Gift Giving Mechanics in Games

1257675768969338833secretlondon_red_present.svg.medLast week I offered up a gift guide for Christmas giving. This week I’m going to continue the seasonal theme by looking at gift-giving as a game mechanic.

Sure, it’s hard to fashion pure gift-giving into a mechanic, because in that pure form it’s theoretically altruistic — offered with no expectation of recompense. But, that isn’t how gift-giving really works, especially not when it gets wound up into societal holidays like Christmas, where gift-giving becomes an expectation.

When you add expectations and recompense in to the idea of gift-giving, then you have something more like a game mechanic. I’m thus going to look at the few games I know of that have used these various elements … Continue reading