Player Engagement

Raph Koster has argued that the primary motivation for playing games is the sense of mastery that arises from overcoming challenges within them (2014). In every game, the player is afforded some action, such as attacking an enemy, jumping between platforms, or solving a puzzle, along with an obstacle that they must use those actions to overcome. While the player may initially struggle to accomplish this, through trial and error, they will gradually grow more skilled and will eventually surpass the challenge. However, players will quickly grow bored of a game that has become too easy (Chumbley & Griffiths, 2006). Thus, the game will increase its difficulty over time until the player once more finds themselves facing an obstacle they cannot overcome without growing more skilled. 

It is this cycle of continuously raising the difficulty that is believed to be responsible for generating and sustaining player engagement (Koster, 2014). So long as the game’s difficulty is appropriately balanced, the player will seldom grow bored, as they are constantly facing new obstacles and being pushed to grow more skilled. Meanwhile, a game that fails to properly balance this cycle is often believed to be incapable of keeping its players engaged, as the challenge is either so hard that the player becomes frustrated or so easy that they become bored (Pagulayan et al., 2002). However, there is also a genre of games that lacks this central challenge loop yet still produces consistent engagement.

Cozy Games

Cozy games are a genre characterized primarily by their inclusion of safety, softness, and abundance (Short et al., 2018). These elements refer to a lack of danger, stress, and pressing needs, respectively. Within cozy games like those from the Animal Crossing series, there is no significant threat that the player must fight or flee from, and they are free to explore their town and spend their days however they wish. While each game of the series does present the player with a home renovation loan that they must repay, these loans do not accrue interest over time, and there is no deadline to pay them back. Thus, cozy games lack any form of threat or challenge that the player must overcome, but despite this, they are still played by millions of players every year. 

Unlike traditional games that rely on continuous challenges to keep players engaged, cozy games accomplish this feat through simplistic and repetitive aesthetics and mechanics designed to never overstimulate their players. In cozy games, progression is almost effortless, often involving simple actions like repeatedly pressing a button to harvest crops in a farming simulator. However, there is also a subset of cozy games that takes this effortless progression a step further by allowing the player to advance while they do nothing at all (Buergi, 2024).

Idle Games

Idle games differentiate themselves from other cozy games through an automated and passive progression system that continues regardless of the player’s actions and often takes the form of accumulating currency (Alharthi et al., 2018). For example, Cookie Clicker is a game centered on collecting in-game currency called cookies. At the start of the game, this is accomplished by clicking on a giant digital cookie, with each click generating one unit of currency (aka one cookie). The player may then use this accumulated currency to purchase an upgrade that generates currency every second and continue to do so indefinitely, even when the player is away. 

While most games end when turned off, this is not the case for idle games.  Instead, idle games persist beyond the player’s presence and reward them upon their return from a prolonged absence with an amount of in-game currency roughly equivalent to what they would have earned if the game had been left running the entire time. Thus, progress is made regardless of what the player does, with even their own presence being somewhat superfluous.

However, despite this guaranteed progress, players often return to idle games multiple times a day and continue to do so for months or years (Alharthi et al., 2018). This continued engagement has previously been attributed to a desire among players to progress more quickly and efficiently (Larsson, 2019) because while progress is guaranteed in idle games, it may be accelerated through active engagement. This phenomenon was demonstrated to me when I decided to play the idle game Adventure Capitalist. 

After turning on the game, I realized that I had briefly played it before. At the time, I needed some screenshots for a presentation, and after gathering them, I turned off the game and did not return for over a year. In that time, 6.8 billion units of in-game currency had accumulated. While this initially seemed like an extraordinary amount, within only a few hours of playing on a fresh save file, I managed to accumulate over 42 billion units. Because I had been more active in my playstyle and returned frequently in those few hours, I was able to generate several times more currency than I did in a year of passive progression. 

However, despite this ability and desire to advance more quickly, the journey through an idle game is ultimately aimless, as idle games seldom have an ending. There is no final boss to defeat, no princess to save, and no credits to watch scroll across the screen. Instead, numbers continue to grow as players go from accumulating a few dozen units of in-game currency per second to hundreds, thousands, millions, and so on, with Adventure Capitalist even having an achievement for accumulating a googolplex of currency. This number equates to 10¹⁰⁰ and exceeds even the number of atoms in the known universe. Still, even that is not the end, as numbers will continue to rise afterward indefinitely, regardless of how much time and effort players put into the game, yet the players still try.

Idle games are played multiple times a day for months or years (Cutting et al., 2019), with some players devoting their time to filling out spreadsheets and performing calculations to further optimize production (Spiel et al., 2019). This sustained and dedicated engagement in an endless and repetitive task defies the traditional understanding that player motivation depends on constantly evolving challenges. As such, the persistent engagement of idle games raises questions about how games can keep players engaged and has led to several attempts to apply idle game mechanics to gamification.

Gamification

Gamification is the practice of applying game elements to non-games for the purpose of teaching their players or encouraging them to perform some desired behavior. While this practice has shown positive potential, it often struggles to keep players engaged, particularly over prolonged periods (Huang et al., 2024). However, idle games may offer a solution to this problem, as a recent study found that turning a breathing exercise reminder into an idle game increased not only adherence to the program but also the frequency and engagement of deep breathing (Sadprasid et al., 2024).

 This result highlights a fresh perspective on how players can be kept engaged by showing that the motivation to play and continue playing does not always stem from stress or challenge. By removing the stress of failure and incorporating elements of safety, softness, and abundance, cozy games foster a unique form of engagement, which may be key to making all games more engaging and gamification more effective and long-lasting. Thus, the future of games may lie in cozy mechanics that make progress feel both rewarding and comforting.