Liveblog of talk on Sporadic Play, Bryan Cash & Jeremy Gibson
Sporadic play describes a game where mechanics intentionally limit how often a player interacts with a persistent game world. We’ll talk about history with it, why it is a good thing, design concepts, and a bit about the future.
HISTORY… IN REVERSE
Most obvious place to start — Facebook. Look at the top 20 games here. Farmville is #1 and uses sporadic play. Mafia Wars, Petville, YoVille, 16 of the top 20 are sporadic play games. If you add up the MAU, you get 332m people, which is kinda BS, but just in the top 20.
It has also been around in console and traditional PC games. Animal Crossing, a game where as time went on in real life, events like Christmas happened in the game too. Seasons, real time, limiting what you can do based on the real time of the real. Another one was Kingdom of Loathing in 2002, a web game, limited number of things you can do based on action points.
