Mini-book about energy mechanics
Since late November of last year I’ve been on-and-off working on a mini book project. Yesterday I finally got it past the finish line! You can get it from rupazero.com.
Delay is about energy mechanics, a recent design conceit popular in casual and mobile games, whereby playing drains a resource that can only be refilled by not playing it for a while. I argue that they’re about impulse control, our own fear and shame when it comes to over-indulgence, and ideas about what it means to be a grown-up.
It starts with a history of how energy mechanics developed on Facebook, and from then on in each of the main chapters I try to bring in a new idea that builds up a theory of how they work. I’m trying to layer together ideas from different disciplines: there’s a chapter on games studies theories about ‘attention’ as an alternative to ‘immersion’ (the title is a reference to Brendan Keogh’s paper on co-attention in Angry Birds), a chapter on queer theories of shame, a chapter on anthopological ideas about liminality, etc. I’ve also included some interviews with developers who have worked with energy mechanics, and analyses of how energy mechanics affect the design of five games.
It’s all packed into a tiny, focused, mini-book, the kind of thing you could finish in a leisurely afternoon. If you’re curious, you can get it now for £2.