History Analysis / AntiPoopSocking

Sometimes things just happen in your game whether you're playing it or not – your VideoGame/{{Tamagotchi}} gets hungry, zombies break through your defences and start destroying your crops, another player invades your kingdom – events that are sufficiently rare so as to not force you to remain playing, but do get you to come back from time to time and clean these messes up before they get worse.

The game detects that the player has been going for a long time or is playing into the wee hours and advises him to wrap it up and go to bed or grab some fresh air. This may be intended in all seriousness or is just a fun fourth-wall-breaking Easter egg for the player to stumble upon. Not likely to be effective unless they are backed up with more substantial time limiters.

Various games, most notably mobile games such as Puzzle and Dragons, subvert this trope with their use of stamina bars, where they can be instantly refilled for the cost of in game credits. This, in combination with urgent/time-limited events that offer special drops but consume even more stamina, is an effective means of tempting players to spend extra for more chances during the event's duration than they would otherwise.

Sometimes things just happen in your game whether you're playing it or not – your {{Tamagotchi}} gets hungry, zombies break through your defences and start destroying your crops, another player invades your kingdom – events that are sufficiently rare so as to not force you to remain playing, but do get you to come back from time to time and clean these messes up before they get worse.

Set times of the day in which the game is limited or outright unplayable. Examples of the former include games where important [=NPCs=] will only be around help the player at certain times of the day, which is synchronised with real-world time (eg. ''AnimalCrossing''). Latter examples include server shutdowns imposed by governments, eg. South Korea's gaming curfew.

A stamina bar that gets used up a little with many actions you take. When empty you cannot do those actions until the energy grows back in real-time. Very popular with Zynga games like ''FarmVille''. Easy for the player to understand, simple and effective, but also quite limited in comparison to methods like Harvesting.

This method includes other types of automatically replenishing resources such as oil in ''Airport City'' or coins in fruit machine games. Other games do this with the health mechanic, where the player needs to leave his character out of combat or even has to put him to bed at the TraumaInn until he gets the chance to revive.

Every single method mentioned above (with the probable exception of Dropping Hints, which isn't terribly effective anyway) can be used to attract players back to the game as much as push them away from it.

Set times of the day in which the game is limited or outright unplayable. Examples of the former include games where important NPCs will only be around help the player at certain times of the day, which is synchronised with real-world time (eg. ''AnimalCrossing''). Latter examples include server shutdowns imposed by governments, eg. South Korea's gaming curfew.

As mentioned on the main page, many anti-poopsocking methods are not just about pushing players into taking breaks from gaming, they are about regulating his time, persuading him to return and continue playing again and again. By pushing the player away then attracting him back the hope is to give the game a long-term appeal while not wearing out the player too soon.

A stamina bar that gets used up a little with many actions you take. When empty you cannot do those actions until the energy grows back in real-time. Very popular with Zynga games. Easy for the player to understand, simple and effective, but also quite limited in comparison to methods like Harvesting.

This method includes other types of automatically replenishing resources such as oil in Airport City or coins in fruit machine games. Other games do this with the health mechanic, where the player needs to leave his character out of combat or even has to put him to bed at the TraumaInn until he gets the chance to revive.

Set times of the day in which the game is limited or outright unplayable. Examples of the former include games where important NPCs will only be around help the player at certain times of the day, which is synchronised with real-world time (eg. Animal Crossing). Latter examples include server shutdowns imposed by governments, eg. South Korea's gaming curfew.

!!!While You Were Absent
Sometimes things just happen in your game whether you're playing it or not – your Tamagotchi gets hungry, zombies break through your defences and start destroying your crops, another player invades your kingdom – events that are sufficiently rare so as to not force you to remain playing, but do get you to come back from time to time and clean these messes up before they get worse.