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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."
Man, I really wish their game wasn't as good as it is. And to think they gave me *more* game than they advertised! Oh, what false advertising is this?
I demand my crappy games back that I beat in a week.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
and he complains?
Someone call the waaambulance.
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Maybe the estimate is based on a average skill level, and you just don't make the cut.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
Actually, I was expecting him to indicate the other way. When I bought Prey a couple months ago, I was expecting 5-6 hours single player, got 7.5 and was happy.
It's been a long, long time since I've seen a game, especially in my preferred genre (FPS) that carries anywhere near the playtime promised.
So, isn't this more of a problem that the estimates are just totally wonky across the board, and vary wildly between genres and the players playing the games, and not a singular "40 hour myth?"
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
My stepson was dissappointed in Tomb Raider because it only took him half the time as it said on the box. The key difference is likely that when you play a game here and there it takes you awhile to get back into it and get your groove back. If its summer break and you play for twelve straight hours, well, its not going tot ake as long. What would be interesting is if he took a week off to just play the game, and see how he does. Not likely, but interesting;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Quoting "time to complete" on a game is nonsense, and always has been. Time to complete for a 12 year old kid? for a thirty year old guy? for someone whose crap at FPS games? for which level of difficulty?
I play games because i want to immerse myself in another world, and play with some interesting stuff. Its not a race. I dont keep a clock going as I play (although oblivion does that for me for some reason).
Whats important is FUN, nothing else. People can't easily define fun, so they try to come up with other metrics.
how many unique units does it have?
How long is it to complete?
How many DVDs does it come on.
I had someone complain about one of my games once because it was "only 23 MB". Apparnatly they didnt want a "good" game, a "fun" game or an "original game" or even a "game with depth", they just wanted one with a bigger filesize. I played Elite for most of my childhood. it was 48k. Was I ripped off?
whats the time to complete for Chess anyway? I'm still working on that one.
One day maybe game reviewers and publishers will shut up about how much bump mapping the game has, shut up about what hollywood actor did the voiceover, shut up about how long they *think* it takes to complete it, and just sell their game on the basis of it being a GOOD game.
King Kong is a long movie. Its also shit (in my opinion, YMMV). Applying the metric to books and movies is clearly nonsense, so why apply it to games?
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Perhaps if the editor played fewer video games, then he wouldn't have made such a classic ass of himself by writing: "fails to jive..."
I suggest you read Slashdot
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!
That's because you're old and you suck. I can state that with confidence because I also am old and suck. It's a young person's world, guy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
This guy is just angry that he is bad at the video games
As a former EB Games employee, I remember being frustrated at the large number of customers who would purchase the strategy guide along with the game at release, and then have the nerve to complain that the game was "too short". It's since been my opinion that the growing strategy guide market has encouraged developers to use "cheap" methods to increase the average gameplay time.
Games were much more satisfying before the popularity explosion of guides and cheats =/
I have the same deal the article author does: too many games, not enough time, never finish anything. I don't see what the problem is, though. Knowing that there is more to do in a game, if I ever had time to do it, doesn't make me enjoy playing it any less. If I was really obsessed with completionism, I'd buy fewer games, but I've never felt a strong need to get every medal or unlock everything or whatever. I just enjoy the game until I'm not enjoying it anymore, and then I switch to something else.
Of course, these days I have money for games but not enough time to play everything as much as I'd like. In my college days, I had plenty of time but no money, so I played fewer games for longer. I think I get more out of gaming now, though.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
What's he complaining about? Long games = good.
This is only true if you have loads and loads of free time on your hands like a high school or college student might. Otherwise, when you get out into the real world and get a job or start dating someone, you find out that free time disappears and a game that gives lots of goodies for little effort or that can be dropped for weeks and months before being picked back up without losing you is a great thing.
Long games are good for certain people and bad for others. However, the problem isn't really that the game is giving him a lot of gameplay so much as it's making it's gameplay so hard that it's unnaturally prolonged by failure. That's another split between the hardcore and casual gamer markets.
As a fan of console RPGs, I run into this all the time. Some games keep the fun continuous. Others require a lot of old-school level grinding to wring out the rewards. Some games make it easy to pick the game up and remember where you were if work intervenes for a week or two. Others leave you feeling like you need to start over.
It should be pretty easy to guess which type I prefer.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Part of the appeal of an MMORPG is that there is no specific end-game per-se. Hardcore uber players have turned the raid instances into the 'end game', but its not necessarily what Blizzard intended. What can a L60 do in Wow?
Rep grind with various factions.
Battlegrounds -- faction rep, PvP rank/honour.
Raid instances.
Crafting professions (aka "The Auction House game").
And of course, you can skip all of those like I did and start another alt -- different race, different faction, different zones. IMHO the tiered questing is Wow's greatest strenght, coupled with rest bonus for inactive characters.
I played Baldur's Gate II to finish the game. I play WoW for the experience, knowing there's always going to be something new around the corner. The online social aspect is a huge benefit too.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
RTFA. The very least thing he complains about is length. So some cliffnotes are in order.
His points (as a person with a job, life, kids) are:
- puzzles many times take him much longer than kids in the 6-17 range he compares himself to.
- he compares in-depth games to his job, dumping information in and out of his mental RAM doesn't get him very far. See: late-night or off-shift coders who work to avoid users/meetings/interruptions.
- he understands the hardcore vs casual design problem.
TFA isn't even that long but his really good point (imho) aren't in the title (which is Gamer not Game). But if you just read the title, then you miss the point. Great read, critical hit close to home.
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In my experience, that is a terrible rule of thumb. Perhaps it is the case for the genere's that you prefer, but I haven't noticed this trend.
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!").
First off, the article is about the myth of the "40 hour gamer" not the 40 hour game". The author is not complaining that the games take longer than 40 hours, but that it takes him months to find 40 hours in which to play solitary games - a problem for those games who suddenly find themselves with the trappings of what is commonly called "a life".
Most of the posts here are completely missing the point ("You suck D00D!"). As someone who's put down more than one game that I was enjoying partway through, I can tell you the main reason why: because something new comes along. Humans enjoy novelty, and many long-play games are long play because of a continual repetition of the basic game mechanic. After your fourth session sitting down doing essentially the same thing you've been doing for the last month, you get intrigued by the latest & greatest. Add to this the fact that you may have multiple irons in the fire (I'm currrently in the middle of 3 different books and 4 different single-player games)
Why is this a problem? Because there are a lot more "soft" gamers out there than hardcore ones, and they make a lot more money. As a developer, what would you prefer you market to be: 3% of the population or 30%? If you're spending tons of effort to produce a narrative game that can only be reached by 3% of the population, why are you bothering with a narrative? Hard games are fine, but perhaps they should be restricted to genres that are inherently more repetitive (e.g. classic arcade games), allowing people that bail on the title to go away feeling they had fun, as opposed to abandoning the narrative.
Ultimately, there are many more people out there that only want to commit 6 hours to some interactive entertainment as opposed to 40.
-BbT
The problem isn't that the game has given him MORE time than the box listed. The problem is he doesn't have 40 hours to devote to the game.
However on the other hand the 40 hours game claim are almost always wrong. I now work in the game industry but still found a way to play 40 hours into disgaea. I have about 24 hours in Samurai warriors (only been out a week).
I believe the real myth is "40 hours" games or games like Xenosaga that promise 100 hours where they hardly deliver half to people who ACTUALLY play the game. If you pick it up and drop it over and over and keep dying then yeah 100 hours is possible. However if a game can be completed 100 percent in 20 hours by knowing what to do in it, then it's a 20 hour game.
What the industry needs is games like Katamari damacy, or multiple non-forced (suikoden 3 way? bad) story lines. Imagine if you could change your character, and get a different story. Imagine playing through games that have "good" and "evil" story lines. They might be 20 hour games that you play through once, but if it's fun the first time and good the second time that's fine. Kotor started on this path but how you acted never really effected future gameplay too much until you get to the final temple. This allows the "hard core" gamer to get two unique experiences, and the casual gamer to get one solid experience that they decide.
Some game companies are making "40 hour games" by making the game so obscure you won't know what to do in it for the first 30 hours, or giving you puzzles that will make you work on them 5 hours to find a little dot. I'm all for hard games, or difficult achievements but pretending obscurity makes your game longer is a joke.
I've put at least 100 hours into FFX when I was able to devote that time to it just because I loved the level grid/capture system. But it's not a 100 hour game. It's a 30-40 hour game which a few people could put 100 hours in.
The problem we are running into is game companies who won't or can't make scaleable games. Lego Star wars 2 has a good start, on the 360 there's the regular game, and then "never die" achievements which is quite hard for the player. They are completely optional but everyone is willing to try for them. If more games used "achievements" systems like the 360 to give optional quests like so it would enhance the length of most games.