And start.
So yeah, we're talking about jokes, it started as a joke.
The entire research started as a joke.
And we were talking about idle games.
And we're a lot of people.
It's-- yeah, well, me and then Sultana and Andrew and Jessica
and Lennart, who is here, and Z, who is here, and Theresa.
And it's also involving a bunch of institutions
that I'm not going to read all out now,
if it's all fine with you.
But it was nice.
We were all coming together.
You might be wondering or some of you
might be wondering what are idle games.
They're like-- well, we're playing one right now.
If you look at the smaller corner,
we're currently counting up a slide progress.
Basically, we're allocating resources.
And in this case, we're allocating slides.
And it's going to be exciting, as much
as it can be in this context.
So what was our motivation?
Like why would you look into games?
I mean, these games are called trash or gutter culture,
as one of our participants called it.
There are tacit engagements in mobile.
And we were like, we really like them.
And there's interesting things happening in that space.
We played Kittens game a lot.
At least Z and Jess also.
There was a book about that.
How it's just like to play Kittens game.
And we were also interested in the experience and game-play
that happens there.
These are games with tacit engagements,
and you can see more about the player
experience in Cutting et al.
from this year.
And I think-- is that you?
Yeah.
It's an interesting paper if you are really into idle games.
And they say we are basically busy doing nothing.
And others say you're waiting to play.
So what did we do?
We did do interviews.
We played a bunch of games in the mode of playing well,
like critical reading, critical playing, and deep engagements.
And we looked at receptions.
Basically, yeah.
We looked at a bunch of articles that
were talking about these games and then
we did a thematic analysis on them.
As you see the slide progress is getting up, so is my speed.
And you have heard a lot about thematic analysis,
so I don't have to explain the specifics anymore,
but here you can see our steps that we did
and how we did them.
We were just praised so much for the transparency
of our methods, that I also wanted to show that here.
So yeah.
And then-- yeah.
We also really, really like playing these games.
It's fun for us.
It's a fun that we don't necessarily understand,
but that's our position from which we came into this,
which matters when you do--
positionality matters.
And so we looked at 13 games that we played,
basically all of us.
And then we looked at 26 popular texts
were discussing these games.
10 per minute, six interviews.
And they were conducted via chat and video.
That was well timed.
So our participants were on the one hand, Lucas Mills,
who was involved in Tap Titans and Tap Titans 2.
We had Grumdrig who had progress quest.
One of the very early ones.
The games that play themselves.
Jake Hollands, who did Space Plan and Bloodrizr, who did
Kittens game, which probably inspired the Kittens crypto
game as well.
Sorry.
Frank Lantz's Universal Paperclips
that made a big buzz, and then Ian Bogost, Cow Clicker.
I couldn't play that other than this way.
We're now on mega slides, because they are magenta,
which is a paradigm shift.
We have encountered a paradigm shift
where a resource of slides changed
into a different resource.
Yeah.
[INAUDIBLE] so to speak.
And these paradigm shifts are usually
embedded in a narrative.
This is one of our themes that we could establish.
So what Bloodrizr says there is, my favorite concept
is an idea of paradigm shift.
Especially when you are not aware of it.
In Candy Box, another idle game, you
start with a single button and end with an rpg
system, inventory and road map.
Sorry.
In Sandcastle Builder, another game,
you start with a single picture and end with time travel
and industrial production of sand.
This is something I tried to replicate and crank up to 11.
So what that entails, is that there
are stories that are told through the allocation
of resources.
But it's also kind of funny.
Jake Hollands said, well, obviously it
started as sort of a joke.
Sort of highlighting video games or Skinner boxes just sort of
dressed up.
And I think that's great how that happened.
And it just-- it usually starts with an idea of how far can
I go.
That's what we also found.
What do these developers do with designers in the auto game
vision that's the same person.
And it's just-- it gets even absurder.
It's not even cows or the absence of cows.
It's just pictures of cows.
It's ridiculous.
But it's not more ridiculous than anything.
Players imbued them with meaning,
and collective meaning.
They recognize those meanings, is how Ian Bogost said.
But since the cowpocalypse, rapture, all
have been raptured.
There are no cows anymore.
So you play with the absence of cows.
And also, personal play was a motivator for design.
Franklin said, I wanted something simple to execute,
because I started Universal Paperclips
as an exercise in programming, improving my programming
skills.
And I'm not a great programmer, so I wanted something simple.
And I didn't read the rest.
Because time.
But essentially, yeah.
He said he wanted something simple
and he realized very fast it got more complex than that.
And now you have a side note.
So his wife did the math.
One of the reasons why I started working on Kittens,
was because I was sick of games like Puppy
Clicker, or something clicker, said Bloodrizr.
So what we see is also that a lot
of these enthusiastic designers are playing these games,
and then use the scent as a motivator.
They're like, there could be something different there.
I want to create something different.
So it comes from that.
That they engage with these games.
And then, people are also trying to be careful.
Like Jake Hollands said, of course
it is by nature so addictive.
I just summarize.
They're trying to be careful about addiction.
At least some of them.
And they're trying to engage modes
where you can stop playing and have a moment of letting it go.
They have some micro transactions,
or some way of paying it.
Either as the full game, or repeatedly, or as donations,
or not anymore, or forgetting about it.
And they also offer noncommittal invitations to play.
So you can play, but the game basically
goes forward without you.
You're invited to participate, but you're not
at the center of the world.
You're a spectator.
So it's like spectator play, but you have agency over it.
But you don't have to.
The game doesn't care.
It's about the game not the player so to speak.
Because you're de-centering the player.
I'm so glad.
We level up power slides.
They're purple.
So what we did is, we then tried to go to,
what does this mean for the genre having
talked to all these designers?
So we tried a little bit of refining the genre.
Not only on interactivity, but also on what happens there.
So at the one hand, you have the de-centering of the player,
and the busy doing nothing, and the waiting to play,
and the short bursts of engagement.
But on the other hand, we could identify something
that has been little discussed previously,
which is that there are narrative systems
and systematic narratives.
That there is exploration and that there is carpentry.
What we mean with carpentry is in--
these games do philosophy.
At least if you want to.
There is a tension between exploitative mechanisms and art
forms, but some of them do philosophy.
And we had some design insights that we also
packed into guidelines.
And they center on taking care by design,
through active reflection.
That designers could plan for a systematic narrative arcs.
And could care for creating these safe places
for exploration, where you come back,
but where you can explore without making a mistake,
because the game plays for itself.
So yeah.
This is game over.
So thank you.
Stay in touch.
Thank you, and congratulations again
for the honorable mention.
Do you have any questions from the audience?
I have a really quick question because I'm
playing this penguin idle game.
I don't know if you guys--
my Twitter handle is @arcticpenguin,
so I really love penguins.
And one of the reasons I play is because the aesthetics are just
so beautiful and calming.
And I was wondering if that's anything that you
saw in some of your themes.
Well, the first one had this aesthetic,
and it carried through a little bit through the genre.
But you do have moments where there are then visual things,
and you have it under a more commercially oriented side,
which is a lot of--
it's very busy then usually.
But what I really liked for precisely the same reason,
just in playing, was Space Plan, because it was really calming.
And also it has an end.
It lets you go.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
Adrian Schneider from Queen's University.
And I was wondering, it seems like it's a fuzzy logic,
like semi relatedness.
But games where you have to wait for points
to rack up before you can do anything,
but when they're not racking up, the game itself is idle.
So would that count as partly an idle game
or does that not fall under the umbrella?
That's me.
So when you're not playing, nothings happening?
Well, you can-- those game that try to scam you
into giving them money.
And you build a building, and it takes eight days to finish,
but if you pay a coin now, it finishes instantly.
Right.
We have usually thought about those
as not really falling into idle games, right?
Because the mechanic is more around spending money
as a form of play, and less about handing off
control and experience of the game,
to the game to just do its thing, so.
Can I add?
Yeah.
So Kiev and Richardson, I think, talked about that
also at length, and how the community of players
actually really frowns upon paying to play
and is really engaging with the experience of waiting to play.
It's also like a status negotiation.
We have time for another question.
Hi.
Official to the University of York.
I was just wondering if you had any figures
off the top of your head, of how popular these games are?
I was just curious.
No.
That was not something that I was interested in.
And so I didn't let anyone else.
We mentioned it in the paper.
Oh, we mentioned it?
Yeah.
I think there may be numbers.
There might be numbers in the paper
because I feel like we may have had to justify that
to reviewers at some point.
Just to why it mattered.
Oh, yeah.
And please, anyone who has ever reviewed the paper,
please read the acknowledgments.
We really appreciate the 12 reviewers who were ultimately
involved in this.
Thank you very much.
Our final presentation for the day
is about peer feedback processes in the game industry.
And Eric will be presenting on behalf of his team.
All right.
So first of all, I want to acknowledge Joseph and Ray
as co first authors of this paper.
They did the majority of the cat herding and the data analysis
and the writing of the actual thing.
And they wrote a really great paper
that I have struggled mightily to fit into 10 minutes.
So I highly recommend you check it out.
There's a lot of really awesome, nice minute detail in there.