Delay: Paying Attention to Energy Mechanics

by Zoya Street

Why do so many casual games tell you to stop playing them?

If you’ve ever run out of lives in Candy Crush Saga or played a Zynga game, you’ve encountered an energy mechanic – you run out of a resource, and have to stop playing while it regenerates or pay money to continue.

In this short collection of essays, Zoya Street explores energy mechanics. Each essay weaves in a new idea, and then applies those ideas to key examples from social and mobile gaming, bringing together game design theory with queer theory, anthropology and a study of the recent history of social game design.

Genres: Video Games, Nonfiction, Games

ebook

First published June 1, 2014

Reviews

[Red🏳️‍⚧️ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that deftly manages to meld business and psychosocial analysis, queer theory and critical video game research, Delay is a book with a lot going for it. While covering things of an academic nature, it never succumbs to dry sluggishness and clearly is the result of strong editing, moving briskly and coherently from topic to topic. Though there is the occasional thought brought to the table that I wished Street would tarry on a moment longer, by and large every idea has its day in court.

Such ideas! I came to this as someone who'd never heard of energy mechanics but has also been a gamer for about as long as my capacity to form memories. I spend time on Critical Distance and elsewhere looking for intelligent deconstructions and deep dives on the gaming medium. Here you find the marks of some of the best of that work, which in the same breath as discussing attention/immersion and the applications of differing reward mechanics, also speaks of the evolution of the relationship between parent and child in the 20th century, speaks of the nature of shame. The book has the ingredients to make a person wiser as well as smarter, and I highlighted a number of passages I intend to revisit and ruminate on in the future.

A quick read, a clever read, a joy to read. I recommend it for people of multiple stripes, who will find a number of real world corollaries and uses for this investigation into the construction of games.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a short but very interesting book on the use of energy mechanics in casual games. Energy mechanics is the system of the game stopping and giving the gamer a choice to wait a while to play again or pay to play immedeatly. Street uses a lot of good theory to talk about the permutations involved in this. I liked the behavior aspect of it, though I wish the book was a little longer. The topic could have handled more length.