense in web empire building games. It ensures that PvP conflict happens over the course of a day or three, rather than over the course of an hour late at night. A well designed web game is also set up so that you always have mechanics that are real time: communication, information gathering, the map, or similar.