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Finish a Game in a Work Week
by Chris Remo, Sep 26, 2006 9:26am PDTWired contributor Clive Thompson has a piece up entitled The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer, reflecting on the dilemma developers and gamers share when it comes to settling on an appropriate length for games. On the one hand, many gamers rarely if ever actually complete games, while a hardcore segment of the market frequently laments that games are becoming ever shorter. One point Thompson addresses that is frequently forgotten in most discussions of this topic is that, even if two gamers play a given game for the same total amount of time, the player who split that playtime up among a greater number of play sessions is likely to have made much less progress than the other player. This effectively widens the gap even further between players willing to dedicate to long uninterrupted play sessions and those who cannot, which then makes it even more difficult for developers to satisfactorily cater to both groups. Of course, Thompson is sure to point out, most gamers love the feeling of completing a game. I certainly do, but it's something I rarely experience these days. Long epics, particularly those such as RPGs or dungeon-based adventures or other games that demand long unbroken periods of attention, are nearly out of the question for me given the scattered bursts in which I generally play.
The 40-hour gamers are able to play in a way that I used to when I was a teenager, but can't anymore. They devote full evenings and entire weekends to marathon play-sessions. ... And hell, anyone can lick a game in 40 hours easily if they play like that. What you need is to have very few distractions and commitments. That's why a recent study by the NPD Group showed that hard-core gamers -- those capable of truly monklike devotion -- are, as you'd expect, aged 6 to 17. In contrast, folks like me -- "soft-core" gamers? -- also crave to play these richly narrative, long-lasting titles. But we can only play in dribs and drabs -- an hour here, an hour there. The unspoken truth of gaming is that this creates a vastly different, and vastly inferior, mental space for game playing. If you're continually loading the game into your mental RAM, only to dump it out again an hour later, you can never concentrate as fully on grokking its internal mechanics. The thing is, finishing a story-based game is an enormously rewarding experience. I'm depressed that I so seldom achieve it. It's like mixing the literary pleasures of finishing War and Peace with the itch-scratching OCD feel of completing The New York Times Sunday crossword.This whole conundrum is becoming increasingly important for game developers, just as the average age of gamers becomes increasingly older and the average gamer has less and less time to spend several hours at a time on a game. Thompson mentions episodic gaming as one potential route. Several month ago, designers from Valve mentioned that according to their Steam statistics, the majority of gamers tend to eventually just give up after playing a game for some period of time--this certainly isn't limited to Valve games. Of course, not all games can (or should) go in that direction, so it remains to be seen if the problem will be wholeheartedly addressed or if gamers will just keep on disagreeing about whether games are too long or too short.
Comments
Make the game worth finishing is the main goal and about 20 to 30 hours long. It seems to be the only games I actually finish out of the mountain of titles I've purchased. Jedi Knight series, No One Lives Forever 1 & 2, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Thief 1, 2, 3. Short games 12 or less ours to finish just irritate the hell out of me and I feel ripped off if I paid full price.
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In a single player game its quite possible to have linear yet mentally challenging level design , but of course it cost more than freaking cutting and pasting levels with a random level generator.
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Fable, first run, I rushed through the storyline - 8 hours, second run through (yeah I thought it was that good) 22 hours.
Chrono Trigger I did 9/10'ths of but the ending became tedious, that was around 15 hours.
All games should have timers, I like knowing how long I've invested personally.
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I realize I'm probably a much more solid platformer player (and game player in general) than the general market, but is there really that great a factor of difference on the average game completion time for a hardcore gamer and more casual gamer? In the Tomb Raider example, we're talking almost a factor of 10 from what most people I've talked to have managed and what the author was on pace for. My wife is about as casual as they come (save for me recently addicting her to WoW) and typically takes about 10% longer than I do to finish your average platformer.
And what games outside of RPGs are promising 40+ hours? I don't see much talk of even up to 20 these days (which is fine by me, really).
Far more likely, the fun runs out and then it becomes a chore to finish it, or the game is so damned enjoyable that you just start playing it all over again.
I mean, how long did it take to end Contra on the NES? Not that long, but my little brother and i would play that thing co-op for hours and hours just ending it over and over and over again.
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If I get frustrated to the point that the game is no longer fun I will probably stop playing and I may never come back. If the frustration is because of a game mechanic I find particularly stupid (spawning enemies in most first-person shooters, for instance), it's even less likely that I'll come back.
So, yeah, engaging gameplay OR story (I'll deal with average of one as long as the other is awesome), err on the side of "too easy" rather than "too hard", and skip on some of the dumber game mechanics:
Go easy on jumping puzzles if your game isn't a platformer, routine use of enemies that just pop fully-formed out of the ether (particularly in FPSes), enemies that watch you through walls, enemies that ignore movement and especially cover, and probably others I can't think of.
On of course there are exceptions, just be very, very careful about trying to make such exceptions.
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http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050809/eilers_01.shtml
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When I play for an hour, I want to feel like I got somewhere in the game, like I'm a step closer to finishing. To achieve that, I either need to be able to complete a level in that time or move on to the next plot point by then.
And with save systems, if I have to play two hours to save progress I made in the first hour, I end up dumping the game. I need to be able to save my game and run upstairs when the wife calls out that dinner's on or that it's time for sex.
Games that offer both are the ones I finish most often, but I can sometimes get through a great game that offers just a bit of those (eg GRAW - story progresses in an hour, saves aren't save anywhere, but are frequent enough).
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Most gamers these days have killed so many AI opponents with so many different weapons that they really don't care much about seeing that next uber enemy or getting the next uber weapon. Been there... done that... a thoasand times.
Ironically, over and over I'll hear developers claim that story has no place in video games. That having strong characters and a story are somehow incompatible with video games as a medium because of its interactivity. They seem to think that repeating the same game over and over with different enemies and weapons is a better alternative.
Granted... telling a story in a game isn't as easy as telling it in a liner medium like movies or books. And granted, if you come up with a new game type, and a new way to have fun in a game, you may very well not need a story. But the VAST majority games are much too similiar to the games that came before them for the gameplay in and of itself to be interesting enough to hold a player's attention. That's where story comes in. I may not care much about getting game X's version of railgun, but if I am dieing to learn what happens next in the story, I'll keep on playing.
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Ive played plenty of 20-40 hour games where about half way through I just wanted it to be over because it losts its steam. In addition, if a game is gonna be 10 hours, it better be the best damn 10 hours ever and it better have some serious replayability.
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I think his points are valid, but not mind-blowing. This is the reason why adults always tell children to cherish their youth. The act of simply enjoying life changes dramatically when the time that you have to do it in is cut shorter and broken into small pieces.
For instance, when I read Calvin and Hobbes now, I take it very differently than I used to. When I was seven, I simply thought it was a lot of fun. Now, I see it as an obe to childhood and a message to parents - let kids stay kids as long as possible.
For example, I don't think long games are a problem as long as they broken down into small parts, kind of like oblivion. Its nice nowing I can jump into the game and just go through a couple quest in an hour. True I forget what I was doing sometimes, but its nice that the game tells you what your current quest is and where you have to go.
Off to work I go :(
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For example I just started playing Okami and Saint's Row, both of which have a lot of content.
I'm trying Metroid Prime 2, we're almost there.