Arrogance in a casual game design (about butterflies)

In checking out the Chrome web store, I've found various Mahjong games. One I picked up a few months ago, Mahjong Butterfly, I found to be fairly enjoyable for a mindless, relaxing variety of game. You can pick up three different tiles at once and match any of them, so it's rare to be seriously stuck. And there is a "butterfly collection" component on the side, which allows for an excuse to keep playing the game longer than a handful of rounds, where you still feel like you're achieving progress toward a longer-term goal. I eventually filled out the butterfly catalogue, and wandered off from the game for a while.

The other day, I was looking to fill that mindless puzzle game urge again, and thought, why not a couple rounds of this game again? I never uninstalled it (mind, it was a bookmark app anyway -- another issue entirely) so it's an easy thing to find.

Turns out, they've updated the game.

My butterfly catalogue is empty. I don't really care. It's almost nice to have that secondary goal available again.

It loads with a 30-second video ad. This is irritating, but would be tolerable, except that from time to time, the game will bug out and freeze up. I can't click on anything. 10 seconds of no input is about my threshold before I refresh -- and then I have to wait for the ad again.

But the thing that bothers me the most is the "Would you like to share this achievement?" questions. When I first picked it back up, it started spamming me with four of these popup messages per butterfly, and some of them seemed to be exactly the same. I have to tell it, "No! No! No. No!!" before I can get back to my game. It doesn't even say where it would share anything if I told it yes; I assume either Facebook or they have something on their own company game site. And I absolutely don't care enough about this game to want to tell everyone on facebook that I play it, much less that I have found a dozen different butterflies. (Obviously, this is an issue with many Facebook apps, that aggressively try to trick/persuade users into spamming their friends with messages from the app, rather than respectfully allowing a default setting of "Nah, I don't want to say much about this to anyone.")

Annoyance with this primes me to be annoyed at the hint button. Sometimes I look away from the screen while I'm playing this low-priority game. But take 15 seconds of inactivity, and it starts blinking. Hint, hint, hint, hint! When I finally come back to the game, I either push the button, or I click on a random tile I didn't really want to mess with yet, because of the irritation of the blinking. It's a little thing, but in the context of the way I play the game, it suggests to me a huge arrogance. "This game is important! You are definitely focusing only on it! If you can't figure out what to do in our time limit, it is certainly because you are too stupid to see the solution, and you could not be either strategizing several moves ahead or attending to something off the computer!"

Ultimately, the take-away message for game design that I have built up for myself here is this: Don't be arrogant. Accept that your players may not consider your work, no matter how lovely or brilliant, to be the center of their world. Make sure there is an options menu, wherein they can turn off all the repetitive demands for attention that you might think are a good idea to include for some users. Be respectful in your requests for players to do the work of free advertising (i.e."sharing") for you, and back off if they're not interested.