r/todayilearned • u/DueNeedleworker5036 • 4h ago

TIL that the Civilizations games (and others) include creator Sid Meier's name in the title because Robin Williams joked that it would help sell more copies of 1987's Sid Meier's Pirates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier#MicroProse
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u/WalterWhitesBriefs 4h ago

The games have short term goals, medium term goals, and long term goals. You end up feeling like you are constantly on the cusp of completing a goal, and inevitably telling yourself, "Just one more turn."

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u/throwitawaynownow1 3h ago

Did you just tell /u/just_one_more_turn how many turns you are going to do?

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u/Stouts 3h ago

To expand on that a little: because there are always so many things in motion, it always feels like it's a bad stopping point. You're juggling so many things in your head that it feels like if you were to step away, there's no way you'd remember all the stuff you were working on.

So it's constant push-pull of "I just need a good stopping point" and "but this thing is almost done!"

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u/guto8797 2h ago

Expanding even further, games tend to have a gameplay loop.

Think for Skyrim: you pick up quests on settlements, travel and explore on the way to said quests, do the dungeons, return to settlement to sell loot and upgrade gear, complete and acquire new quests, repeat.

And where do people tend to stop their gaming sessions? Either after clearing a dungeon or after finishing their business in a settlement, it's when the next step in the cycle would be a new significant task.

Civ generally has a very smooth cycle, you react to the previous turn, move units, queue buildings, hit next turn. But hitting next turn is a trivial task with a high reward, namely seeing the consequences of your actions and choices, so you just click it. But then moving your units in response to what happened last turn isn't a very time consuming thing either unless it's late game. And queuing a few buildings is fast too, etc etc etc. You are seemingly never presented with a natural cut off point, the next task is always something you can do quickly.

Factorio does the same thing. The cycle of optimizing the bottlenecks, expanding the factory, etc keeps presenting you with small tasks you could get done quickly

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u/D3rpyDucky24 3h ago

Sums up my expirience perfectly.