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

[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.