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How Long Should Games Be?
Like a toilet flushing in reverse, the starfield swirls back into existence. Hyperjumps are never precise, so you check the map to see where you wound up and are crestfallen to discover that you’re on exactly the wrong side of the huge ion cloud in the middle of this system.
The verdict is that you are royally screwed. You over-reached in your last mission, and now your attempt to limp back to spaceport is doomed. You’ve traversed this ion cloud dozens of times under better circumstances, so you know the odds are high you’ll be ambushed by those annoying pirates whose ships look like alarmed jellyfish. Your tattered armour won’t hold up in a fight. With your pilot in the infirmary, you’ve got no chance of ditching them in an asteroid belt. Your useless comms officer never cracked their channels. You’re just going to have to think of something. You push the throttle forward…
Other than the specific shape of the spacecraft (and perhaps a few other minor details, such as genre), we’ve all had the experience described above while playing a game. I believe you can only have that precise experience while playing a game. To pull off the same moment in a film, there would be an earlier bit when the captain explains to a passenger how the ion cloud is dangerous, and you’d realise that you were being set up for a future scene. In a book you’d get to see right inside a character’s mental process as he contemplates the ion cloud, but even then you’re being told about it. The important distinction of the videogame version is that you’ve forged this realisation yourself and imbued it with the dramatic context that makes it work. You’ve dealt with this ion cloud before, you know what you’re likely to encounter, you have a few stock tactics you normally employ, and you know that none of them are going to work this time, which means you’ve pooped the proverbial bed. Way to go.
A key ingredient of this experience is repetition. The world is designed to have you criss-crossing the ion cloud all the time, learning the parameters of its random encounters via repeat exposure. It can take several hours to establish that familiarity. This leads into a tension that’s central to bringing games to a wider audience.
Devil’s Advocate #1: “Hi, I’m an adult now. I have important responsibilities like being angry about politics and drinking until I soil myself. Mass Effect might be the best game ever fathomed, but I’d never know because I don’t have 100 hours to spend sitting in front of a computer like I’ve never heard of hygiene. Can’t you give me a game designed with my lifestyle in mind? Maybe one that takes as long to play as a movie does to watch? Maybe one that doesn’t require repeating mindless tasks a billion times before the next interesting thing happens?”
Devil’s Advocate #2: “Four hours might be long when you’re sitting on your hands absorbing someone else’s story, but it’s barely enough time to scratch the surface of a well-designed game. I really don’t want to feel like I’m just starting to get the hang of the systems, like I can finally take charge of the experience, only to get kicked out because the plot decided we were done. A good game should keep opening up, should build by adding novelty and complexity, continuing to reward my investment. A game that rushes to get finished in two hours is either going to be so thin as to be trite or a flash in the pan that leaves me wondering WTF just happened.”
A beautiful thing about media is that they come in lots of formats. Literature has novellas. Music has rock operas. TV has the miniseries. As an innovative show like 24 will show you, there are always fresh ideas for making the best of their various strengths. So hopefully there’s no need for us to go apeshit and forever banish an entire duration range of games. Smash Bros is just one example of a short, repeating core experience with incredible versatility and depth, which makes it perhaps the haiku of our medium. The latest, Brawl, sports what may literally be history’s most enormous metagame system, whose staggering vastness exists primarily to drive the player back into exploring combat mechanics. At first, trying to beat five metal Bowsers using only Yoshi and some parasols seems like it’s going to be a drag, but then you realise you’re being prodded into mastering some arcane corner of the possibility space, and it’s actually kind of cool.
Smash Bros does a decent job of satisfying both Devil’s Advocates, but it does so in part by punting on story continuity: any place you leave off is as gratifying as any other. This means it’s not going to deliver player-owned moments embedded in a larger narrative like the one above. If Smash Bros represents our haiku and Mass Effect represents our epic poem, what fills the comfortable mid range? What’s our equivalent of a two-hour film?
No Rpg should take less than 40 hours to complete... I think a $1 an hour is a fair amount of gameplay... $6 an hour just for the game, not including the cost of hardware and internet connectivity is lame. Ain't no wonder our economy is breaking down.
The length of a game does not matter to me one bit! My experience with the game is what matters. Length of a game is truly in the eye of the beholder. I do not want a game that is 20hrs just for the sake of being 20hrs. Setting a time limit on the length of a game, movie, or any medium, takes away some of the quality. You find in most these games that they are nothing more than fetch quests, loads of back tracking and pointless and dull story moments. Why? To make the game longer of course. Design your game and your story to be what you want it to be and build it because once you put that time stipulation then you are losing part of what the game is supposed to be.
God of War was 8-10hrs in length which is short for many out there but my experience with the game more than made up for it. The second game was longer, again short for many, but more than made up for it in story, and presentation. Heavenly Sword was a short game but I was completely satisfied with the story, game play, presentation, music, and just the experience in whole. I didn't have any of the unnecessary story filler to lengthen the experience. Same with Uncharted, Ratchet and many other games I've played.
So, if you want some 100hr game to justify spending your $60 then go play some RPG because unlike you not everyone wants to dump 100hrs just to get the story of the game. Not everyone has a 100hrs to invest in a game and 100hrs of game play doesn't make a good game! It is almost as bad as people wanting online play in every game known to man. You may want your SP experience to suffer just you can have a woefully multi-player experience tacked on but I don't. If you can't do it right from the beginning don't do it at all.
I agree with you on every point. Length does not a good game make. Too Human, Mass Effect, too short, too long, that's all subjective. The quality of the experience (utility) associated with the cost-reward correlation is the equation I believe you're looking for. So, in essence, it is mathematically represented just after the definitions.
Utility - the amount of satisfaction received after any particular behavior
Cost - the amount invested to undertake a particular behavior.
If utility > cost, then the game is good.
If utility < cost, then the game is bad.
Truly, game length is not the issue, it's about expectations. When a game is presented as having an epic story and enthralling gameplay, one of four things occur.
1) The game delivers on timely storytelling and gameplay matches its expectations. - Utter success: Popular example - Bioshock
2) The epic story (although delivering on expectations) ends abruptly. Gameplay meets expectations. - Too Short: Popular example - Heavenly Sword
3) The epic story is fine but the gameplay makes unfolding the story a tedious process. - Too Long: Popular example - Lost Odyssey or any 60 hr+ RPG.
4) The game fails to meet both expectations. Epic failure: Popular example - Too Human. Not my personal view of the game but these criticism appear in many published reviews.
It's simple economics my friend.
The problem is not the length of the game, but price vs length.
Uncharted is a wonderful game, but it is short. No problem if it costs 40 Euros. But 70 Euros for 10 hours of gameplay is way too much.
COD4 costs 70 Euros but it's online mode warrants for > 100 hours of gameplay, so it is cheap compared to Uncharted.
Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty is cheap but it only lasts 3 hours.
The price of a game should be directly related to the time of enjoyment it provides.
Depends on the game really. I found Uncharted on PS3 to be a perfect length, was really motivated to play to the end. Couldn't be arsed with GTAIV after about 30 hours. Just got a bit boring. Just been playing Resistance FOM and that game just drags on and on and on.... It's too long. However if the gameplay was to variate a little then I might be inclined to play on.. sometimes I wish games told you how far you are through so yo know when its going to end. I played Battlefield BC recently. Played it over several months. I got a point and stopped playing, the next time I played I completed it in about 20 mins. I had no idea it was the final level and it was a complete anticlimax. That's the only problem with not playing a game through in a few long sessions. You just lose all the pacing and structure. I would have rather it said that I was 98% of the way through on my last go so that I spent the extra 20 mins and completed the game in my penultimate session. I actually get very guilty about not finishing games. I guess thats not really my fault, maybe the developers should be to blame for not getting the length right. But one mans short is another mans long.. so who knows!!!
I hate games that are too long more than I hate short games.
You want to play through games start to end if that's possible, and long games in most cases become boring at the latter levels. To name my most recent example: Bioshock. The game itself was just not good enough to justify spending so much time playing it. A long game can't just rely on either gameplay or storyline, it needs both (HL2 being my favorite example.)
The best games are not the kind that are too epic for their own good, nor the games where it's impossible to get engaged. The best games are the ones where you can play it through in 5-10 hoursif you feel like, yet spend many more hours if you feel like as well.
Mass Effect, although certainly not a perfect game, managed to come close to this. One playthrough goes fast if you just swoop your way through it. But you can do other things on the side, and even play it through again without it feeling repetitive. More games should be modelled like this, it's a winning design IMO.
I would say that is a hard question. I feel that a lot of games are too long... but that is usually because they drag on and get boring. There are other games that are too short... but that is because they aren't very fun beyond the first play through. Too me, it doesn't matter how long a game is. It should just be fun. However, I do understand that people feel the need to justify their 60 dollars by playing the crap out of a game. This makes sense. I can't really offer any answers because you can't pin point one aspect of a game such as length and say this maes it good or bad. Lost Odyssey is a decently long game, but I never finished it because the game mechanics (random battles, traditional RPG grind) got to me by the fourth disc. I loved the story, but not enough to keep playing the game. On the other hand I loved Gears of War. That game only averages 9 or 10 hours to play through. Then beyond that there is Trigger Heart Excelica which can be beaten in about 15 or 20 minutes. Different games focus on different things and its not the length of a game that should be important. Yes, a short game can feel rushed, but if a game ends and leaves you wanting more it usually means that they did something right. A game the length of a movie? I think I must repeat how interactive a game is compared to a movie and what a completely different experience it is. Games should not be measured by a movie standard.
What we shouldn't forget when approaching this topic is the mechanic nature of a videogame itself. The Media works because it achieves to create a unique way of expieriencing a situation (because of interactivity, the possibility of simplification of a problem, etc.).
If a story works within this context, a game can take more than a hundred hours but it needs to apply to different qualities when it does (Much more those of a movie rather than those of a game). Games of this kind have to create a dense atmosphere, they have to move players to create affection - hardly anyone would praise MGS4 because of it's shooting mechanics.
However, the shorter the game, the more compelling the mechanics (I'm not too fond of the word "gameplay") have to be to actually make a game work; it's not different from a board game. Perhaps those games still are what arcade games where when they first appeared: the real videogames.
So how long should a game be? It depends on what it's trying to do.
//schmoek
http://gamesession.wordpress.com
R&C: Quest for Booty is, if you ask me, "our equivalent of a two-hour film". It might be a little short, but fulfils both demands.
Seriously, I'm getting more and more excited about the 'episodic blockbusters' of late (Half-Life 2, Siren, R&C, just to name a few). With these titles everyone wins.
I'd say Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. About 6 hours on the first play-through, less than 4 on sequential runs. If one could only eat popcorn and play at the same time, without getting the controller all shiny and salty.