How to make boring tedious actions funner? [Theory]

[Lord Ned]

I'm sure we've all played games like Harvest Moon, or Lost in Blue, or other games that require tedious repetitive work. An example for this would be in Harvest Moon, having to water your crops every day, morning and night.
I think this should go here. It's not a mod so.

Say I was looking to craft a 'farming/survival' experience, but without the boring repetitive actions. What could I do to make the whole experience less repetitive?

Would rewarding the players work? (Do this X times to get Y money, and buy Z machine that does it for you?)

Would making different ways to accomplish the task make it funner? (Water by hand or Dig irrigation ditches or create an irrigation system)

Would throwing a wrench into the works (Breaking objects, burst pipe, etc) break up the repetitiveness? Or would it just create a huge hassle?

If it's a more-construction based mod (Eg. GMod Gamemode), letting the players build their own equipment to ease the strain of the task. It could be a system like Easy Engine, but would need limitations or else people would create huge rolling water-ers, and make it unfun/easy as shit.

Have the gardener be hot and have big boobies, that way you have something to watch while you repetatize?

What other ideas could work to make the task less boring, and repetitive.

While a farming/survival game in theory requires a lot of these tasks, I think it's a turnoff for some people, having to micromanage things like that, while for others it's a plus.


Is there any one way to solve this situation? What is your guys input?

[snotball]

I think it's a very interesting idea you're playing with. It's mostly about motivation. Boring tedious tasks are just boring and tedious. What you need is a carrot in front of the treadmill. Have the gardener show her tits at 15 repititions and promise buttsexx at 1000.

[MayheM]

I think your idea on rewards is probably the best way. If you look at in the view of "we all play games to win" we are in fact moving towards a goal. If the repedative actions has not outcome other than stopping you or slowing you down then it is silly. But if you build up money and are able to buy a machine and so on it is far less boring. Look at the game Black and White. you do good deeds and you are rewarded with tribute and can buy things to help you along the way and make it easier to play the game. It goes along the same concept of what you said above...

[Lord Ned]

And if the farmer is male?


A more serious reply:

If this were a multiplayer enviroment, how would making things balance out? Becasue sure we'd have the guys who try and keep it realistic, and others who just will exploit it to a large extent.

But having the same kind of 'rewards' might bore you.


And I was playing Harvest Moon the other day... Something makes me feel obligated to farm, even though I can survive completely off of fishing. I felt obligated to plant large crops, and then continue watering them even though it was a huge hassle and pissed me off. Why?

[Jman]

I found if there was a repetitive task I needed to do, I'd get better tools along the way to do the job easier/faster. Kind of like the multi watering can or something in plants vs. zombies.

[mat_de_b]

Surely its like quests in WoW?

Grinding EXP is boring a shit, so they created quests, in which you must do specific tasks that make you feel like your not grinding and if done quicker can result in more exp? But at the end of the day most of it is still stabby rip stab stab, it is just more broken up by questions...

Not that i've got a PhD in MMOs but i've heard that it is all the quests in WoW that serperates it and makes it superior to older ones...

[Lord Ned]

"Try to plant x water melons per season"
"Water your plants twice a day for a season"
Etc? I just don't think you could create a ton of quests based on... watering crops.

Though, I'm not talking about farming in general for repetition. So yeah, Quests could work, it just might take a team of highly overpaid blizzard people to come up with enough ones to pull people in.

[Jman]

"Try to plant x water melons per season"
"Water your plants twice a day for a season"
Etc? I just don't think you could create a ton of quests based on... watering crops.

Though, I'm not talking about farming in general for repetition. So yeah, Quests could work, it just might take a team of highly overpaid blizzard people to come up with enough ones to pull people in.

Try having it start with a water can, then a larger area watering can, then like a hose, followed by a sprinkler system as upgrades. It gives the player a sense of progress.

[Lord Ned]

So:

• Holding the carrot in front of the player. (Upgrades to make life easier)
• Giving them some other reason to play the game, which makes the repetitive task less repetitive.
• Entice people along with rewards. Achievements maybe?
• Mini-Quests (Goes along with Achievements)
• Helpful random occurrences to break up the repetitiveness. (Rains one day, or for a couple in a row)
• Other ways to give the players a break from doing it.

[BillyDa59]

"Try to plant x water melons per season"
"Water your plants twice a day for a season"
Etc? I just don't think you could create a ton of quests based on... watering crops.

Though, I'm not talking about farming in general for repetition. So yeah, Quests could work, it just might take a team of highly overpaid blizzard people to come up with enough ones to pull people in.

Didn't you ever hear of the mod called Farm Cry? Ah man, it's too bad that mod died...

[jaddorii]

If you want to keep the player active, then the upgrades should be a false illusion of less work but instead it requires just as much (purhaps alittle bit less, just to not piss the player off) work, maintaince of the machines, repairing, purhaps the rain damaged the machines or whatever.

Another thing that will keep the player at its toes is fear. If all you have to do is water the plants and wait than you'll sit back and relax and after a while you'll find it booring. However what if there was something that could destroy your "lifes work" in a matter of seconds? What if a flock of birds came and tried to eat the plants etc. Then the player could try to upgrade "security" and stuff to.

[theCommie]

I'd say even repair would get tedious, mostly depending on how much time it takes to do; look at Far Cry 2, repairing that car got old pretty fast. You need to do something that a player will enjoy looking at time and time again; open-world games have to deal with these issues, and so do hack'n slash games. Look at God of War, I never get tired of seeing Kratos rip a monster's arms off and beat it to death. Hell, if you add that to a farm game, I am already more interested.

I definitely agree with upgrades, but am not so sure about a constant threat to your work - to me that ranks up there with time limits and escort missions.

[dragonfliet]

I would say that Bethesda has pretty much mastered the art of boring shit being fun. Okay, so I think I like Fallout 3 better, but Oblivion is pretty much a perfect example of truly inspired boredom. In that game, I spend most of my time running around the countryside, gathering flowers. Think about that for a second. Here I am a grown man with better things to do and I've probably put in a hundred hours picking plants in a videogame. I don't fast travel anywhere because running boosts my athleticism (or whatever, I haven't played in some months) and as I pick more flowers to make more potions, my alchemy skill goes up and when I sell them my mercantile skill goes up. I run to exotic locations because I know I'll find a certain type of herb there for specific potions that are helpful/bring in money. Then I get sidetracked killing bandits and then I go back to the flowers.

When I think about it, there is nothing fun about it. I feel guilty over the time I have spent in such a mundane activity. But like actual work, so long as it is MILDLY interesting and there is a goal that is being achieved (and it's not some silly requirement to farm x amount of whatever) and I've chosen to do the boring task for my own reasons, then it's pretty much good to go. Adding in extra work is frustrating, tbh. I have difficulty justifying my silliness in the first place so that when a wrench gets thrown into the works I mostly just get pissed and quit the game.

~Jason

[no00dylan]

Really the quests don't have to be all that big, it could just be going to a local store and getting a certain product, say, a remedy for a heatwave. A great thing is a change of scenery every once in awhile, from farm to town, forest, city, capitol, etc.

[Acheron]

You also have to understand that a lot of people actually enjoy repetition, it's why techno is so popular.

It depends on the delivery as much as the actual action, to work off what was said above with the plant picking. There's a reward for picking them with improved skills then the ability to do other things with said skills but also it can simply lure a person in. The flowers is a good example of not necessarily a change of scenery (which is good as well as dylan stated) but the actual scenery itself. If it's a lush landscape that draws the person's eye, well picking flowers doesn't seem all that bad when you get to see how lovely everything looks while doing it, really. It's also an easy way to incorporate various different things since the players attention will be focused to a specific area, even if it simply is the ground!

Say for example you are, as you've mentioned a few times, watering crops.. The player's focus would be on the crops themselves and the ground, to work on the simple quest idea dylan said, there's a locket caught on one of the shrubs/whatever after some girl and her friends were strolling through the fields playing and laughing merrily. Voila a simple and very rpg friendly find and return quest. It'd be quite easy to add a bunch of "quests" in that sense, especially if you let your imagination go with a zanier ideas. Crop circles, molepeople, government conspiracies, you can even be a little controversial and base quests on topics like gm food. To be honest it wouldn't be too hard at all to create a whole bunch of quests for it. From simple things as say, going to the store to buy some milk to stopping crop circles and the subsequent alien attack to follow by genetically modifying your corn to have the properties of superglue.
Though then again that is highly dependent on the limitations of whatever it is you're using as well and probably going into far too much detail for a gmod idea, if I read your posts correctly.

Another thing which would be useful to do is look at current/old simulation games and how they try to fix the inevitable tedium that will follow.
Take the Theme Park series for example, particularly Theme Park World:
It's been awhile since I've played any of those games but the goals you had were simply to attain a new plateau of awesome theme park business man sir type person and unlock awesome new places to build your new unlocked fucking awesome eight mile long rollercoaster of awesomeness. The aims were all fairly simple and stuff like making all your visitors happy, having all their needs taken care of, earning over $100,000 in profit, etc.
You give one big global goal in this case; making like the world's like best theme park like ever! ..like.
Throw in a bunch of small things that work that idea and then you just build off of them, rewarding the player as he attains the small things and works his way to reaching that near unreachable ends.

Simple goals as in say: earn x amount of money over the next z amount of years, produce x amount of y crop in z amount of years, whatever and then just work everything around those very simple goals.

Regarding the throwing a wrench into the works idea, it is needed if it is going to be a simulation of any kind.. And I can't see any other reason why to have a game/mod/mode based on mundane actions since that goes against pretty much the whole idea of video games in the first place.
It will obviously break up repetitiveness though may as well frustrate the player if not done correctly.

In the expansion of Tropico they added random events to create a more difficult scenario (though the random events were completely controllable in how often they occured ranging from "why the fuck did you set it so high you stupid bastard" to "nothing") and your little muchacho would warn you when a problem was going to happen if it was forseeable... At least I think he did... Had a hurricane come pretty much decimated my entire little tropical paradise, millions of dollars worth of buildings gone and the USA is like, "oh hai there, here's ten grand to help get you back on your feet " Yeah thanks, jerks. Maybe I can buy a used car and run over the remnants of my now sick and homeless inhabitants.

Any ways!

If you add something like weather for example, you could always make it so the player has the ability to know about it beforehand (newspapers, tv, whatever) and have a way of protecting themselves although not completely at least partially from the effects... You know, tv states that there's war is coming to our/your/his/their shores so he builds a bomb shelter and stores all the crops he cares for and has named, like gerald the potato.. just throwing it out there.. you know, in there to protect them. Though war isn't exactly weather.. I don't know, tornado, hurricane, volcano, virgin sacrifice, mohican rain dance. Anything.

I doubt this is useful or can assist you in any way as most of it is probably common sense any way, so sorry. It's late here; I'm tired, slightly batty and trying to be helpful. I don't think it worked. Proceed to laugh at how useless this epic length post is.