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Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing: It's like the sidequests without all of that rpg stuff getting in the way.
It becomes obvious as you play this that the designers had a very specific goal in mind: To get you to play it for a very long period of time. The game is basically all about sidequest-grinding--there are 40 fish to catch, 40 bugs to catch, something like 40 fossils to dig up, dozens of clothes and umbrellas to wear, hundreds of pieces of furniture to buy/find/get given. (Beyond the "main quest", which is earning enough money to pay Tom Nook to expand your house.) But the kicker is, you can't access everything when you start playing. In fact, you can access very few things.
You'll start off "working" for Nook, which is basically a tutorial about planting flowers and running errands for the townsfolk. That takes about an hour. Nook will sell you a shovel the next day, so you can start digging up fossils--but you need to mail them to the museum to find out what they are before you can donate or sell them, and that requires a real-time day for every three of them. You can buy a fishing rod and a bug-catching net within another day or two, but the fish and bigs that actually can be caught are dependant on season and time of day: There are fish that can only be caught in the morning, or in May, or when it's (in-game) raining. Which means that you can only catch half of the fish (and four of the 40 bugs) if you play during the month of November.
(Also, I have no corroborating evidence of this, but it seemed like the game slowly "unlocked" the fish as my play time increased--I pretty much caught one new fish every day, even when I was playing at the same time of day and fishing in the same spot.)
Also, while you need Tom Nook's store to buy most of the common items (and all of the tools) and as your only place to sell things and make money, it's closed some times. Between 10pm and 8am (again, real-time) it closes; it'll also close for renovations shortly after you upgrade your house, and will only be open for special sales or a lottery on some days of the month. Which mean that if that's when you choose to play, you can't sell off any items.
The goal of the designers, obviously, is to get you into the habit of playing for half an hour to an hour every day for years. There are special items you can get by playing on your birthday and on holidays. There are festivals and tournaments, and salesmen who are only in town for a specific hour on a specific day. This is a game designed for completionists to get addicted to. I consider myself fortunate that I'm the type of completionist willing to give up when things stop being fun.
(Oh, and Jethrien notes that this game really shouldn't be given to impressionable children: While the message of "working" to earn money is admirable, the entire goal of the game is to get a giant house and fill it with random, useless crap. And it's not like you even have an option on that goal: Every time you pay off your mortgage to Tom Nook, he automatically expands your house and puts you right back into debt.)
It becomes obvious as you play this that the designers had a very specific goal in mind: To get you to play it for a very long period of time. The game is basically all about sidequest-grinding--there are 40 fish to catch, 40 bugs to catch, something like 40 fossils to dig up, dozens of clothes and umbrellas to wear, hundreds of pieces of furniture to buy/find/get given. (Beyond the "main quest", which is earning enough money to pay Tom Nook to expand your house.) But the kicker is, you can't access everything when you start playing. In fact, you can access very few things.
You'll start off "working" for Nook, which is basically a tutorial about planting flowers and running errands for the townsfolk. That takes about an hour. Nook will sell you a shovel the next day, so you can start digging up fossils--but you need to mail them to the museum to find out what they are before you can donate or sell them, and that requires a real-time day for every three of them. You can buy a fishing rod and a bug-catching net within another day or two, but the fish and bigs that actually can be caught are dependant on season and time of day: There are fish that can only be caught in the morning, or in May, or when it's (in-game) raining. Which means that you can only catch half of the fish (and four of the 40 bugs) if you play during the month of November.
(Also, I have no corroborating evidence of this, but it seemed like the game slowly "unlocked" the fish as my play time increased--I pretty much caught one new fish every day, even when I was playing at the same time of day and fishing in the same spot.)
Also, while you need Tom Nook's store to buy most of the common items (and all of the tools) and as your only place to sell things and make money, it's closed some times. Between 10pm and 8am (again, real-time) it closes; it'll also close for renovations shortly after you upgrade your house, and will only be open for special sales or a lottery on some days of the month. Which mean that if that's when you choose to play, you can't sell off any items.
The goal of the designers, obviously, is to get you into the habit of playing for half an hour to an hour every day for years. There are special items you can get by playing on your birthday and on holidays. There are festivals and tournaments, and salesmen who are only in town for a specific hour on a specific day. This is a game designed for completionists to get addicted to. I consider myself fortunate that I'm the type of completionist willing to give up when things stop being fun.
(Oh, and Jethrien notes that this game really shouldn't be given to impressionable children: While the message of "working" to earn money is admirable, the entire goal of the game is to get a giant house and fill it with random, useless crap. And it's not like you even have an option on that goal: Every time you pay off your mortgage to Tom Nook, he automatically expands your house and puts you right back into debt.)
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Conversely, the one time we made
... I guess the completionist bug is not really my problem. Every time I play, I am likely to make a little money and get a little new stuff, and that's cool. I also got much better about selling stuff back to Tom Nook, because (except for the rares) once I had acquired it into my "catalog", I could order it again at any time, and over the long haul I didn't really care whether it was going to cost me double the purchase price again later. 'Cause hey, it's only Bells ;-) and there's a more or less infinite supply of money over time, relative to the things you can possibly spend it on.
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However, there are times I think for everybody when you don't want to do anything but don't want to be bored either, and this seems perfect for that.
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I didn't really get into talking with the townsfolk much--but then, I'm an rpg gamer by preference, and talking to the same people repeatedly gets frustrating because, hey, it's not like they're going to unlock a sidequest or something.
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