now that i'm at a higher-ish level and have completed all the skills i want [except the 17 day Teleportation V] i'm starting to appreciate certain ways in which the game is structured to encourage casual, drop-in play.
*easy currants*
some people have .. i don't know if "complained" is the correct word .. but have expressed concern over how easy it is to accumulate a large number of currants very quickly and then have little to nothing to spend them on.
this is GREAT for me. it means that i can log in, grind out some quick currants in a thankfully efficient and high speed fashion, buy whatever new stuff is available or buy enough energy to contribute to projects or experiment with levitation hacks or whatever i want .. maybe speed up a skill learning time a bit .. and then when i am bored, leave the game for long stretches of time without feeling that i'm being somehow left behind because i didn't spend two or four times the time grinding my way up to 200k currants.
even if i don't actually leave the glitch site i can chat in global chat or read and post to the forums and do generally social, non-grindy things. there is relatively little distraction from keeping my in-game status at a level where i can play without a feeling of burden when i do decide to do game-play-ish stuff.
so while the game certainly stalls out at level 20 and above, and while there are many times where i want to play glitch but there is frustratingly little to do .. i rarely feel like there is a *need* to play in order to keep up.
*coop gaming lock in and drop in*
that is, unless i'm right in the middle of some kind of game-play activity - particularly social ones .. in which case i do find it rather difficult to tear myself away to deal with a pressing need like a phone call or email or scheduled task.
this leads me to mentioning a design principle that i think might improve the game's social activity components.
you know the "lego" games? like "lego star wars"? they are usually built with a "drop-in" function that i presume is meant for parents and friends to be able to drop in and out of the kid's solo game-play session.
i hope that glitch takes this into account when structuring coop gameplay elements. cooperative mining fits this mould well just by virtue of being based initially on solo mining and being so casual in nature.
there are more complicated types of communal gaming, however, which might not straddle the solo/coop divide so well. i hope that these aspects of the game, may they come, pay careful attention to the ability to switch relatively seamlessly from communal to solo mode.