Finish a Game in a Work Week

September 26, 2006 9:26 AM

Wired 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.