[erickhill]

"Ultimately, games are trying to deal with the human desire to clean things up." That's a fascinating way of looking at things.

In games like Quake, the "cleaning up" is eliminating opponents. But even in educational trivia, one could say the "cleaning up" is getting as many correct answers as possible. Our instinctual desires to organize, i.e. "clean".

[DanHulton]

I prefer Raph Koster's way of putting it, that good games are really just "satisfying work".

[mmatants]

True, in fact, having played World of Warcraft and having observed other players, I think the satisfaction "pay-off moments" can be interleaved with huge stretches of monotonous activity (essentially waiting) - people show surprising reserves of patience for some games. In other words, the happiness of playing that kind of game comes from optimistic waiting, not the "pay-off" itself.

[xsmasher]

Interesting. I've worked on two games that include a "clean up" mechanic - one where you tap buildings to collect taxes every few minutes, and another where trash collects on the map and you have to tap to clean it.

The users loved the tax mechanic and hated the trash mechanic, even if they earned the same amount of coins for the same clicks. One felt like getting a reward, while the other felt like doing drudgework.