Why I Rarely Complete Long Games

[Erik_Twice]

I think the complex, arduous, difficult games you described appealed to original ganster gamers, but not to casual ones.

I think that view suffers quite a bit from presentism.

The people who played Dungeons and Dragons with their friends, Ghosts'n Goblins at the arcades or owned a NES were not out of the norm. A ten year old playing Gradius was not a "gangster" and the complex, ardous games of Avalon Hill were sold to the general public in bookstores and malls.

Demanding games still have a market though, don't you think?

Consider the sales figures of games back then. Both Advanced Squad Leader and Tresham's Civilization sold, just in the US, over 200K copies when a current boardgame is happy to sell 6K. Megaman 2 sold 1.5M, Tiger Heli, a Toaplan game, sold over 1 million in the US alone.

The market for this kind of "demanding games" is much, much smaller now specially on proportion. So either 90% of "gangster gamers" dissapeared and no new ones were born or there's more to this than a new audience getting into the market.

Skyrim [...] WoW [...] CoD [...] These games are not short at all, and they are among the most popular.

Confusingly, when I talk about lenght in the article I'm refering to boardgames. The average lenght went from a whole evening in the 80s to ahour and half today. People now play more games per evening which I think is mostly due to price.

But yeah, video game lenght exploded in the 90s. I think average lenght has signficantly gone down since then and for the same reason: Taking 80s hours to beat a game is a huge positive if you can only buy a handful, but a negative if you have tons of games to play.

1. Many games are looked at more as full gaming experiences with an emphasis on presentation, story, and immersion that used to not be there. Older games mostly focused on a set bit of challenges or in game skills to master.

2. Prevelance of game saves and checkpoints. Instead of starting from the beginning after a few deaths, you respawn at your last save or checkpoint. Less progress is lost.

These two are related. Since games can now be more about aural experiences and presentation, story and the like are more important, respawning becomes more bothersome and the benefits (challenge) matter much less.

[marlowe221]

I'm in the same boat. As much as I like RPGs, finding time for them is tough at this stage in my life. I'm usually busy with other stuff now so when I sit down to play something shorter games are preferable. Nowadays I spend a lot more time on shmups, beat 'em ups, and arcade puzzle games and really enjoy them. Still terrible at the things, especially shoot 'em ups, but having a ton of fun and it gives me an opportunity to play some games without having to dive into one that necessitates a 30+ hour investment of my time.

This is me. There are few games that I am willing to invest RPG-lengths of time into these days. There are a few though, like the Elder Scrolls games and the Civilization series.

I find myself leaning more toward more arcade-style or action-oriented experiences because they tend to be shorter.

[Exhuminator]

What's wrong with playing short sessions of long games?

[Tanooki]

You get nowhere as they're not designed for that usually, and by the time you do something else comes along either you wanted to play as a game or something else pulls your attention off and it never gets finished making it a big waste of time and money.

[noiseredux]

You get nowhere as they're not designed for that usually, and by the time you do something else comes along either you wanted to play as a game or something else pulls your attention off and it never gets finished making it a big waste of time and money.

I've never felt like you have to beat a game to make it worth your time or money. I've played lots of RPG's for 10 hrs and then quit because something else caught my interest, but had fun in those 10 hrs. Sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination?

[Xeogred]

What's wrong with playing short sessions of long games?

Especially with a lot of games giving you the ability to save anywhere thesedays... this goes along with what I was kind of saying earlier, pacing is key. But I guess not everyone has the patience or something. Nothing wrong with small steps of progress to me.

[Tanooki]

You get nowhere as they're not designed for that usually, and by the time you do something else comes along either you wanted to play as a game or something else pulls your attention off and it never gets finished making it a big waste of time and money.

I've never felt like you have to beat a game to make it worth your time or money. I've played lots of RPG's for 10 hrs and then quit because something else caught my interest, but had fun in those 10 hrs. Sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination?

No I agree, but I was thinking it can and does go both ways. Sometimes a game is so bloated even that piece of a ride isn't worth the price of admission. Since you threw RPGs out there, I did around 30 on Xenoblade on 3DS before I gave in on it, it just was so slow and spread out just for the sake of being long and I felt I didn't get my value from it because the story just went quick for the first 10hours~ then crawled but I totally lost interest. Yet there are others, even RPGs, where I'll run it through a good bit and I'm satisfied too. It's totally game to game on it.

[noiseredux]

It's totally game to game on it.

this is my stance, yeah. There are some short games that I might play 100's of hours of. Or some long games I might feel content with less than 10 hours of. And both might feel really satisfying to me. I don't think "length" of game matters to me so much as the enjoyment I get out of it.

[MrEco]

I get the feeling that the main point of contention here isn't so much on whether or not "long" games are better or worse than "short" games. I think it's more that some people feel it's easier to take a risk on a short game than it is a long one. Both games can turn out to have bland content and not be worth the time, but with a shorter game you can usually get a good feeling for how fun the game is gonna be earlier on.

In (for example) a big 100 hour JRPG they might front load the first 10 hours of the game with a lot of excellent quality high-budget content, and then pack the middle with repetitive fetch quests or something. Whereas if a game is made with a short completion time in mind, there isn't as much need to "bloat" the content. So you can usually get a good idea for how the game is gonna play like very soon after starting it up.

This means that for some people with limited time to play games popping in a shorter and more focused title is usually the safer bet, even if it turns out to not be as fun as they hoped. Of course there's also the idea that you don't necessarily have to finish a game to get your time/money's worth out of it. I'm in huge support of that idea. But consider this possibility: Someone plays a long game and the first ten hours are great. But after that first ten hours, the game becomes a boring slog to them. Hoping that "maybe it'll get better" and the game will return to the quality it was in the first ten hours, they keep playing for another ten before giving up. So in the end, they got a net gain of ten hours of fun, but also lost ten hours doing something that wasn't any fun for them. Just something to consider.


That being said, I love playing longer games all the time. With so many of them having "save anywhere" functionality these days, playing them in smaller sittings when my time is limited works perfectly for me. And I'm rarely unlucky enough to run into any situation like my proposed one above, but I consider it an acceptable risk to continue playing the video games which give me the most enjoyment (Long, immersive, complex RPGS).

[samsonlonghair]

It's totally game to game on it.

this is my stance, yeah. There are some short games that I might play 100's of hours of. Or some long games I might feel content with less than 10 hours of. And both might feel really satisfying to me. I don't think "length" of game matters to me so much as the enjoyment I get out of it.

I would consider 10 hours too long.

A hundred hours? That just sounds ludicrous - you may as well say "a million bajillion" hours.

I would honestly have a hard time playing any game for more than three hours.