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The Myth of the 40 Hour Game
Over at Wired, Clive Thompson talks about the myth of the 40 hour game, the typical length of time listed on the side of a game box nowadays. Mr. Thompsons discusses the ways in which that estimate fails to jive with reality. From the article: "This game offers about 40 hours of play. This is precisely what I was told by Eidos — and countless game reviewers — when I picked up Tomb Raider: Legend earlier this year. As I gushed at the time, Legend was the first genuinely superb Lara Croft game in years... I was hooked — and eager to finish the game and solve the mystery. So I shoved it into my PS2, dual-wielded the pistols and began playing... until about four weeks later, when I finally threw in the towel. Why? Because I couldn't get anywhere near the end. I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours — but still only got two-thirds through."
Indeed, it seems to me that the TFAs author might in fact be complaining that he sucks at Tomb Raider. It's also possible he's taking time to read all of the story bits in the game and do all of the minigames and whatnot while someone who only cares about beating the final boss can finish it in much less time.
Those time estimates are totally bogus anyway. Who even looks at them?
I read the internet for the articles.
First, I've found that while working on any problem, given sufficient time to focus (maybe an hour), I can often improve my productivity by taking a break of a few hours or a few days. True, the longer I leave it, the longer it takes to get back in the groove, but if it's just, say, an hour a day, I'd still be better than ever by the end of the hour.
But more than that, he mentions a long list of unfinished games. Sounds like a quitter to me. Two thirds of the way through Tomb Raider: Legends, halfway through Kingdom Hearts II. I don't think it would've taken him any longer to actually finish Kingdom Hearts than it would to get that 2/3rds of the way through Tomb Raider.
This person has made a conscious choice to play more games and leave them half-finished, rather than playing fewer games and finishing them. I'd certainly take a few good games (the Half-Lives, the Halos, the Final Fantasies) over many, many bad ones (the Dooms, the Quakes, Final Fantasy X-2). So, he has two related, possibly valid complaints: It's hard to actually find a really good game, so he wishes he could play more games, in order to find that one -- except that games take a long time to complete, so he can't actually beat as many as he'd like to.
That, or it's a problem of attention span. But he mentions finishing War and Peace, and a Tomb Raider game is too much?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The problem is, is that the game was so hard that it was unbeatable. I hate when they make games like this. They make it so hard, that unless you read a walkthrough, spend 300 hours playing the game, or enable cheat codes, then there is no way to get good enough or figure out how to beat it. Games aren't my life. I don't want to spend my life beating it. If it takes three times the amount of time that was listed to beat the game, then the game should have been labelled differently.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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Yeah ... but as a long time Console and PC gamer I can honestly say that I would much rather have 16 hours of great gameplay than 40 (or 200) hours of mindless repetition.
That comment reminded me of Unreal 2. It was slated quite a bit by reviewers as I recall, but I really enjoyed it, yet it was one of the shortest games of it's type I've ever played because it wasn't repetitive and threw up new enemies, new weapons, new environments and provided a showcase of challenges that kept me entertained all the way through. It was slated for all of those reasons.
It took me maybe 12-14 hours where as most games take me 40 or more - typically I finish few of them - I often play about 70-90% of the way through, then come back a few months later and god mode my way through the final stages, if a game gets too difficult or is tediously repetitive early on (Rising Dead I'm looking at you) I am likely to ignore it and play something else entirely, because I just don't have that much free time that I want games to feel like 'work'.
In case of this happening 'literally', I gave up on Shenmue (one of the best games I've ever played, and I regret not finishing it now) after it got to the stage where your character gets a job and has to move crates around the dock every day to make money to get through to the next stage of the story. While it had some really innovative gameplay and I appreciate that it did add to the telling of the story (like a lull in a movie, between the high action sequences) I just lost interest because it was too tediously repetitive.
Perhaps one way to satisfy more users is to make games shorter but cheaper, with episodic content (I guess this is what Valve are trying to do now). It certainly seems a logical approach, particularly with the ability to deliver content electronically. I can see publishers not being so keen on this though as they'd have to release and promote each title separately which would eat into profits, and they'd run the risk of people spotting the turkeys more easily (I can't see many people playing the first half of Doom 3 and going "ooh I've got to get more some more of that stumbling around in the dark action!").
You are complaining that a Bollywood movie is too long? That's the whole point! You can spend your entire evening having a great time with all your friends at the movie theater. Hindi movies are produced for an entirely different audience and context than American films.
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
Sure they want to sell to us, but we're not the "core demographic". They want someone who's going to play the game fiercely, talk about it to all their friends and gamers online, spread the gospel, and therefore sell more copies to more hardcore gamers, and so on and so on....
I'd be interested to see the actual median player age for various types of games. I suspect that it's probably higher than game companies typically target in many categories and it's likely getting higher over time as first-gen gamers grow older.
But the gameplay has to be structured in a way that it can be crystallized and played in smaller nuggets, and yet still flow.
Exactly. See my comment about PC games vs. console games elsewhere in this topic. This is also why I hate when games are simultaneously developed for a console and PC, as they tend to both be "dumbed down" to suit a younger target audience and more limited hardware interface, and often eliminate most of the technical features that make PC games more appealing (save anywhere, progress logs, etc).