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."

Comments

It is just a matter of time...

[LincolnX]

It is just a matter of time until the length of time in certain game genres becomes nearly standardized. Such as the "average" movie length of 75 minutes.

Re:It is just a matter of time...

[johannesg]

I doubt it. A movie must be consumed in one sitting, while games can be played in chunks, saving inbetween. The need that drives movie length just doesn't exist in games.

However, the rising cost of producing content will probably continue to drive down game length. Since this can only asymptotically approach 0, in that sense you are right that there is some standardization going on.

Re:It is just a matter of time...

[88NoSoup4U88]

"However, the rising cost of producing content will probably continue to drive down game length."

Overtime, the gamedevelopers are able to build up a solid library of assets, once a the new technology gets adapted (for instance, the incorporating of bumpmapping/normalmapping in about every new game getting on the market right now).

IIRC, id software has allready build themselves a nice library of assets with Doom3 ; I read in some interview that they wanted to keep in mind that the assets they made for D3, could also be used in their next (unnanounced) title ; thus sparing them alot of time re-building a whole new library.

The way they have made the in-game textures (by creating objects in 3dsmax/lightwave ; and taking the texture-information [eg. color, heightmaps] from those models) is a new way of creating texture assets, which are easily to be modified when needed in the future in another format/structure.

This guy obviously lives in a different world

[bskin]

I'm a college student. I have very little income, but lots of free time. (Well, not really lots of free time, but more than most employed adults.) When I buy a game, the *very first thing* I consider is the 'time i'm gonna get out of this game'/price ratio. I won't buy a game that's only gonna give me ten hours of playtime. A game that's 20 hours would have to come down in price a lot before I'd buy it. Even massive rpgs that promise 70+ hours of gameplay...I still think, 'yeah, but is it worth 50 bucks?' Cause let's face it, 50 bucks is a lot of fucking money for a toy.

Basically...fuck short and sweet. I hate playing a game for a little bit and then tossing it aside never to played again. Maybe it's such a huge factor for me these days because games have virtually zero replay value anymore. I personally think this can be blamed squarely on systems with memory cards. Wonderful idea...but the problem is, when even your favorite dumb action game has savepoints, it just makes it so that when you beat the last level, you're done. I mean, looking back to when I was a kid...I probably put about 200 hours into something like contra, and probably 150 of those were the first few levels. I'm not saying memory cards are bad, cause they're great, but they've really changed the way we play games and how much enjoyment we get out of them (in terms of hours) for the worse.

So maybe it's just because I don't buy into the whole 'video games are art, they're great storytelling!' thing. I call bullshit on that. Video game storytelling is as awful and childish as ever, by and large. No, if I'm going to throw down a large chunk of money on a game, I want to spend the largest amount of time possible enjoying it. I don't want some supposed masterpiece that's short and sweet but tells a great story. I want something that'll literally kill hours and hours and hours. Because video games are, and always have been, a timekiller. Forget whatever else.

A Different Twist. . .

[MistaE]

I can sort of relate to the article author in regards to having a lot of games that I haven't finished yet. For me, I really blame the fact that the video game industry seems to have a "good game season" in which a crapload of good games will come out weeks within each other, which then forces the gamer (that has enough dough to buy all the good games) to pick and choose the ones to work on. Eventually, games are bound to be lost in the cracks.

This is just, and its kind of weird, but sometimes I don't like to keep playing RPGs because I don't want them to end. There are a few games I've played that had great stories and the battle system and graphics were decent, but I just didn't want to continue playing. Just like how some readers fear finishing a book because when the ending is made clear the suspense and fun is gone, that's how I treat a good RPG sometimes.

Re:Plight?

[obeythefist]

This is surely just a case of a serious PC gamer devolving down the evolutionary ladder of quality to a console gamer.

Console games, as console gamers continually remind me, are more "fun" than PC games because they are simpler and you can just pick them up and play right away. They're also shorter and have considerably less replayability than a PC game - this is a good marketing strategy, similar to car manufacturers. If you make a car that lasts 20 years - you won't see that customer for 20 years. If you make a car that lasts 2 years, over a 20 year period you'll see that customer 10 times.

PC gamers tend to be more discerning, where playability and the quality of investment are much more important, as well as modability and improvements to the game via patches over a longer time period. This is great if you're a dedicated gamer.

What gets me is that the writer is trying to tell us we need shorter, lower quality games which are more simple, just because *he* doesn't have time to play games like he used to. I'm not sure why we should suffer because he's shifted lower than the lowest common denominator, though.

Game demo scene

[tod_miller]

The game demo scene is sadly lacking. This is the movie trailer equiv. Very few trailers i see, and go, I *have* to watch that, but if I do think that, then I see it opening night.

Usually the trailer only showed the 30 seconds of decent footage, in which case I don't get it on DVD.

Good trailer + good film = DVD.

Gaming is different. I am looking forward to the Doom3 demo.

Why? I will not buy Doom3! But if they release a demo, I get to look at those graphics on my machine.

Like the article says about bigger games, how you 'weigh' a game is different per game.

I weigh Doom3 purley on Graphics. Therefore I will play just the demo.

Just a demo of FF7 (I never really played that game) or a game that is really compelling (GTA [1-4]) can get away with a demo - usually time limited.

Demos can make cracking easier (see recent /. story), but after playing the XIII demo, I paid for it, and I was glad I did!

Commandos also had a great demo.

More demos!

Opposite problem here

[Apreche]

I have too much time on my hands, and I have a little bit of spare cash to buy new games. But new games just aren't coming out. The last video game I bought was Mega Man Anniversary collection, which is just a re-release of old mega man games. Before that it had been a long time since I got a new game.

There just aren't a plethora of new good games out. Back in the NES days I would go to toys 'r' us and have trouble picking a game out. Nowadays I read about all the games online and I know exactly which ones I want. When one gets released I go to the store and get it. But quality is severely lacking. One or two good games being released every few months is about the current rate. It's really pretty sad.