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Dust To Dust - The Plight Of The Unplayed Game
Thanks to Eurogamer for its editorial discussing the phenomenon of having too many videogames and too little time. The author starts by suggesting: "Take a look at your own shelves. Look closely. Spot any shrink-wrapped games you definitely will get around to playing some day?" He continues: "Let's have a look at this writer's personal 'to play' pile: MGS: The Twin Snakes, Super Mario Sunshine, Knights of the Old Republic, Full Spectrum Warrior, True Crime, Deus Ex 2", before concluding: "Games. We love them. We could fill about 47 lifetimes playing them. But we hate them too. Most are overblown, bloated, and chaotic in their design. If they were movies, most of the footage would be on the cutting room floor. Few games designers seem to know how to edit, and weigh down the production process in the belief that we need bigger games."
"The Plight Of The Unplayed Game"? Hell, this article should be retitled "The Plight of the Guy With More Money Than He Knows What to Do With". He goes on and on about the games he's bought and never played, and I'm sitting here thinking of how I'm going to make this month's rent.
where the comment ends and sig begins
I also have some unplayed games on the shelf, but it would be an injustice if Star Wars:Knights of the Old Republic was one of those games. Seriously, try it out!
Every now and then a game comes along that miles above the rest (especially for RPGs), like Fallout, the original Deus Ex or KOTOR. If you don't have much time, it's a good idea to not buy many games, and just the quality games when they come out. As the article says - be more discerning.
The big problem with games these days, is they take far too much time to really get into the *good* parts of a game. Much like a book that starts off slow and doesn't get exciting until halfway through. Games however, cost a lot more, and frankly are much more repetitive and leave much less to the imagination than a book.
Your average, casual gamer, does not have a whole crapload of time in one sitting to spend getting into a game. In my opinion if a game cannot draw a person in within the first hour, that person probably will not be anywhere near as motivated to play it again.
My solution to this, keep games short, sweet, unique, and appropriately priced. Development times would probably be shorter, development *costs* would probably be shorter, and hell, people might actually get a decent variety of games that they can actually finish in one hour spurts throughout their hectic lives.
I have to wonder how age correlates with the people who can't afford many games, vs. those of us who collect more games than we can play.
I find that as I age, I have less and less time for game playing, more and more disposable income, and as much of a desire as ever to play the great games that come out every year.
The people who are, say, under 30 and are saying "you have too much money" are missing the point: this is the plight of the aging gamer. I'm 34, and it's only the last few years that I've found myself to have more games than time.
Looks like a sound financial strategy to me ;-)
I have a bunch of games lying around that I picked up at bargain prices - yesterday I bougt Silent Hill 2 and 3 for the combined sum of 15 euro. However, I have a couple of other games lying around that I also bought at such prices and never came around to playing: Evil Twin, Septerra Core, Metal Gear Solid, Outcast, maybe some more. Will I come around to playing them eventually? I don't know. Do I feel sorry for buying them? Well, not at that price. I feel sorry for buying Unreal 2, because I bought it full price and it stinks.
"Your average, casual gamer, does not have a whole crapload of time in one sitting to spend getting into a game" There are games for these types and there are games for hardcore gamers. Don't try to shoehorn the industry into serving one demographic. Take me for example: my PC tells me when I am allowed to eat, sleep, or do something fancy like go to school. I probably wouldn't like your short and sweet games nearly as much as my epic and complex games. Coincidentally, I also love really long books (when I'm given permission to read). To conclude, let's all be more careful before grabbing the proverbial tiller.
Personally, i can't afford to buy games i don't plan on buying. And most of the time, i feel games aren't long enough, but maybe i only buy good games? Couldn't say really.
Pick your games carefully, and watch for sales.
I'm actually in the same sitaution as the article author. I bought a GameCube a little over a year ago, when it dropped to $100. Within a month or two, I had over a dozen really good games, because they'd all been out for a year or two. They may not be the newest games, but hell, I'd never played them, so they were new to me. And they are damn good games, including Zelda: Windwaker, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, True Crime, Beyond Good & Evil, Soul Calibur 2, Skies of Arcadia Legends, Pikmin, Burnout 2, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, and more.
Oh, yeah, and I only payed more than $20 for one of them.
By watching for good sales, I've managed to continue the same way. I buy games that have been out for 4-6 months, and have dropped down to $20-$30. Heck, a lot of times I'll find them for $10-$15.
At this point, I've got close to 40 games. Of those, I still have a significant amount of playing left to do on at least half of them. Now I just need to find some time to actually play them more.
Topher
I won't buy a game until I've finished one of the games that I already own. Somewhere along the line I ended up with a few games that I still haven't played yet. So, I won't let myself buy a new game until I finish an older one.
Sure, I don't play newer games right away, but that allows for the price to drop down about $10-20, and I'm still enjoying the games that I already have.
Will money get you through times of no games better than games will get you through times of no money?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
So frankly, if you have time for all those games, either you don't have a life (job, house, wife, kids), you are not a player, but a collector, or you are not letting yourself get your money's worth.
You like Max Payne? Well good for you. There is probably a market for it but that does not mean that every game has to be a Max Payne.
There is a market for short simple games. There is a market for incredibly hard non-ending games. And there is a market for everything in between.
Accusing Deus EX 2 of being to long suggest this guy is either a really bad player or just a very bad organizer. If anything version 2 was a lot smaller and was over far too quickly.
Same with games like Elite Force wich can be completed in a couple of hours. I am expected to pay full price for that? Sorry, I grew up on games that charged full price but gave me weeks of gameplay. Hours is not going to cut it.
And having unplayed games on the shelf shows that this guy needs to get a grip on his life. He buys games he never plays? Isn't that like those shopaholics?
If we don't kill this guy then we will soon have an extra edition of the Lord of the Rings. The super cut, 1 hour for the entire trilogy. War and Peace, reader digests version. Baldur's gate, the lets not mess about version, you roll up a god and kill the bad guy on the first map. No need for all that boring endless roleplaying crap.
If you want a fast game go play tetris. A lot of games by their nature have to be long. You can't simulate a flight between London and New York in 2 minutes. Landing on the beaches of normandy will at least take you as long as walking a few hundred meters of terrain. Telling a complex tale of growing up is going to take more then 5 minutes. Driving around the nurburg ring is not going to be done in a 2 minute game.
Can't play all the games out there? Cry me a river. BUY only the games you really want and give the rest of the money to charity.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Agree entirely with the point about not liking "short and sweet" games, but I do take issue with some of the other stuff you say. "Short and sweet" has been the inspiration behind too many games lately, particularly PC fpses. Medal of Honour and Call of Duty were perhaps the worst offenders; that the latter should have received so many "Game of the Year" awards is a damning indictment of the state of PC gaming in 2003; it was one of the shortest and most derivative titles I've played.
On the topic of saves, I now refuse to play games without a fairly enlightened save policy (eg. save-anywhere or regular save-points). I recently picked up R-Type Final and although it's a good shooter, I can't stand the idea of having to go back to the start every time I play the game.
In a way, no offence intended, I think you're the one living in a different world. I've recently gone through university myself and the lifestyle and attitudes you find there are a long, long way from those you'll find in the real world. At school, you generally have little disposable income (unless your parents are a push-over) and your free time is constrained by regular school hours and homework. Once you start work, your disposable income rises considerably (assuming you have a decent enough job), but your free time is still constrained (and you don't even get the long school holidays). University life is a peculiar little stage balanced in the middle where you've little or no disposable income, but you have more free time than you will probably have at any other period of your life, after you start school (assuming you manage to avoid lengthy spells of unemployment). As such, university student attitudes towards games are going to be different. Like school-kids, students have to be incredibly picky about which games they buy; forget about trying to pick up every interesting new title. However, due to the vast amounts of free time, students have to stretch out those games for longer. This is complicated by the fact that the traditional timesinks, MMORPGs, are often rules out for students by the monthly fees.
Since I graduated from university and started working, my attitudes to games has completely changed. I expect to get decent enjoyment from pretty much every minute of gaming time now. I'm happy to take this in a variety of forms, be it plot or gameplay. Hence games such as the Final Fantasy series are among my favorites now. Moreover, I'm not especially fussed about game length, so long as it's reasonable. I generally consider 20 hours to be reasonable (full marks to Doom 3 here, for being the first PC fps in a long time to break through that barrier). What I'm not prepared to tolerate is trying the same sections over and over again because I made a mistake. This is where games with ridiculous save policies or no save option at all go out the window.
Personally I'm on the side of the "make games shorter" argument. However, shouldn't it be possible to satisfy everyone? I'm proposing, in a similar vein to the "easy-medium-difficult" setting, a "distilled-medium-dilute" setting which specifies the approximate size of the game.
I'm currently playing Doom 3 and it'll probably be weeks before I get a chance to finish it. If I could play it through in, say, 7 hours, just being exposed to the most interesting parts, and skipping some of the endless corridors and mindless fighting, I'd be happy.
MI2 had this kind of feature. You had a choise at the beginning if you wanted to play Monkey Lite, or the full adventure.
Taking the Lite option simplified some f the puzzles, and removed some of the locations, making the game far more accesable to people on a tight timescale. It took absolutely nothing away from those who opted for the full thing.
I completed the long version, then went back and did the short version to see what was missed out. As far as I can remember the many-stage puzzles were usually simplified by removing a few sections, or you automatically found an item lying around that you would otherwise have had to solve a puzzle to obtain.
I cant see how this kind of choice can be anyhing other than a good thing?
RM
I have no sig yet I must scream.