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alt title(s): Poop Socking It's also important to be able to control your bodily functions. You never know when a long demo is about to begin, so make sure you're prepared to sit in front of the monitor for a long time if necessary. If you're feeling drowsy, you should get some sleep.
I mean, if you have to answer the phone, or take a shit, it's like, "Tough shit if you gotta take a shit!" You got to take a quick shit! You gotta turbo turd! I gotta play the game, I've got shit stains in my pants! ... What a selfish game. Bottom line, have a fucking PAUSE BUTTON, GOD DAMN IT!
"Poopsocking" is the supposed activity of a gamer so focused on playing he would rather poop in a sock than risk a bathroom break from the action. Another version describes the stereotypical gamer as drinking a lot of soda, and using said cans in a related way. Others call it catassing , where the player becomes so engrossed in playing they forget basic chores, such as cleaning the cat's litter box, for so long that the stench wafts through their entire house.
Media Watchdogs complain poopsocking is not healthy. For once, they're absolutely right. Plus, from a pure gameplay perspective, it encourages players to level quickly and disrupt the ability flow of the gaming population. So occasionally, a game has a built-in function to reward the player for taking a break from the game. This also works from a business standpoint, because once you charge a monthly fee, a company doesn't care how much you play, or if you play at all, only that you keep paying for your account.
There is some reality to the dangers of poopsocking. There are documented cases of people who literally play themselves to death, mostly by playing so long that they ignore basic needs like food and water. Some other cases have even resulted in the deaths of babies because their parents were too preoccupied with poopsocking to care for them.
Of course there are people who respond to this by playing more than one such game, gaining the "you took a break" benefits of one by playing the other. Some people will not be helped.
This is much rarer in one-time-purchase console games, where one can prevent this by building a game where it's easy to sit down and enjoy a session lasting only a few minutes to an hour.
This is essentially a way to try to stop The Tetris Effect. See also Hikikomori. The antithesis to Bladder Of Steel, in which pausing to get some fresh air is forbidden.
Examples:
- World Of Warcraft rewards time logged out with a short period of increased XP after you log back in. A loading screen tip reads, "Take all things in moderation, even World of Warcraft." In addition, raid dungeons can only be done once every few days by a given group.
- In China, the system is much harsher, with players receiving half normal experience points and gold after 3 consecutive hours of play, and no experience points, gold, or quest rewards after 5 consecutive hours of play. These features, by the way, have been specifically requested by the Chinese government.
- Not so much "requested" as "required". Also, this "Anti-Indulgence System" applies to all online games published in China, but doesn't apply if you are above the age of 18.
- The first expansion introduced Daily Quests, of which a maximum of 25 can be completed per day. Heroic Dungeons were also introduced, offering a higher Risk vs. Reward, offset by players only able to complete each dungeon once per day. While these limits take a long time to take effect, it prevents players from grinding specific items or gold quite effectively.
- The South Park Affectionate Parody of World Of Warcraft ("Make Love, Not Warcraft") has one of the most effective poopsocking satires ever.
- Finally, Item Crafting has an Anti Poop Socking element of its own: specific item crafts have a real time recharge time between one and four days. As these items can be traded, they are usually in high demand and serve as a good source of income even if you aren't making much use of your professions otherwise.
- Guild Wars helpfully warns the player every hour just how long they have been playing. After two hours, it suggests taking a break.
- Maple Story does the same thing, with an added "We suggest you take a break from mapling" after the third and subsequent hours.
- It counts the hours client has been on; If someone else comes and plays it without closing the client, counter won't reset. Also, if the client crashes the counter will reset and before windowed mode was added, going to check a guide could shut the client down.
- Earthbound will have your dad call your cellphone and suggest you go outside if you've been playing for a while.
- Mother 3 does this too, with Leder's bell as the reminder. It takes quite a while to trigger, though, and is more to keep you from going too far without saving your game.
- Incidentally, Earthbound could retroactively be the Trope Namer - a sign in Threed gives you a message saying not to play for more than two hours at a time, from the "Parents Opposing Obsession Plan"...
- Kingdom Of Loathing has a daily limit to the number of adventures each player can have in a day. Though you can eat food or drink booze to increase the limit, eventually the player simply runs out of things they can do that day.
- Forumwarz has a similar mechanic, and additionally you don't get your victory rewards until the next day.
- This seems to be the standard form of Anti Poop Socking on browser-based MMOs, from as mainstream as Kingdom Of Loathing to as obscure as Billy Vs SNAKEMAN.
- One of the loading screen tips in Baldurs Gate II reads, "While your character doesn't need to eat, remember that you do. We don't want to lose any dedicated players."
- Parodied in NWN which has a loading screen that reads "While your character doesn't need to eat, monsters do. They eat player characters" or words to that effect
- Rather disturbingly inverted by Galactic Civilizations II: The Dread Lords where when you try to quit the game tells you "Another few turns wouldn't hurt". Even is you've been playing for the last five hours, something which is quite plausible.
- This is probably a nostalgia nod. The same was actually in lots of old games, like Doom, Wolfenstein, basically everything you actually turned off other way then by shutting down your computer. That was before the huge fight against gaming, specifically addictivity. Remember how games used to be called "addictive" to have positive feedback from the buyer? Do you remember a game officially designed as addictive in the last few years?
- On one screen in Zoombinis, the Narrator might say the player has done enough for today, telling them to relax, turn off the computer, and go get some fresh air.
- During a portion of Metal Gear Solid 2 the player receives messages from a character, most of which are 4th-Wall-breaking nonsense. In one of them, the player is told that they have been playing the game for a very long time (regardless of time playing) and asked to turn the console off.
- This is actually a Shout Out to the original Metal Gear on the MSX, where Big Boss starts giving you suspiciously misleading information in the second half of the game. When you're about to reach the room where Metal Gear is held, Big Boss will personally call you and order you to turn off your MSX/ PS2/ Cellphone.
- A reversal of this trope occurs in the prequel, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. During the boss fight with The End, the player is advised not to save, due to a "bad feeling". If you save and come back later, the boss sneaks up and captures you while you are away.
- Unless you leave the game off for a week, in which case the boss dies of old age.
- One of Master Miller's fantastic No Fourth Wall lectures in Metal Gear Solid was about staying mentally alert by taking breaks.
- When you stop playing Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake rests and recovers some health and stamina. Unfortunately, any food he has will rot if kept too long, even if you're not playing.
- Metal Gear Solid 4 continues this trend. At the end of each act a loading screen comes up with notes like "use an astray when smoking" and "you've been playing for so long, why not take a break?". My first play though lasted 26 straight hours, with the game making increasingly desperate attempts to convince me to put it away and go get some sleep.
- The Game Boy Player - basically a Game Boy Advance that uses a Gamecube and a TV as its input/output - had a special timer feature, settable up to 99 minutes. It was never really explained why it's there: it can't be a parental control, since the timer doesn't stop the game, and can be turned off at any time from the menu without even a password. So, it seems like a voluntary APS.
- EVE Online has a particularly extreme form; while equipment can be acquired via drops or the (notoriously) free market, the skills required to actually use said equipment are trained in real time, regardless of whether you're logged in or not. For a sense of scale, the time required to reach the minimum level of skill needed to pilot a cruiser (which is near the low end of the power range) is on the order of two weeks. Meanwhile, the skills required to operate a Titan take multiple years to develop (at 14.95 a month).
- While The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker doesn't have a time-based reminder notice, one of Sturgeon's notes advises you not to stay up all night playing video games.
- Battlefield 2142 gives an 'away bonus' in extra points to this effect.
- Similar to the Metal Gear Solid example is the ending of the first Monkey Island game. After the credits have run, a message appears, reading: "Now turn off your computer and go to sleep."
- The sequel, Monkey Island Le Chuck's Revenge had the same thing, but every few seconds the text would refresh with a new suggestion for something for you to do. Watching them all takes an hour or so.
- The fourth game did nearly the same thing, only with a fake error message telling players to get back to work. The developers eventually 'fixed' this in a patch, since the player was there to play, not to work.
- Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games has a box that pops up after playing for some time, advising you to take a break.
- The Wii has made wearing out the player a viable Anti Poop Socking strategy. Wario Ware: Smooth Moves, for example, requires a good deal more physical activity than some real world sports.
- The same can be said of games like Dance Dance Revolution, or basically any game that has a physically tiring mode of input.
- When playing Dungeon Keeper 2 at night, you'll start getting messages like "Your nocturnal perseverance has earned you a hidden gaming tip: GO TO BED!"
- Civilization IV has a built-in alarm that can be set by the player to go off after a certain amount of time.
- And there's an option to have a clock displayed on the screen, which is handy when you're playing in full-screen mode so that the clock on your computer's desktop is obscured.
- In a way, the turn-based nature of the game serves as a kind of anti-poop socking measure in itself: if you get up and go to the bathroom, fix dinner, watch TV, etc., the game will still be there for you exactly as you left it.
- Wii Sports periodically encourages players to take a break by pausing the game. While most of the games aren't tiring, the boxing game can wear you out if you keep playing without stopping.
- And by periodically we mean almost every time you change minigames.
- Wii Fit also recomends periodical breaks. A good thing, since some games can be very tiring.
- The World Ends With You has an anti-poop-socking function: pins, your means of attacking, can earn three different kinds of experience, one of which can only be gained by leaving your DS off for a while. So because some pins will evolve into new and fancy kinds of pins only if the majority of the experience they've gained is of one of those three kinds, if you want to get every kind of pin, you have to leave your game off for significant periods of time.
- However, this feature can be easily bypassed by merely changing the clock on your DS' system forward one week, which is the longest that your pins will receive experience for the game being off. So much for that.
- A better example from the game would be that another type of experience requires you to not play the game and just leave it on in Mingle mode.
- Also not entirely true in that Shutdown (the aforementioned "turn your DS off" type) and Mingle (don't play the game but leave it on in Mingle Mode) Pin Points are worth nine times as much as Battle Pin Points for the purposes of determining evolution.
- The free MMORPG Urban Dead has a maximum cap of 50 Action Points per character that regenerate at the rate of 1 AP every half-hour. There's also a max of 160 IP hits from a certain address per day, although you can donate $5 to get this lifted for one character. Of course, this only stops in-game poopsocking — metagaming on the numerous forums devoted to the game and its gaming groups can consume far more time than actually playing the game.
- The MMORPG Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates reminds you to take a break to stretch and such every now and then. On the other hand, its system of decrementing lifespan of items and badges based on how many different days you've been online for and not total time spent connected to the game runs contrary to this.
- In the Stronghold RTS series your in game advisor will make comments depending on how long you have been playing. “How about a snack my liege?” “You have been playing for a very long time.” “Aren’t you tired, sir?”
- The browser based MMO Tribal Wars does this by making it so that even the simplest of tasks will take an hour, during which time you are supposed to go do something else while waiting. Some things can take a lot longer.
- In the MMORPG Eternal Lands, you're only allowed to get a certain amount of Harvesting EXP for each in-game day. (6 hours real time). You still can harvest though, so it's only effective in one way.
- Issue 13 of City Of Heroes introduced "Day Jobs", which give players bonuses when their characters are logged out.
- Those logged-out time stats apply to characters individually and also builds up patrol XP, which allows you to gain 1.5 times the normal amount of XP per kill until it runs out, so really what it does is encourage people to rotate their characters.
- Many games for the infamous Virtual Boy have an "Automatic Pause" feature, which pauses the game after 15 straight minutes of play, though this is mainly due to the Virtual Boy having the potential to easily cause headaches and eye damage.
- Nintendo refused to license a game unless it included this feature, so all official games do.
- The MMORPG Atlantica Online features a "Stamina Gauge" which decreases by 1 every time you enter a battle; while you have stamina, experience gains are tripled and item drops are doubled (which is a roundabout way of saying that once the gauge hits zero, experience is reduced to a third and item drops are cut in half). The stamina gauge is reset to 100 every morning at 6:00 AM, plus a small amount of rollover stamina depending on your level.
- The browser-based psuedo-MMORPG Dragon Quest limits how many "Quests," or actions, you could take in one day.
- S4 League gives the traditional hourly messages during gameplay, but a bug introduced in the European live version is far more devastating: If it affects you, it initially halves the (actually pitiful) amount of money you earn for playing a match after three hours of play, then reducing that amount to zero after five. In a game where the prize money for a single match can fail to cover the expenses incurred in weapon/clothing damage during that match, this can hurt like hell. Fortunately, this is on the priority list for fixing, but nevertheless is a pretty good example of this trope even if it is unintentional.
- It also mentions it's time to take a break after three hours, "cool players know when to take a break" after four, and soon after it begins telling you to take a break to preserve your health.
- In Black And White the divine advisors will pop on if it's late at night, saying things such as that even gods should sleep from time to time.
- In one CSI: Miami episode, the team tracks down a gamer who may have witnessed a crime. Only to find that the gamer had died at his computer due to sleep deprivation and overdoses of energy drinks.
- According to the manual for FusionFall, the Nano Com is its own Anti Poop Socking indicator. Its efficiency determines the rate at which you acquire Fusion Matter and Taros (money) - the longer you play straight, the further the efficiency cramps, and once it hits zero, you stop getting both. Word of advice: if the stored Fusion Matter stops glowing for some reason, take it as a not-so-subtle hint to log off.
- While not likely to be poop-socked, Animal Crossing has real-time based shop opening and closing times - that is to say that Tom Nook's store will close at 8PM (Wii) or 11PM (DS) and not open till the next. This is especially annoying if you are somewhat older than the "intended" child demographic.
- The opening times depend on what building Nook is using. The convenience store building, Nook-N-Go is open from 7:00 AM to 1:00 AM, while the largest store, Nookington's is open from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM. However, the only game that gives you direct control over which building Nook has is City Folk; on the other games, Nook will always use the largest building available.
- Fable 2 tracks the income from rent in real time: If you don't play for a few days you'll have a nice pile of cash waiting for you.
- This troper learned from the internet that if you forward your 360 date a few years you'll get a very VERY large amount of cash.
- Eversion has something like this in the form of random messages that replace the "READY!" prompt in later stages, such as "STOP" and "GIVE UP" (as well as occasionally having the regular "READY!", which then has "TO DIE" flash underneath), but their purpose is not encouraging the player to take breaks so much as it is to scare the player out of continuing the game, not unlike the aforementioned Metal Gear Solid 2.
- Failed implementation in Final Fantasy XI. There is a clickthrough screen while logging in with a short message about playing too long, ending with "Don't forget your family, your friends, your school, or your work." Ignored by most if not all players, who click through it immediately.
- In the Playstation video game adaptation of the film Independence Day, you are tasked with flying a fighter plane through various stages. The final level takes place onboard the alien mothership, and it is equal parts frustrating and difficult. After you beat the game, a message at the end of the credits tells you to "go outside and get some sunlight". Real useful advice, that.
- The game Eat Lead: the Return of Matt Hazard (which is basically just a parody of action games) has some silly trophies/achievements. One of them is an achievement called Take Five aquired by pausing the game.
- The LeechBlock add-on for Firefox lets users establish their own Anti Poop Socking for websites.
- There is also MeeTimer, which has no relation to Miis whatsoever.
- It would seem someone finally found TV Tropes' nemesis!
- Chances are it's accidental, but Sim City 3000 Unlimited has a little clock that can be accessed by clicking the blue area around the mini map.
- The flash RPG Battle Stations uses Action Points, which regenerate hourly to a maximum of 500.
- Free web-based adventure game Legends of Zork also uses Action Points, which regenerate at the rate of 20 a day; with a cap of 90. Items that grant additional Action Points can be purchased at the premium shop; and purchased action points can exceed the cap. However, there are restrictions on the number and frequency of use of these items, so there is still an effective limit to daily play time.
- Mabinogi somewhat subverts this by simultaneously encouraging and discouraging poopsocking; both in small ways; mainly through the aging/rebirthing mechanic. Characters age in real time, at the rate of 1 year per real-time week, and gain stats and ability points (for levelling skills) for each in-game year. Depending on the particular character build and skillset, there are benefits and drawbacks to both extended grinding sessions (levels and skill training), and extended breaks.
- Along with this, certain parts of the mainstream storyline quests, as well as a few side quests, require the character to wait until the next real-time day to aquire the necessary item/information to proceed with the quest.
- Dissidia Final Fantasy has a "favourite day" system where a chosen day of the week gets you bonuses like extra EXP from fights. So for optimal advancement you play only on that day. Or mess with the PSP's calendar.
- Gaia Online rewards you with golds for posting. Your first post of the day gets you a whopping 75 gold. However, it only registers as the first post of the day if you've spent at least ten consecutive hours logged out of Gaia Online.
- How long have you been reading and editing? Is the text starting to blur together? Can you feel your legs? Maybe you should crash.
- I can see my health gauge depleting already... No, wait. That's just my eyes bleeding. *Troper has fainted.*
- *Troper has lost 3 posts.*
- Troper needs food, badly!
- In Boktai and Boktai 2, your assorted Solar Equipment would overheat if used in direct sunlight for too long, rendering it useless and requiring you to play in the shade for a while if you wanted to keep going. But if you played for too long, you would automatically overheat regardless of how close you were to overheating by normal means. Reaching the point where you went into permanent overheat took a while, but even if you overheated normally, there was no point in trying to go on-instead of having a set waiting period before you could use the gun normally again, it merely counted down the invisible meter it used to track the heat, much slower than it heated up in the first place. It liked to toy with you too-it wouldn't make you wait until the gun had completely cooled off, it would just wait for a certain threshold, so that after a rather absurd wait, you'd nearly kill a Bok and the gun would overheat again.
- Improbable Island has a Stamina gauge that runs out as you do things such as fight monsters and travel. Once it goes below 60% you start taking penalties to attack and defense, if it gets below 30% every encounter has a chance of you collapsing from exhaustion, which sends you to the Failboat, where you'll most likely have to wait for or use a New Day to get back in the game. However, Game Days have a cycle of about 4 hours. So it won't be too long before you can play again, and if you're logged off long enough, you can "Save" New Days for use later.
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