Hay Day is a mobile farming game created by Supercell, who is also responsible for other popular mobile games like Clash of Clans and Brawl Stars. It is available on Android and iOS systems. Its target audience is, theoretically, everyone of all ages. Its entire farming concept is pretty easy, even for really young kids to understand: you generate and manage resources that will allow you to run your farm and get more money, which goes back into getting more resources. The content and visual design of the game are very age appropriate, featuring bright colors, recognizable icons, and friendly NPC designs. Hay Day doesn’t even insinuate at death, even in cases where it’s the logical conclusion—rather than killing pigs for bacon, you stick them into this cylindrical contraption that squeezes the animals, leaving them hungry but unharmed, ready to be fed once again. Hay Day’s content is not only suitable for young audiences, the gameplay is also engaging for older players as well. In fact, the countless microtransactions that the game advertises are much more likely to land effectively with an adult audience, since adults are more likely to have the money to spare for game passes and diamonds, as well as the financial autonomy to spend on these features.
Hay Day uses idle resource gathering mechanics inherent to the game’s premise as well as time-limited but recurring events to encourage regular, continued gameplay that has the potential to escalate into addiction.
Hay Day is one of those games I’ve been playing on and off for years now—in between long, long months of not sparing it a second thought, I’ll get struck with the urge to open up my farm again, harvest and replant my long-overdue wheat fields, and then forget about it in a few more days. For this critical play, I cracked open my modestly-leveled farm once again. The first thing I noticed was just the deluge of information that flooded my screen. Hay Day informed me at every opportunity of the many time-limited events that were ongoing, and the rewards I could get by doing them. 
Events and their rewards in Hay Day are pretty uniform in that they generally consist of the player achieving certain gameplay goals in exchange for a resource or decorative item to place on their farms. Both the goals and the rewards of these events reset after a period of time, with players having to work themselves up for a new reward every few weeks. Often these rewards are cosmetic farm decorations that have no bearing on gameplay, but have unique designs that give their respective events a level of urgency.
The exclusivity of the designs increases their value in the eyes of the player, and encourages the player to log on more frequently in the short term so that they may complete these events to get the items before the events themselves disappear. For example, the only way to obtain a certain type of topiary decoration (that would spell out “HAYDAY” when assembled) was by exchanging the topiaries for purple flowers, which could be gathered through gathering farm resources and completing daily tasks. While I’m forgetful enough that I never got the chance to earn one of these topiaries, they’ve proven to be of interest to many other players, including those I found discussing them on the Hay Day subreddit.
So the topiaries didn’t land with me, but I still found myself drawn to returning to the game periodically throughout the day due to one of the other events Hay Day was running (the Farm Pass). If not the Farm Pass, there was also the Neighborhood Derby, or the Full Bloom event, or the Design Festival, or the Hayday Fair to catch my interest. Some events, like the Derby, are opt-in, but many others are updated and shown to you automatically. 
I got into the farm pass because I would incidentally complete some of the farm pass tasks while playing the base game normally, which led to the game informing me of the rewards I was able to collect. This discovery led me to start completing, or planning ways to complete, farm pass tasks on purpose, and to look forward to logging back in again to do so.
While the sheer amount of simultaneous events was overwhelming to learn about when I first rejoined the game, I eventually found my way to checking out most of them. The various events, and the tasks they offered, served as a constant stream of stimulation. If I was stuck on a task in the Farm Pass event—like if I needed a pie but it was still baking in the oven—I could swing by the Full Bloom event and complete a few small tasks there.
The expediency that certain goals require mix quite potently with the game’s nature as a farming simulator with idle mechanics. Every resource you create in the game, from the crops you plant to processed items you manufacture, has a waiting period before you can collect them. 
With some things taking up to several hours to collect, it’s pretty unfeasible to get everything the player wants done in a single sitting. Instead, gameplay involves the player closing and opening the game multiple times a day—optimally, probably every hour or so, especially if you want to get all those event tasks done in time. There’s something really fun about working out a playing schedule that makes your farm run like a well-oiled machine, to see the disparate parts of it start to function in sync, but it also requires a continuous relationship with the game that starts to feel less like play and more like work. “We should redefine live service games as the living dead” by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell describes live service games as “a burden” because of the way it takes away your control of when and how you enjoy the game. Hay Day, with its strict time deadlines, dictates to the player when it should be played, demanding more and more out of the player’s personal life.
Hay Day does capitalize on chance in some ways, but for the most part it feels like the routineness is instead what puts players at risk for addiction, bringing them back again and again. 
Locked mystery boxes, wheel of fortunes, and a few other micro-transactional elements utilize chance to encourage players to spend money on the game. As with slot machines, the mechanisms the game’s RNG uses to determine what kind of prize you get is mysterious to the player, but when one of the possibilities is just the wooden plank you’ve been looking for to expand your barn, or a heap of coins that will help you buy your next fruit trees, it starts to feel worth the risk. The predictability and routine of Hay Day’s design is capable of holding even non-paying players captive. There have been moments in the day where I didn’t really want to play but felt obligated to go in and harvest my crops anyways.
For me, at least, I think I’ll probably drop Hay Day again in a few days, but it’s becoming easier to see how someone with a slightly different relationship to their phone and this game could become addicted in the long term.
