Video Games are too 'Effing Long!
July 27, 2007, by Erlog I am a long-time video gamer. I remember fondly the dusty horrible smell of the second-hand crate of Atari 2600(with games) my father pulled from an antique store while we were on vacation. A week or so later we were home and I was introduced to my first, very own, console video game experience – Atari Pac-Man. It was crap. In fact, most of the 30 or so games that came along with that console were crap. Today, you wouldn’t play them more than 3 minutes before tossing them away. They were so simplistic that it’s hard to think back to that time and remember how many hours I spent playing Megamania, Ms. Pac-man, or Centipede…I feel so ashamed.
Arcade Phenomenom: Centipede
But, I digress. Today, conversely, you can pick up most video games and play them for hours and hours upon end without finishing. Dragon Quest 8 is nearly 60 hours at a minimum, and that’s understandable because it’s an RPG. However, even games that are looked at as kind of short are surprisingly long. The recently released Tomb Raider: Anniversary is about 20 hours for most players. I’m shocked that a game of that length is seen as a kind of short little ditty barely worth the price of admission. Even handheld games suffer this same problem. That’s crazy.
I’m not sure you realize just how long 20 hours is. To be more exacting, that’s 1200 minutes. You could watch about 10 full-length movies in that time. Not 78 minute old Disney classics, by the way, but full 2 hour movies. You could also listen to the audio version of a nearly 600 page book, and if you chose to read those pages as opposed to listening to them then that page count would approach 900. That’s more than 1/3rd of the way through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or through any other single volume that might be published. And so, 20 hours is a fucking long ass time to put it very concisely.
That's time spent not being here.
It’s ridiculous for gamers, as a community, to look down on games that aren’t longer than 15-20 hours. We want to argue about replay value and bang-for-buck when I haven’t finished a game in nearly 3 months. I don’t want longer games, and I don’t think you should either. A game’s story is no good to anyone if players can’t finish the game, or even finish it in enough time to keep the story straight.
Interestingly, shorter games have some inherent significant benefits. Having less overall game content to produce allows developers to spend more time tightening and prettying the experience in the remaining game content. Because of this, shorter games have less bugs, have more detail in their game worlds, and are a tighter more well-packaged experience. On top of all this players, will be more likely to finish. Finishing the game gives players both a sense of accomplishment and leaves them wanting more.
This last part is very important, and I think it’s something that current game developers do not understand. Apart from Ico, Anachronox, Beyond Good & Evil, and Psychonauts there are few games that have ever left me wanting more. This is so strange because in nearly every other media the whole idea is to leave people wanting more. I’m never satiated by an episode of Lost or by the end of one Stephen King's Dark Tower novels. I’ve enjoyed the experience and so I want more.
I think it’s a problem that I’ve played quite a number of hours of Final Fantasy XII, haven’t finished, and yet don’t necessarily want more. I should probably finish it, but I know that there’s just so much there. It’s such a sheer unsalable wall that I know I’ll probably never be able to reach the summit. I don’t have the time or the attention span, but I would really like to.
For these reasons, I cry out to developers, “Stop! Halt! Do not pass go! Give me quality over quantity.” I don’t want to shell out $50 dollars for 90 hour epics I’ll never finish. I want to be able to finish my games. I want to know the rest of the story. I have no need for filler. Does one of the volumes of Lord of the Rings need filler? That’s essentially what we’re talking about here. The obvious answer is, no we don’t need it. The crazy part is that it costs more to do that. It costs more to water down the experience.
Size only matters in some gaming...
In short, give me something streamlined. Don’t dilly-dally. I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to pay for it. Give me a bigger, better, faster, stronger experience. I swear that I, and many other gamers who don’t know it, will be happier if you do that. In the meantime, I’m going to reward developers who have gotten things right by playing Telltale Games’ excellent Sam & Max – Abe Lincoln Must Die!
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