. Last tended to <ahref='https://code.incremental.social/thepaperpilot/pages/commit/411de1d59fe75b3e56de49dd5209b0b0b9a8616c'title='Tue Jun 18 09:30:26 2024 -0500'><timeclass='dt-updated'datetime='Tue Jun 18 09:30:26 2024 -0500'>2024-06-18</time></a>
.</span></p><hr><p>If you've been in the incremental games community for any amount of time, you'll quickly find the number one thing players want is <em>content</em>. They want as much of it as possible! The most popular incremental games have tons of content, so they just keep stretching on and on and on, introducing mechanic after mechanic, and players love it. In fact, players seem to value the <em>amount</em> of content over the quality of any <em>specific</em> content. However, there's a bit of a lack of understanding concerning <em>what</em> content is, and I'd like to explore what counts as content, and how we measure it. As a baseline definition, I think "content" can just be described as the parts of the game that engage the player, but to truly understand it we need to contextualize what that means and how it affects the gameplay experience.</p><p>To clarify the purpose of this page, my goal is not to get (too) nitpicky or to attack games with "low content". There's nothing wrong with short / low-content games - I'm quite a big fan of those games myself! This is mostly targeted toward those who <em>ask</em> for content and settle for "long" games, and those who <em>want</em> to provide content but want to make sure they're not just artificially inflating the game. Ultimately, I suppose the goal is to just reduce the amount of artificially inflated content for the sake of having a "longer" game.</p><h2id="interaction"tabindex="-1">Interaction <aclass="header-anchor"href="#interaction"aria-label="Permalink to "Interaction""></a></h2><p>I think it should be a fairly non-controversial opinion that time spent <em>solely</em> waiting should not count towards content. That is not including the time reading various effects or making decisions in your head, but rather time spent waiting for a condition to be met so you can re-engage with the game.</p><p>That is not to say games should necessarily try to minimize this time. Plenty of games lead towards more infrequent interaction and still get popular. In fact, these games appeal to many gamers who want to have something to check up on in between bursts of working on some other activity. These games seem to have fallen slightly out of fashion amongst modern incremental games, but they're still fully valid. The point I'm trying to make here is just that this time is not content. As an extreme example, a game with no interactions and just a counter that goes up every second could safely be said to have 0 content beyond the time it takes to understand what's going on. If it has a list of "goals" to hit, then the time understanding those goals and a short time after achieving each one could be considered content, but not the idle times in between.</p><p>Let's take a look at the opposite end of the spectrum - interaction that is so frequent as to become mindless. This is any mechanic where you need to spam-click something to progress. This may be a more controversial take, but I do not believe this constitutes content either. It does not engage the player, because each consecutive click blends together and they do not individually change the gameplay experience. That is to say, a single click and 100 clicks are not meaningfully different in terms of engaging the player. I'd go as far as to say clicking 100 times would be actively <em>worse</em>, as it's artificially delaying the next piece of actual content, alongside the issues of accessibility and potentially causing RSI.</p><h3id="repeatable-purchases"tabindex="-1">Repeatable Purchases <aclass="header-anchor"href="#repeatable-purchases"aria-label="Permalink to "Repeatable Purchases""></a></h3><p>Imagine an entity in a game that you can purchase multiple times, each time it performs the same thing but for a higher cost. These are incredibly common, from the buildings in <ahref="https://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">cookie clicker</a> to the units i
