Android: Where's My Video Games? Pt. 1: Tap Dragon Park Special

It's time for biased and absolutely correct thoughts on Tap Dragon Park!~

My proposal for Tap Dragon Park's new promo pic

You might ask why I am playing Tap Dragon Park. I don't and won't like Tap Dragon Park. I wouldn't have reccomended it and I will never reccomend it to anyone I wouldn't reccomend Boku No Pico to. As in, I mean the game is a mild psychological hazard to most of the population. So why am I playing it? I'm playing it because I realize I shouldn't be talking about social games without firsthand knowledge about what they are.

Penny Arcade - Innovation (click to embiggen)

First, a short prelude: I saw this Penny Arcade comic which, given the accompanying blog post, seemed to be about this game.

I figured that, given my apathy for most settings typical to social games...
-FARMING: Farming Simulator looks dull enough, an abstract and empty cartoon version is surely duller

-ISLANDS: why would I want to be on a deserted island for no reason with nothing interesting on it

-STOREFRONTS: they pay minimum wage for this, why would I want to play the version without even the base comfort of human interaction

...it might be a tad more tolerable to play a social game in a fantasy setting (not that I'm too partial to generic fantasy settings or anything). Like dinosaurs, DRAGONS ARE THEIR OWN REWARD. Or something. So, I downloaded it and braced myself. What is Tap Dragon Park (TDP for short)? TDP is, as I've been calling it, a "social" game, I suppose. Despite not being on a social network like Facebook, it's in the same bucket as Farmville thanks to the way it plays. The term "social gaming" is a funny way to describe the game, because I haven't seen a single smidgen of social interaction in the game. From others' descriptions of it, I gather Farmville includes chatty avatars, but I can't find any such mechanic in this game, nor can I find even a silly "share to X" button for a token injection of social [insert sparkles]. However, knowing how social games have historically abused these things, I don't feel any loss. The memories of 7th grade still linger in my head-- when every single post on my Facebook newsfeed was bugging me about joining some "social" game so that my "friends" would get tiny referral benefits. That was why I deactivated my account. Sometimes I fear that this kind of social game is the future-- a grim preposition. Anyways, back to the game. TDP is like Farmville in that it uses the traditional credit factory model of "gameplay," which is, in TDP's case, as follows: You are dumped into a roughly empty grid, given some credits (let's call them creds) and some premium credits (Pcreds).You buy the titular dragons, which are used to produce creds and fight trolls. One collects the creds by tapping them (the dragons) every once in a while. As in all games of this type, you play the game in spurts, waiting for something to recharge. In this case, you wait for dragons to produce gold, finish training, recover, etc. Pcreds can be used to remove these delays. Eventually, one gets to "mix" two dragons to create preset dragon combinations. Along the way, one battles trolls using a rock-paper-scissors system based around the game's three elements: fire, water and earth. This system is confusing to anyone that's played Pokémon because although water still logically beats fire, fire beats earth (?) and earth beats water (??). During combat, one taps the troll to decide which displayed element the troll will choose. One then chooses a dragon to fight it. Level, elements and luck decide who wins. That's about as far as the mechanics go. So, here's my TDP journal.

CAPTAIN'S LOG:

The splash screen

DAY 1: As described above, I enter the grid. There's a few buildings taking up space (to make the first patch of land seem larger than it is?)I get creds and pcreds, and am instructed to buy and train a titular dragon. I suppose the tapping mechanic is there to keep people checking in often. At first, Things take place with 10 second delays, but I soon encounter a 30 minute delay to impress upon me that things take time. I'm instructed to spend a pcred to speed things up, which I do, because I have no intention of paying them anything and the cheapest pcred things are 6 Pcreds (you start with 5)-- a tactic used to urge a first investment. Then I am told that I am to be guarding my treasure against generic trolls, which sit around doing nothing, utterly ignored by your dragons and townfolk while they refuse to make off with any of your creds. The rock, paper, scissors combat system described earlier is heavily luck-based, the end result being that you'll eventually run out of dragons, since dragons seem to get "tired" for 30 minutes if they lose in combat. Of course, dragons can be freed up for more combat if you use Pcreds, which I did once because I was tired of staring at the menu graphics. That marked the end of the pcreds and my second loss. Time to put this away for today.


DAY 2: There's been a button in the top left that's been telling me to complete so-called achievements for cred rewards. After the first few, though, they quickly seem very pandering. Some people complain modern gaming's achievements and medals are doled out like consolation prizes to keep up the "everyone is a winner" mentality, but the system in TDP ends up being more demeaning than that. Why does every bloody obvious thing have to be shoved in my face like this? It's just like I'm playing a game designed specifically for the lowest common denominator audience. Fancy that. Back to the game-- the waits increased to 1-4 hours for things like expanding the kingdomor waiting for a hurt dragon to recover. I wait out 1m30s to tap a dragon, collect some coins, get to 3k creds, expand the kingdom and place a mixed dragon. Oh, and a wonderful correction-- It would be logical for dragons to get tired when they lose fights, but dragons also seem to get tired when they win them, since my entire stable became pooped after a decisive victory. I expand the kingdom again with some newfound funds I forgot to collect. That'll take 4 hours, so I'm done for today.

Maybe our usual achievements aren't as annoying as we thought

The battle system

DAY 3: I tap some more creds out of the dragons, and the entire game lags for half a second every time I do this. Ew. I was instructed to purchase "Wizard Luke" to speed up the training of dragons and the game has given me no hints as to where Wizard Luke has gone to, aside from my owning him. Maybe he's been absorbed by that other guy that's been waving his rod at my dragons. I lose a battle thanks to luck, then another because the game only spawns enemies at the lowest level of your top 3 dragons- and each fight requires 3 dragons, so I had no dragons left. This is boring.

Puff the Magic Dragon

DAY 4: I'm not even sure I want to see the clockwork dragon the game promises me I can get at the end of a suspicious, unknown chain which starts with a 10$ investment. I grind away while my park fills with samey dragons. Surprisingly, I'm experiencing the pull of the compulsion loop, which has kept me from pulling the plug so far in favor of spending another few minutes making the numbers go up. Bah. Once again I lose one of the game's stupid, rigged fights. Level and element advantage? No! The troll gets a battle bonus! But fear not, I recieve a consolation prize... my underleveled dragon with the same element gets a battle bonus! But since I'd exceeded my daily allotment of coins, I lose against this troll. No dragons. Next day.

Day 5: Nothing's changed. I'm over the legal limit. For dragons, even. As for the game, I've had enough.

Hopefully this hasn't killed dragons for me...

Final thoughts:

My feelings:

The game's art grew on me a surprising lot, given that everything is stock cartoony stuff with a few dragons and cheap animations stapled onto it. I'm still not a huge fan though, and it won't redeem the game in my eyes. There's nothing there, and I'm now fully certain the only reason people play games in this genre is because the concepts are cute (ooh, baby dragons) and because of the compulsion loops the games employ. Speaking of compulsion, earlier, I mentioned the game is a mild psychological hazard, and that's because the game tries to get into your head, making you repeatedly check in like a hamster in a wheel. It's not *too* evil, but it's still something I'd avoid for the sake of time and being free of some constant desire to check in. On the item shop: I notice there's an item shop whose button is always in the corner away from the other controls. The cheap 2$ entry price for the cheapest pack seems tolerable (I didn't buy one). The 50$ pack is concerning (and somewhat menacing), though. I don't see much _game_ in this game yet, but somehow it's supposed to be possible to spend over 50$ on the thing. That kind of pricetag also seems to run counter to the emphasis in the promotional materials on how free the game is (AND HOW FOREVER). Someone once told me that F2P gaming is an alternative to paying a one-time, 50$ fee. Some of the time, it is. But if your model is going to make a 50$ purchase sound so damned casual though, it's basically a subscription service for unhindered gameplay. And since I'm not convinced games built around making me wait can have any content after the wait is gone, given how I haven't seen any real evidence of game beneath the waits, I can't imagine how deeply irritating the game must be to people to convince them to buy the 50$ pack-- maybe even more than once. You might point to games like TF2, Tribes: Ascend and even EvE Online, pointing out similarities like how these games can all have large amounts of money spent on them. The thing that makes TDP different from these, though, is that those 3 games have some sort of core gameplay, whereas TDP doesn't have much. Even casual games Angry Birds have more. TF2 and EvE are also extremely playable at their face costs (free for TF2, sub for EvE), while Tribes: Ascend is acceptable after a starter pack and some grind. At the start, TDP is just a slog, some pictures, and a looping MIDI track.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinnerbox

The mechanics at play:

Thinking about the factory credit model of "gameplay" that so many social games like this one use reminds me of an article: Who Killed Videogames? A Ghost Story. This article is a great one on the topic of social gaming and I suggest that anyone who will ever come into direct or indirect contact with social games read it. That means you, Zynga developer. That means you, soccer mom. That means you, hardcore gamer that can't stand his Zynga developer soccer mom telling him about how amazing Farmville is. Rogers describes a few of the typical psychological strings that social game developers pull to get you to play their games, and I see a lot of them at work in TDP.
-I see myself being baited with rewards with increasing distance. 10 seconds. 30 minutes. 1 hour. 2 hours. Longer.
-I see myself being told to do menial tasks like pick up garbage for trivial amounts of creds.
-I see myself being offered the possibility of playing the game faster for investments of Pcreds.
-I see myself being rewarded with creds for continuously checking into the game
In conclusion, I don't want to play a game like this ever again. This is a skinner box with no redeeming features and it's so sparingly animated that you can lap up all the art in a single screenshot. If anyone tells me that I have no right to criticize (conventional) social gaming due to my lack of experience with it, I'll challenge them to show me something conforming to the model that isn't boring, tedious and exploitative to the extent of weaponization-- no, a chatbox alone does not always make a game properly social. I know my blood is hot from all the boredom,but reading this headline makes me feel happy: "Zynga's Cash Crops Appear to be Drying Up, Investors Head to Greener pastures." Maybe people will move past the worst side of social gaming after all.

P.S. Fermi taught us that TDP is bad in excess Q.E.D.