Maintenance and Scarcity

Drawing on the topic introduced in Chapter 3 , Chapter 5 focuses on the particular topic of “maintenance” in games. Maintenance is a particular focus of civilization simulation games, where balancing the input of various raw materials (like stone, wood, food) is central to the experience of the game, and a distinct break from lever-based games of forward movement without concern for systematicity. The question of maintenance is intimately connected to the scarcity of some resource in the game. Sometimes these are literally physical resources on the game map, which the player might exhaust at the start of the game before building up ways to generate resources in an ongoing manner, or through some kind of finite limit that gives shape to the game itself—as in Exocolonist, where the ability for the colony to develop is limited by the number of years the player avatar has to study and develop a career path. The issue of scarcity has wide application to some of the most basic features of game design, like the “skill tree” that many games depend on to shape player customization. The scarcity of “points” available to put into the game determines the limits on player design; this chapter connects this to a larger infrastructural system organized around scarcity.