Pleasure in Conveyor Belt Games

Over on CapsuleCrit, Kavi Duvvoori explores their particular and somewhat ambivalent pleasure taken in 'extractive captialist' games such as the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and Factorio. In the article, Duvvoori highlights two of the central pleasures videogames tend to feed on, neither of which are the adrenaline-pumping, conflict-oriented "competition" that one might typically associate with games in general, and videogames in particular.

Instead Duvvoori highlights a curiosity to discover "what happens if...?" given a certain level of mastery over the game. These sorts of games require/allow the player to construct elaborate (or simple) chains of cause and effect, which shuffle entities (in most cases, paying patrons, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon or Theme Hospital, for example), from beginning to end. The general idea is to extract value from those customers. In Factorio, the metaphor is more industrial: construct vast networks of literal assembly lines which add and modify components in an ever-increasing network.

I'd suggest the "what happens if?" question arises in the mind after a certain point of mastery. The initial questions are usually more like "how do I [do something specific]?" The game usually requires a certain level of proficiency in order to make the machine work at all, so players will typically have a series of smaller, more concrete goals which create a self-sustaining assembly that accepts whatever input is available, and creates a positive feedback loop more or less ad infinitum.

Often, these games will offer a wide array of objects whether rides and attractions, as in Rollercoaster Tycoon, or resource gathering and production equipment, as in the Anno series (trade routes being nautical production lines). These give the player a fixed goal to aim towards on the way to learning the basics of the system. The key is to combine these in such a way that they create more than the sum of their parts. Whether we term this resonance or positive feedback, the goal is to multiply value exponentially.

However, I feel that those numbers of imagined value are a skin over the top of the more primal pleasure of figuring out how a gadget works, then setting up ever-increasingly complex versions of that gadget to manipulate. The pleasure comes not only from setting and meeting goals, but from something primordial in humans - the same itch that is scratched by watching a ridiculous, convoluted and pointless Rube Goldberg machine work successfully. We needn't justify them in any other way than to say it feels good to build something that works.