ok so I know the "bus factor" is a thing in software development already but I'm talking about mobile games. You know how some public buses have rows of seats at different elevations, such that if you sit in one or two specific rows then the person sitting behind you has an excellent view of exactly what you're doing on your phone? The bus factor of a mobile game is how personally embarrassing it is to me to have somebody in the row behind me on the bus watching me play it.
This is an important factor to me in how I choose what mobile games to spend time on, but I don't know if anybody actually considers it in game design. It's a very personal thing - beyond the fact that most people probably don't care, I think how exactly you reckon it is going to be different depending on how you view yourself.
For me part of it is the apparent quality of the game just at face value; like, if a game has little visual polish, or is full of those weird ads for fake games, or clearly has predatory monetisation, or if it's one of those games that has a million clones (2048 variants, the one where you put blocks in a 10x10 grid, the one with the... balls...(??)), then it's gonna have a higher bus factor to me. This is because, for some reason, a part of my own self-image is that I consider myself to have good taste in games, so playing a game like that would be embarrassing to me. Threes! looks like a 2048 clone, but it isn't, so it has a much lower bus factor to me.
Totally unrelatedly to my own relationship to my own standards that I've barely examined and probably should, also affecting the bus factor for me, is how... inscrutable a game is. Consider the game Gatecrasher. It's a good game and it looks fine, but the problem is that it's too understandable. The guy sitting behind me on the bus need only look at the game for about three seconds and they know literally everything there is to know about it. When you watch somebody mess up in one of these games the only possible reaction is to think "I could have done that better". And you might even be right.
This is why I find it much less embarassing to play games where it's less obvious what's going on, especially if that makes whatever you're doing look more impressive. Puzzle games are good. Cracking the Cryptic is a good example because while it's obviously sudoku it looks absolutely preposterous and much more impressive, though the effect is somewhat diministed if you're like me and enter about one number every ten minutes.
Michael Brough's roguelikes are great for this because you'd actually have to play the game to understand anything about it; the UI is so often completely ridiculous (and Cinco Paus is only in Portugese, which gives the bonus point that somebody watching you play it might assume you know the language (as a side note to this side note, I really want there to be a mobile game in sitelen pona, because then this assumption would actually be true)). Did I just throw away a perfectly good run by making an obvious mistake or did I actually just finish a round that went really well? Just watching the game, you have no way of knowing.
I think roguelikes in general are good because they're so complicated. I once saw somebody on the bus playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup on a laptop. This is the only time I've ever asked somebody on a bus what game they were playing, and it started a several months long roguelike obsession for me. So that's probably a rare instance of a game with a negative bus factor, that goes beyond being not embarrassing, all the way to being cool.
Was I going somewhere with this? Um, if anybody has any suggestions for mobile games that look good and/or impossible to understand, or that have a high bus factor but are good anyway, or any thoughts on this concept at all, I'd love to hear about it.
