Naomi Clark - A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design

This simple platforming game also serves as a commentary on the proliferation of nearly meaningless rewards in games: you earn your first achievement simply by loading the game, and you earn three more for watching and clicking the opening screens. Once play begins, you unlock dozens more just by using the games controls, moving and jumping around its single scene, and dying by colliding with its spiked obstacles. There are 99 achievements in all, displayed in a list on one side of the screen; completing them all requires a little bit of platforming skill as well as guesswork and math to solve what the names of the still-locked achievements signify. The resulting experience hovers somewhere between the satisfaction of solving every last task on a list and the awareness that these rewards are simply being handed out like candy.

American Dream lets the player return to stock trading immediately, however, and the temptation to see the latest price changes and cash-in can mean that players spend very little time in the apartment. Because the simple, pixellated graphics of the apartment dont feel drastically different even with the most expensive furniture, the ostensible rewards of the gameplay are eclipsed by the drive to gamble and earn. Unexpectedly, a maximally furnished apartment turns out to be critical for optimal success in the stock market because having the best furniture at later stages of the game allows the player to get an insider trading tip that guarantees huge profits. As the player becomes immensely rich, the difficulty of making money becomes trivial and the games resistance becomes slack, possibly leading players to wonder what the point of so much money actually is.

Platform: Flash
Price: Free
http://ded.increpare.com/~locus/american_dream/