While the arguments of Frequency, Reward and Satisfaction are more important in order to make horse care games worthwhile, Star Stable Online proves that brevity can be an asset in itself:

Star Stable’s horse care consists of dragging an item from your inventory onto your horse. You see a brief animation and that’s it. It is neither particularly satisfying nor interesting, but it works because the daily horse care takes a grand total of about 20 seconds, and the game offers hours and hours of content beyond that. On the other extreme, you have a game like My Riding Stables, which makes you spend over a minute on hooves alone, and expects you to do that on every one of your up to six horses, on every in-game day, without offering a whole lot more to do than that.

If horse care gameplay is kept brief, you have a better chance of leaving the player wanting more, and less risk of overstaying your welcome.

Of course, people’s standards of how long is too long differ: A child who does not yet value their own time very highly might not complain as quickly about having to do the same thing several times. An adult on the other hand - especially one who has played better games and is able to see where the problems lie - may have less patience.

Horse games often get away with featuring tedious, repetitive and boring chores under the guise of being “for kids”, but forget that it’s entirely possible to make mechanics that are easy enough for kids to grasp while still offering basic user interaction feedback.

Frequency and Incentive

It makes sense for horse games to give the player a direct incentive to care well for their horses: in Star Stable, daily caring improves your horse’s mood and thereby its speed and reaction time. In My Riding Stables, your horses have a chance to get sick if you skip the care. In Red Dead Redemption 2, failing to brush your horse will eventually lead to it moving more slowly, although the game is more lenient about how often you have to do such chores than most horse games are.