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Numbers go up. | Irrational Exuberance

lethain.com · 825 words · saved by 1 readers

There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games, whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. The initial idea here was social commentary exposing the addictive core of many games, but like all good commentary it’s also inadvertently spawned the genre of gacha games that focus on extracting revenue from addicted gamers. I’m thinking about numbers going up, because I’ve been watching the number of Amazon ratings on Staff Engineer creep up over the past few months knowing that it would soon reach 1,000 ratings. Yesterday it hit 999, and today it turned over to 1,000. Amazon ratings are not very meaningful. Many authors ask friends to provide ratings, and I’m certain there’s an industry for purchasing ratings out there. Many amazing books have very few ratings, and many terrible books have a huge num

There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games , whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. The initial idea here was social commentary exposing the addictive core of many games, but like all good commentary it’s also inadvertently spawned the genre of gacha games that focus on extracting revenue from addicted gamers. I’m thinking about numbers going up, because I’ve been watching the number of Amazon

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