GameDev.net -- Designing Games for the Wage Slave

This is a fantastic article detailing a great deal of my frustration with being what I would consider a notch down from "hardcore gamer", where I buy most of the hottest games, and rarely have time to lay them, much less finish them. In fact, I fired up a game of SimCity 4 the other day, and realized that on my shelf was the Sim City 4 Expansion Pack "Rush Hour", which I hadn't even opened yet.

I'd even go so far as to say that this is one of the main reasons why I stopped playing a game that I absolutely adored ... City of Heroes. COH did something interesting in MMORPGs ... they took all of the little tedious crap out and made the game all about being a hero. When you have limited time to play a game, I want to see progress being made on a regular basis. The problem with COH is that they took out all of the other typical "treadmills" (repetitious shit you have to do to progress, like "crafting"), and turned the game into one giant treadmill ... all working towards the next level. Every reward you get is based on your level. Then they made the mistake of trying to slow down that treadmill, because people were progressing faster than they thought they should. Of course, this immediately alienates anyone that can't spend umpteen hours playing, like myself.

Anyway, the article makes some great points, ones that I've been concerned about for the longest time. Read it, won't you?