I don’t think I’ve made a tumblr post about GodVille, so this is my post about my entire experience with the game.

        I failed to be engaged by this game at every level.

        Maybe playing it as a Google Chrome extension would have been more fun, but I don’t use Chrome that much and I wasn’t engaged enough to want to open a browser to play it. That is, I wouldn’t open my browser solely to play it. I would, absolutely, open my browser and do nothing but play BvS. I open my browser just to play EchoBazaar multiple times per day. If I remembered GodVille at all, it was as “well I’ve got five seconds to waste.”

        After the first few days I stopped reading those amazing journal entries. I just checked my hero’s equipment, healed him if he needed it, then went off. Even generic facebook games engage me - for whatever brief period of time - more than GodVille did. I just felt absolutely no reason to “play”. As an iPhone app - something I would have instant access to, anywhere, any time - it might be perfectly acceptable. Tolerable for a few minutes per day. But when I try to go for a PvP fight - the most involving part of the game - and it takes half an hour, with no signs of stopping (both the other player and I had stocked up on healing power), that’s bullshit. You don’t spend half an hour in a single PvP fight in a real game, and you shouldn’t spend half an hour in a PvP fight in a game that otherwise involves no real “gameplay.” I wasn’t sitting there watching the stupid fight, namely because it is stupid, but I tabbed over every once in a while to click heal.

        I think there’s some kind of passive bonus if you’ve on the page (“watching your hero”) during a PvP fight? But essentially what it amounts to is a big waste of time for two people, when the fight could move 2-5x faster and nobody would be hurt.

        So I quit before the fight was over and decided I didn’t care who won, but I went back a few minutes ago to tick the “pure Zero Player Game” button. For the record, I did not check to see who won the fight. But what the pure ZPG button means is that my hero will revive himself and continue doing the exact same thing he had been, until their servers go down or they implement inactivity deletion.

        The true lesson is that a game needs to be engaging, as opposed to “immersive” or “good” or any of these other things. Vael said it in a post about Echo Bazaar - it’s not like the gameplay is very “good”, it’s just so damn interesting that you can’t give it up. Its interactive story, unique to it as a game, makes it engaging. In Billy vs Snakeman, the basic form of engagement is character progress - get more shiny stuffs to power up your character, do more content, get more stuff. I’ve reached the very tip of the shiny stuff iceberg, and I’ve stopped playing my daily stamina. I go on the weekends for BillyCon (in-game conventions, which are amazing) but aside from that I’m just not engaged anymore. I was more engaged in the game while grinding stats than I am with my current stage of “throw stamina at monster, hopefully get reward.”

        So, engagement. Something browser based games have to work really hard to create. I’ll also note that I haven’t logged into MurCity or MonBre for months, even though I would only need to go on for thirty seconds. Again, no engagement anymore. I’ve tried a few skill builds and that’s that, unless I were to try a different race.

        I’m not really going anywhere with this, but there you go. Stay tuned next time for similar ramblings about the current “console generation,” which will likely become an outdated term in a few years when the Wii 2 comes out!