Blake Snow has an article in the ‘Crispy Gamer’ about modern games having a long game length and how many desire the game length to shorten due to busier lifestyles. It is pretty clear that the ‘hardcore gaming’ is having a correction (or crash however you see it) and the pendulum is swinging the other way. But, still, I have a nagging feeling something isn’t right.
Game length is not the issue. A better question is why do players feel ‘compelled’ to finish the games anyway? Or, rather, why do developers think their games are supposed to be finished by gamers?
This is how gamers talked:
BEFORE: I have finally reached level five!
NOW: I have put in thirty hours into this game!
The problem is that ‘time invested’ was never a measurement in the Good Old Days. Rather, it was skill. Most console games were ports or successors to the arcade games. It took skill to beat these games. You can define this skill as ‘memorization’ or being ‘button masher’, but still, it did NOT depend on time invested.
Let us observe gamers themselves:
BEFORE: Gamer would go from game to game and, in a single play session, would have a pile of cartridges in front of the console. When the games are put up, they come back out again in a few days.
NOW: Gamer puts in the game and keeps playing it until he beats it. Rarely does the disc leave the machine until the game is ‘finished’. Once finished, the game is shelved and not seen for a year.
While games ARE too long, this is not the fundamental problem. The problem is that games are measured as time sinks instead of skill tests. Making a 50 hour game into a 10 hour game is not going to make the game ‘better’ ultimately. What it hopefully will do is prune out the fat of the game. I have to laugh at calling 10 hour games ‘short’.
Did you know that 8-bit games were too long? Oh yes. While a skilled player could chomp through the game within minutes, perhaps an hour at most, unskilled players faced a considerable amount of time before they could become skilled. But that didn’t matter because the game was fun to play. You got more skilled while playing.
Super Mario Brothers was too long. This is why the Warp Zone was so popular. Miyamoto intentionally broke his own game, and it was a hit. Everyone loved being able to warp wherever they wanted. He gave control up to the player. Games like Wrecking Crew had the player choose any level he wanted. Can you imagine that occurring today? Oh no, they would all be ‘locked’ and force the player to invest significant time to ‘unlock them’.
Games eventually switched to passwords. Passwords could make instant ‘warp zones’ after a fashion. Some shmups and action games were so brutal that tricks at the title screen allowed stage skips or additional lives so players wouldn’t have to sink so much time into the game (Hello Contra). Mega Man 2 was the first Mega Man for many things, but it was the first Mega Man for passwords. Games were becoming so long that passwords and, eventually, batteries were required. Games that did not have passwords or batteries, such as Super Mario Brothers 3, relied on warps to cut down the time of the game.
(This is why people are angry at Nintendo for not allowing save files to be exchanged for games such as Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Brothers Brawl for fear of ‘destroying the experience’. Gamers were outraged that the passwords were taken out of the Kid Icarus. If Warp Zones and passwords in the past didn’t hurt the experience, how in the world will they do so today? To the contrary, these ‘cheats’ made the games TOLERABLE. Contra and Gradius would have been nowhere near as popular without their cheat code. But with that aside…)
It would be interesting to explore the switch of the industry from arcade type skill to ‘time invested’ being the metric of how they percieve the games’ value. I suspect the change occurred during the latter 16-bit or 32/64-bit generation. 3d gaming just cemented the idea that games had to be ‘time invested’.
This is one of the secret reasons to the so-called ‘casual’ games success (i.e. New Generation). Publishers may look at it and say, “Oh! Geez! We need to make the game length shorter!” But the reality is that the New Generation games are based on arcade type skill.
Don’t believe me, look at Wii Sports. The entire axis of the game revolves on an arcade type skill of HOW you swing the controller as well as the timing. Aside from the motion controls, the gameplay of Wii Sports is very old, even NES type old. Now look at Wii Fit. It is filled with arcade type games based on skill. It depends on your timing and how you interact with the peripheral. While the stupid unlockables open up based on how much time is invested in the game (a bad habit the entire industry keeps making including Nintendo), the fun is trying to beat one’s high score.
Now look at this:
Next Generation: “I have invested 10 hours in this game, and I am almost done!”
New Generation: “Look! I got a gold medal! Wow! I must be really getting good at this game!”
With the modern style of games, you rarely hear people bragging how ‘good’ they are at the game anymore. However, people STILL want to play games as if they are skill based. To compensate, players have created games among themselves such as ‘speed runs’ or other gnarly tricks they will put up on YouTube.
One of the reasons why online gaming has become so popular is because online gaming tests skill, not time invested. It is not that online gives games more ‘value’ as it does about the gameplay becoming skill based as opposed to time invested. Why? It is because customers value skill.
As soon as the player realizes the game is just a giant time sink, they tend to drop the game. A great example of this would be World of Warcraft. Seemingly invincible, World of Warcraft falls apart once the player percieves the game to be a time sink as opposed to being skills based. The common story is that the player is all smiles until he maxes out his level to discover the Endgame is just time sink raids of loot that may or may not drop depending on a roll. I haven’t played the game in years, but this was its main enemy in the beginning and, I suspect, now. Things like Battlegrounds majorly helped. But the essential problem is still there. (Of course, this ‘problem’ of WoW is miniscule compared to other games. WoW’s success speaks for itself.)
Why are people growing tired of Zelda? Is it because of ‘the formula’? I don’t think so. The problem with Zelda is that the series has moved away from its arcade-type roots and become giant time sinks.
What! You don’t believe me? Ask a person (in the middle of playing, not looking back) their main complaint about Twilight Princess and they will all respond, “Time sink.” It is not that the game is ‘too long’. It is that the game is not really that skill based especially not compared to Legend of Zelda, Zelda 2, and A Link to the Past. The issue of ‘time sink’ is also poisoning the Mario franchise as well. Most people don’t finish all the galaxies of Mario Galaxy even if they beat the game. They don’t percieve the game to be about ‘skill’ as more about a ‘time sink’. Sure, they could get the purple coins. But look at how much time invested. They don’t percieve that to be skill. (“Oh? Well what about those old school games like R-Type which took time invested to learn?” It is about perception. Players didn’t percieve memorizing patterns and all to be ‘time sinks’.)
I’m currently playing Mega Man 7 and I can feel the franchise drift off toward ‘time sink’ instead of ‘arcade skill’. Mega Man moves so slow, has to revisit stages many times, and doesn’t seem like much skill is involved in playing the game. It is no wonder that Mega Man 9 that Inafune said the basis would be dodging and moving like in the first two games, i.e. arcade type skill.
It is not that games have gotten ‘too long’. It is that they have become ‘time invested’ rather than ‘skill based’. Instead of saying, “I finally got to level 5,” people say “I invested 50 hours so far!” The fall and rise of Mario Kart is revealing of this. The first Suiper Mario Kart is skills based. The game was punishing. The bottom was the Gamecube version where multiplayer was why people played the game (who played the game for single player?). The huge success of Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart Wii is because the games are attempting to return to being more skills based.
The common theme that I see that threads through the ‘casual games’, including compilations of solitaire to the brain games, is that they are based on a type of ‘skill’ be it arcade type skill or puzzle solving skill. The so-called hardcore games all share the theme of being ‘time invested’.
Was Quake 3 ‘time invested’? No, it was a skills based game. At least, that is why it became popular.
Was Starcraft ‘time invested’? No, it was a skills based game. Part of the Blizzard secret is ironing out the gameplay to such a degree that players really feel they are ‘gaining skills’ as they play the game more and more.
I can go on with more examples. But the point is not that games are too long, it is that they define their value by ‘time invested’ in the first place. Let games be defined by ‘skills based’ and I assure that you will witness the games being played for hundreds of hours… which explains why such games can sell forever. For this is the origin of how games become ‘classics’.