| abstract
| - The act of taking a video game's existing interactivity away from the player, or giving the option to relinquish it. This may seem to run counter to the entire point of video games, but the medium is not just about poking at stuff - it's about poking at fresh and interesting stuff. The player who cheerfully clicks through a lot of controls to found a moonbase will be a lot less enthusiastic about clicking through the same controls 50 times over to resupply and expand it. Once he's progressed to forging the Great Galactic Empire of Really Big Laser Guns, optimizing planetary shuttle schedules will just be a nuisance. Automation affects the very core of the experience, so it's remarkably easy to screw up. Take away the same player's shuttlecraft once his empire discovers warp travel: he may have appreciated the break from cutthroat scheming against the Star Federation With Lots of Missiles, he may want to savor the feeling of taking care of his little future people, or he may not have cared about the shuttles, yet dislike the feeling of being railroaded. Worst of all, Artificial Stupidity is waiting for a chance to show its ugly face. The player might be winning glorious victories or building wonders to stand the best of time; it's just going to be frustrating if he has to do it by shepherding a computer that should know better. Still, automation is often important in keeping a game fun and challenging. Isn't game design fun? See also Anti-Frustration Features, where gameplay changes in response to the player's (lack of) skill. If the entire game is like this, it's a Programming Game. Examples of Gameplay Automation include:
* Deuteros, an Amiga game, was praised for an almost supernatural sense of timing. The player would get to rediscover space travel. Just as he started to have enough of sending more and more stuff into space, the research teams would come up with an automated cargo transport system. Later on, fully automated orbital workshops, and after that, bulk matter transmitters.
* In the simulation game Afterlife, buildings have to be manually balanced every so often to stay efficient. It's either mindnumbing, since it means moving a single slider and there are lots of buildings, or the player may have the game do it at a serious cost. This is because the designers were dumb.
* World of Warcraft's scripting and macro system originally allowed "push this button to play your character" mods. Blizzard has gradually restricted functionality to avert this over the years. The game is also rife with illegal hacked clients that completely automate gathering crafting materials from nodes, but that's deliberate cheating.
* In UFO: Aftermath, the player has a squad of soldiers, an Earth full of aliens and mutants to conquer, and one helicopter to do it with. Expanding one's territory increases the number of trouble spots and sending the chopper careening back and forth becomes an exercise in futility, until the player wins the first major victory by capturing an alien teleporter. Then the chopper always launches from the closest base.
* Progress Quest takes this to its logical conclusion, eliminating the player from the equation entirely.
* Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula has a mineral probe, which can be deployed from a planetary lander to gather selected types of resources. It's a real timesaver since the player usually lands to look for trade centers and ruins, which are more lucrative, but needs stocks of metals on hand for repairs.
* In Warcraft3 and Starcraft2, worker units can be set to use their repair ability automatically. Very useful. The Real Time Strategy genre as a whole has been inching towards this. Construction orders became build queues, which have been getting repeat options (Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, Rise of Nations). Some games have units automatically find ways to make themselves useful (Rise of Nations, Original War).
* In Forza Motorsport, you can hire AI drivers to do the racing for you. The trade-off is that this cuts into the prize money.
* Gran Turismo 4 and 5 have B-Spec mode, which turns the games into playing a racing crew chief.
* Master of Orion 3 was a failed attempt to revolutionize the 4X genre through heavy automation. It was intended to make ruling feel like ruling by having the computer make low-level decisions, freeing the player to focus on the big picture.
* Kingdom of Loathing has a combat macro script language. It's quite limited, lacking such things as variables.
* There is also a fan-made program called KolMafia which will automate damn near everything and has a comprehensive scripting language, among many other things. People have made scripts to play the entire game for you. The devs are fine with it.
* In Plants vs. Zombies you can buy a snail which auto-collects the coins dropped by plants in your Zen Garden. Though you need to manually awaken it for short intervals or feed it chocolate to keep it awake for an hour.
* Outpost 2, an RTS, has an optional observation satellite that will automatically survey all resource deposits (make them usable) for the rest of the game. It manages to feel great while accomplishing very little: robotic surveyors are cheap and expendable. Yet it eases the crushing multitasking a bit, and is the first concrete benefit of a plotline about escaping the planet.
* Most Real Time Strategy games (or strategy games in general) will automate workers for gathering resources once you've set them up, or if a worker is very specific, it will do its job once it's created. You can effectively ignore them until they are needed elsewhere. Likewise, your combat units will attack any enemy on sight. In some cases, they'll pursue them for some time. More recent game will also have units react automatically given a situation (supposedly). For example, in Company of Heroes, units that get attacked will find the nearest cover, but they won't move from their spot where you left them at.
* Godville follows in the footsteps of Progress Quest, describing itself as a "ZPG" - "zero-player game." The player's input is limited to the ability to issue simple commands that the hero may or may not actually follow, plus the ability to encourage or punish the hero (which likewise may or may not accomplish anything much).
* Many computer Mahjong games have several such features for the player's convenience:
* Auto Win: When you complete a winning hand in Mahjong, you have to declare the win to end the hand and collect the points. (It is in fact allowed to pass up the opportunity, for example if you want to try for an even bigger win. However, 9 times out of 10, doing so would be very silly.) If Auto-Win is turned on, it automatically declares a winning hand at the first opportunity.
* Auto Pass: Ignore all opportunities to call opponents' discards except to win the hand. This is particularly useful because computer games usually try to keep the game moving quickly and won't stall after a discard if none of the opponents can call it. Thus if the game stalls for a couple seconds, you know someone probably has the requisite tiles in their hand to give them the option of calling the most recent discard. If you know you're going to pass every time, this skips the stall so it doesn't tip off your opponents regarding the composition of your hand.
* Auto Tsumokiri: When enabled, every time you draw a tile, it'll automatically discard the tile you just drew (known as tsumokiri in Japanese) unless you can use it to declare a kong or it completes a winning hand. Useful if you're one tile away from a winning hand and are absolutely sure you won't want to change the composition of your hand no matter what comes up.
* Jade Dynasty has a built-in bot that can perform a wide variety of actions for the player, though it may be stymied by unforeseen situations. Use is unlimited up to level 90, after which its energy must be refilled regularly.
* Granado Espada has an array of automation options to help players with the unique multi-character gameplay (each character having almost as wide a range of actions as a typical MMO's lone hero and synergies must be set up in real time). Players formerly used these functions as an ersatz botting system but the developers have taken steps to progressively limit their usefulness.
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