#5

Pictured: Higuarshi No Naku Koro Ni

I decided to write a paper on the topic of Visual Novels. As visual novels are often debated whether or not they're actually games or not, I decided to cover what generally falls under the visual novel genre, as well as briefly whether or not they are actually games or just fancy digital novels with sound and sometimes voice acting. I covered sound/kinetic novels, VNLs, and ADVs, as well as different genres that generally fall under the visual novel category such as: dating sims or adult content, "crying games," horror, and science fiction. I initially was also going to cover different software used to make visual novels, but the paper was becoming lengthy, and I felt I was covering too much at that point. It was hard to extensively cover whether or not to consider them as actual games thanks to the lack of articles covering it, and I mostly found forum posts covering this topic. Unfortunately, it was really hard to find articles on the subject, and many of them referenced each other. My actual paper is linked here. 

blog post 4

All bow before Grandma

I'm sure you've heard of it at some point before, also considering we've brought it up in class. This game is Cookie Clicker, and if you haven't played it, I don't recommend it unless you want to lose a couple days of your life. Unfortunately, I've played through the early stage of the game, on the day of the release, as well as a later release which is shown above during a triggered "GrandmaPocalypse." This game uses both elements of "gamification" and "zero player gaming."

As this game is called, Cookie Clicker, I'm sure you can guess what it's about. In this game, you continuously click the cookie until you can buy items that will increase your amount of cookies over time, whether you're actively clicking the cookie or not. These cookies can in turn buy more items to increase your cookie score, or upgrades to boost your cookie output, as well as bonuses. Cookie Clicker employs gamification as clicking on the cookie, or having more buildings, can lead to more achievements and unlockeables.  It's also a zero player game, thanks to you not having to actively click the cookie once you've bought at least one cursor object. In later versions, once you trigger the grandma apocalypse, you have to actively watch the cookie in case these alien like creatures start attacking your cookie, which significantly lowers your cookie output (Although there's a strategy to get more cookies by making use of these creatures). In the earlier version, however, the grandma apocalypse actually doubled your output, and made a terrifying grandma flash in the background. This was taken out in later versions, and given to the golden cookie object, which appears randomly rather than after having several million cookies, and every 15 minutes or so after clicking the initial grandmapocalypse. 

It's interesting to note that this tedious game exploded almost over night. I remember that the game appeared online around early august, and the very next day, I saw jokes about how awful cookie clicker was, yet no one could stop playing until they either got one of all the objects, or the game actually tells you to stop playing. I'm still honestly not sure what enticed so many people to play this game. Possibly the witty ticker at the top of the screen? Or maybe it was just gamification tricking us into continuously playing.