First off, you’re welcome! Yeah, honestly every once in a while I’ll find a gem on Gamasutra or wherever, but all too often most blogs are either fluff pieces, way too heavy on theory, or just have no practical take-aways at all. Well, that’s my opinion anyways… but here I’ve found useful info with every post 🙂

Thanks for the great answer, I think I understand the “how” and the “what” but I’m still not sure about the “why.” I realize the importance of catering to smaller, flexible sessions since our data (and I’m sure every other company’s data) shows this to be the norm. What I don’t understand is why it’s so important to discourage longer sessions of 10-20 minutes or more. Is it primarily…

…to ensure that players don’t run out of content?
…to entice players to return and play again?
…to monetize another paywall (ie: buy more energy)?
…or some combination of the above?

The concern is we’ve found that this segment of “hooked” players has a much higher percentage of paying users. But… maybe that’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy since we’ve never discouraged longer sessions in our games before.

First off, thanks for the praise. Much appreciated!

On comparing this post to Flexible Sessions, what I’d like to point out:
Eventually you’re going to need to push the player out of your game. That’s consistent in my Flexible Sessions post and this Energy post by Ed. How you do it can be quick and dirty (with energy giving an abrupt end to the session) or you can be a bit more subtle about it (Flexible Sessions). I’d always push designers to move towards a Flexible Session setup, where players eventually come to the conclusion naturally that it would be smarter to leave the game and come back over staying in the game. Session Length caps ultimately come down to habituation, pacing of content, and making sure the player feels good when leaving your game. Especially with mobile, when short session length is so important, making sure the player can complete a session and feel good about it is important.

Hope that answers your question.

As a designer, my initial thought is to simply let players play for however long that they want (assuming there’s an easy out). I never quite understood why it was so important to encourage certain ways of playing (ie: reducing benefits over time in Boom Beach). Again this comes up in the “Habituation” section with the chocolate analogy. In Adam’s previous post he mentioned the first issue with energy systems being “an abrupt end of the session with no commitment.” To me this seems like a contradiction: why should designers try to limit session length when abrupt endings are considered negative? Am I misunderstanding or is this something you and Adam disagree on?