A question regarding free time and game length

(Please note that this question excluded facebook games and mobile games since they have their own sphere of influence)

So I was having a discussion with someone that works in the gaming industry about the changing in focus of games (with a particular emphasis on rpgs). It was argued that the dumbing down of games was "natural" because the gaming industry was born with a very specific target demographic (namely the young, in these cases 6-16 for console games and 18-25 for computer games). Sure there were outliers, especially on PC, Amiga, Commodore etc. but the main idea was that you had a specific demographic to work with.

When gaming went "mainstream" that business mentality remained and publishers tried creating "super demographics" (that term was actually used >.>), namely a game that could be sold to anyone because that's what the people upstairs were used to and mainly because development costs meant pandering to the lowest common denominator.

But now that game development has become much more accessible and the industry is not run entirely by business men we see more and more niche games, the entire market being covered.

BUT...my friend argued that games made 20 years ago had two cornerstones to them: Focus and reflex (given youth) and free time (given lack of job and other responsibilities), so after the rpg nostalgia trend will die down we will see these types of games built on old foundations but with idea that they can be played by both 18 and 60 year olds ( I know a LOT of old people that like rpgs) at the same time.

I personally don't fully agree (when I am gonna do my top 10 games video for this year both Shovel Knight and D:OI are in it) but hey..I am still young. So I wanted to see what this forums thinks.

 

I'm not really sure I see a question.

 

i disagree as well

id wager that for most people time is not measured in length; instead it is measured in quality

ie time is precious and always has been and the games people choose have to be worthy of their time [subjectivity aside]

game length is also irrelevant; people can spend thousands of hours playing tf2/dota/lol; games which arguably do not have a beginning, middle or end

contrast that with shite like depression quest and goat simulator; poor quality games that are a clear waste of time

his reasoning about 'lack of jobs and responsibility' is also specious because gamers have always had 'jobs and responsibilities'; if JaR's were a thing then books wouldnt be popular and movie theatres would be empty

 

Dammit I forgot to sum things ups. The question would be : Does the fact that a certain type of brain physiology dominated the early game industry mean that some types of games will be made rarely or not at all?

I disagree on the J&R viewpoint. The games you mentioned are session based and more accessible because they have a beginning middle and end in a short time period. Books can last say...10 hours if you are a super slow reader and film between 2-3.

Rpgs are a very slow burning form of art in comparison (1 hour of an rpg does not have the same intensity of a dota match but 20 hours in a rpg can have a higher intensity than 20 hours of dota matches, it's about how they evolve and deliver content).

 

I remember reading somewhere that JPRGs were made so grindy because people were beating the games and returning them within a day or two.
So they padded out the RPG, random encounters, etc, so this couldn't happen anymore.
Games are a lot like films imo, they can benefit from a good editor chopping off the fat, so the experience is more focused.
As far as mainstream goes... well it's about graphics isn't it. No "non-gamer" is going to play something that looks like dogshit.
With 3d environments, the game becomes more complex (generally) and therefore shorter.

 

On the topic of development being more accessible and more niche games:

I'm not sure how someone could reach that conclusion after spending time in online game communities. Indie development may cover a broader and more diverse group now than ever before but indie development doesn't carry enough weight (or competence) to service those niches. Let's face it, 95% of indie games are 90% not good. There's a smattering of good games and features here and there. With that high frequency of not meeting basic standards you cannot possibly say that the niches are being serviced even if there are large numbers of people "trying" to service them. As for mid-budget and AAA... I don't think I even need to state that they're not servicing niches in any way.


On the cornerstones of old games and RPG nostalgia:

RPG nostalgia trend that dies down? You do realise how niche the "RPG nostalgia trend" is don't you? It's not some fad sweeping the mainstream. It's a sustained dissatisfaction and supply<demand and arguably is only now being touched on, even after the various kickstarter RPG releases. This isn't nostalgia, it's niches not being satisfied.

On long games with the changing demographics:

Reducing the size of a game is a brute-force way to adjust it to the expectations of the demographic. Some devs will find it necessary, but it's not the clever way to do it. The thing is, game developers aren't anywhere near the point of perfecting other avenues of dealing with how to fit player time restraints with game time demands. Things such as making the interface stronger and more standardised (a huge factor), tracking information better in the game (well-structured journals go a long way to achieving this), less rigidity in achieving goals (somewhat counterintuitive; skip some things and do only what you want with the time you have available) then there's techniques that TV series' use to great advantage and that is to recap details from the previous episode at the start of every new one. Games could do really well with this, but they haven't even bothered.

Changing demographics -> changing approaches to satisfy demographics. The only things to really explain the lack of niches in game development are: greed, doubt and denial

 

hang on; accessibility is entirely individual and based on their available time, er... at the time of their choosing

a 20 minute arena clash is not a self contained story; it is a game of digital chess

you wouldnt call a game of chess a narrative; although i agree a game does have a discernable beginning and endgame, middle is subjective obviously; but a narrative? no

and it is not necessary that a game of hundreds of hours has to be played in huge chunks; like i said; its the individuals choice as to when [and where] they play the game

 

I don't think physiology has much to do with changes in average game length.

The "less free time" argument seems like a non-starter in particular. Games nowadays tend to be even longer than their predecessors and many of the most commercially successful titles are enormous times sinks. Franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Assassin's Creed, and Mass Effect prove that there exists a large market within the mainstream for games that have long, engrossing (well...to some people; not likely the denizens of Noble Codexia) single player components. Many of these feature "main stories" that take up a significant amount of total playtime, often in excess of 25 hours...a big chunk of time, and beyond what a lot of pundits (amateur or professional) claim the all-important "casual" gamer can stomach. I think the market has proven them wrong.

And I'm not exactly sure where reflexive skill fits in either. Modern action games are much longer than their predecessors and the return to reflexes are at least as high, if not higher. Most old-school action titles (mainly action platformers) tended to have much smaller movesets than their "descendants" do (see Castlevania versus Castlevania: Lords of Shadow or the original Ninja Gaiden trilogy versus Itagaki's reboot) and far less of a return to reflexes than newer action games. In most old-school action titles, player characters tend to have very long attack/movement animations, and are often locked into them, whereas new-school action titles have extremely fast animations and are usually built around players canceling out of them as necessary to evade/block oncoming enemy attacks.

The shift in demographics that has probably most affected gaming is the rise of people unable to accept harsher fail states and games that don't explicitly point them in the direction of the end. It's more psychological rather than physiological, and I'd argue it's made games longer, on average, rather than shorter.

The first type of shift is pretty easy to explain as it is well-worn intellectual territory. Everyone knows about brutally difficult arcade or console titles that needed to be cleared in one-sitting and in a limited number of lies/tries. They were short from start to finish, but players were not expected to make it to the finish on their first plays, likely repeating levels over and over again, racking up a high total playtime. This is in contrast to contemporary design with lots of checkpoints/saves to restore from, to promote a flow of gameplay that doesn't repeat levels and is only interrupted by difficulty spikes the player will (eventually) overcome; a lot of folks, even hardcore ones, hate replaying mastered content in order to progress to new stuff. An old-school player may have put in the same 8 hours to clear Contra (sans Konami code) as a modern gamer might to beat Vanquish (not on God Hard). A not too dissimilar argument could be made with old adventure games, that often had fail states, some of which were tucked away to even punish all but the most crafty save-scummer; it was expected you might not clear the game your first outing (and plenty of goofy/fun failure screens were designed because of this).

The second one is probably most pertinent to the cRPG genre, as they arewere the type of game to rack up the most hours by having players wander around, trying to puzzle out what exactly just to do in order to solve the game. Often, the player's quest was vague, and there was no real sense of direction, leaving the player to wander about investigating everywhere and everything in search of what to do. It's not hard to imagine trying all sorts of different things, and in the process accruing a heapload of playtime, to progress in the game before stumbling upon the necessary action to continue or win.

It's this sort of design that led to cRPG playtimes quoted at "100+ hours" or something similarly ludicrous, not based on meaningful hours of engagement, but because the player was fumbling around in the dark. It's a style of design that wasn't universally loved then, and whose adherents are quickly dwindling in number nowdays*. It takes not only a disciplined mind to delay gratification and enjoy these titles, but additionally a mind still mystified by the wonders of a new medium to endure some obscurantist game design. Exploring a vast virtual world is fun as a greenhorn, but as a gamer becomes more experienced, more jaded, they're no longer going to see something like old Ultimas, Realms of Arkania, or Wizardry 7 as a great journey, but a tedious scavenger hunt. The more acquainted one becomes with design conventions, the more they look at things in terms of progression flows, if->then statements, scripting, triggers, etc. instead of jaunting around a fantastic place. Less "what can I do in this game?" and more "What the hell does the dev want me to do to progress? I'm sick of fighting the same damn bandits/wolves/Raubritters over and over again?" And those weaned on easier games, but still games that follow all the same conventions, will likely never appreciate this sort of design, already being "initiated" and conscious of the underlying nature of games. It's like that thing Nietzsche was talking about, yo.

That's why modern cRPGs almost undoubtedly have, what amount to, massive flashing signals of "THIS PROGRESSES THE MAIN QUEST" readily available. Exploration focused games do this as well, just look at Skyrim, GTA, New Vegas, or what-have-you. Where one wants to go may be uncertain, but where one has to go is always obvious. You can still rack up a lot of playtime doing side-quests, but there's never "wasted" time.

I can sort of understand this design decision. Many old-school games had downright obtuse triggers to progress in the gameworld, and many had core gameplay mechanics ill-suited to fleshing out wild-goose-chases. Nobody minds waiting a few missions in X-Com to get a good shot at an alien captain/commander, because the systems are solid and stand up well in repeated play. Even if you aren't making progress, you're having fun. Now fighting enemies in Ultima or RoA on the other hand...well, yeah. And I don't think "just do make better combat/gameplay lolololol" is necessarily the credited solution; most systems will probably buckle under significant repetitions else require a ton of content to keep them fresh. It seems as though it would be hard to make a game that makes getting lost/confused fun without an unrealistic need for unique content.

So, TL;DFR version: Psychological changes, not physiological changes, are the big demographic shifters, but it's hard to say whether or not they made games longer or shorter as it depends of the genre/style.

Fuck my ass, that's a lot of wordswordswords.

 

Abandon all hope before the wall text!

I see, so you are saying that game length and such stayed mostly the same but the way game time padding was done has changed. In ye olden days it was via obscure progression path and now it's down by carrot-on-stick watered down content (Ubisoft games are the worst offenders when it comes to this). I do agree but I think that progression systems added forcefully in all genres made sure that you grind through obstacles at certain points even if you failed. Like the original castlevania or ninja gaiden required you to go through skill based encounters continuously.

And regarding the crpg thing, I find myself wanting more compact games in this area. I really liked Divinity:Original Sin but even it so.....it can drag on sometimes. I remember finishing Shadowrun Dragonfall and loving the fact that it is mostly filler free, sure it's about 10-15 hours but that's not a bad thing (plus I LOVED the fact that both original shadowrun and dragonfall don't have that boring cprg start where you collect bear butts for 5 hours and help people around town with meaningless crap, you pretty much are on track).

 

You forgot the power of copy paste, generic content, generic fight interruptions.

If i compare Fo2 and Fo3, for instance, you can claim Fo3 takes more time to be completed than Fo2.
The problem is that most of the time spent on Fo3 consist of "exploring" locations that look like each other, fighting monsters that look like each other, and loot chests that look like each other.
If you scrap all those things, the amount of relevant contents is lower in Fo3 than in Fo2.
So the lenght of Fo3 was artificially increased by adding generic copy/pasted content that add annoyance instead of adding anything fun, considering the Fallout games weren't much about endless fights and exploration of generic caves/dungeons/metro stations, and that those in Fo3 are more numerous than unique/good.

Ultimately, you waste far more time with those generic annoyances that you can spend time with the things you were looking for on a Fallout game.
FoNV is also guilty of having a lot of generic filler, but the non-filler content is better.

In the end, when the develloppers/publishers promise me that the lengh of their new game will be over 100 hours, i am more afraid than happy, as i fear i will be overwhelmed by generic filler that don't add anything to the mix, and that i will lose too much time here, time that should use to play better games. (or do other stuff)

Fo2/Fo3/FoNV : Fallout 2/Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas.

 

..and I'll disagree with this. (opinion)

Although quality certainly is important, obviously, I like to get lost in a game, literally sometimes, and length is absolutely intrinsic to that. I find short games, regardless of subjective quality, to be a waste of time because I, personally, don't get the feel of the worldbuilding and I really do look for that in a game.

So for me quality and quantity are very and equally important, and I never look to sacrifice either for the sake other.

 

Early game design does echo through game design today. I used to like RPGs the most solely because they had the most content, so they would last me longest. That philosophy was shared by others who are just now getting old enough to make games. So they look back on those memories and try to recreate it. Notice the influx of 'retro' this and 'retro' that? Exactly what I mentioned.

Personally speaking, I much prefer a tight experience these days. The ideal experience is something that keeps the pace up throughout, gets its message across and ends on a good note. Transistor was only a few hours and I had a much better time with it then something that doesn't respect my time. Just coming off of Inquisition, I had fun with the actual story segments. I'm absolutely in love with the lore and world that Bioware crafted. However, the amount of filler was inexcusable. The game doesn't respect my time at all and is just padded out with pointless side quest upon side quest.

There is a market for both ends of the spectrum for length if done right. Transistor, as mentioned, was a fantastic ride. On the other side of the coin is Divinity: Original Sin. That game is what, 50-60 hours? And it was all well written, not to mention brimming with good combat design and field/elemental interactions (assuming you don't cheese it obviously). It respects your time and rewards you for overcoming its challenges.

 

I definitely think publishers have the opinion that older gamers don't want to ever be challenged, lost or inconvenienced. I don't think this has anything to do with game length or free time however, because a ton of modern games go out of their way to have as much time wasting bullshit in them as possible. The biggest hits (Skyrim, Assassin's Creed, Batman, Dragon Age, etc.) have the most grinding bullshit in them of anything out there. The basic concept in most publisher's heads is "dude comes home from work, there's no sports on that day so he wastes time running around a pretty world without any challenge or thought required." That's modern AAA design in a nutshell.

 

That's fairly true I must admit, and that's probably why recently I've enjoyed a lot of "indies" that were potentially frustrating and where dying was very common, but which entertained me a lot (Gunpoint, Electronic Super Joy, Monaco, Hotline Miami, Teleglitch, Deep Dungeons of Doom and the not-very-indie Shadow of Mordor).

 

As someone who was around in the early days of video and computer games, I've never liked this belief that games, from the beginning, were aimed at boys and young men. Look at old Atari 2600 ads, Commodore 64 magazines, etc. and you see families sitting around the console gaming away. You see dads playing war games. You see girls playing Strawberry Shortcake, you see mom playing Breakout with her son.

Maybe in the '90s it changed and became more about the teen boys playing Mortal Kombat and whatnot, you started to see more busty babes in chainmail bikinis I guess, but it certainly didn't start out that way at all. It started out as "games are for everyone!" and why wouldn't they be? If you're a business making a product, why wouldn't you want to sell that product to as many customers as possible?

 

Gonna have to disagree on a purely factual basis, pre-casual market, between 1985 and 1995 the ratio was something like 95% male on "Computers" (there were so many that disappeared) and 87% male on nintendo (I don't what about the other consoles at the time). The reason that you saw the family adds was that they were trying to sell to parents technically, kids did not have money to buy the actual thing, those companies wanted to have an image of "fun for the whole family!"

I am not saying that women didn't game in the 80' and 90' (10% of something is still tens of thousands of peoples) but they were a mostly ignored demographic due to their size. Today's the split is around 50/50 in the casual market, 20-30/60-70 in the hardcore and about 10/90 in super hardcore (think dwarf fortress). I'd love to see more women gaming and I am sure the market will sort itself out because people like to make money and a demographic that feels "underrepresented" is a gold mine potentially.

 

I definitely feel that reflex was tied to the demographic being mostly youth, but not sure about focus. When I was growing up the console games I played were very reflexive. The puzzles were simple, but you had to time things just right. When FPS games started coming out, you ahd to run and jump and aim just right. But with the past several years you see FPS comes coming with auto-aiming features and instead of having to jump over things in adventure games they just have your hero do it automatically. This has of course allowed much older people to get into these games, as well as people who're not as reflexive, young or old. Lets face the truth, just because you're young doesn't always mean you're a twitch junkie.

As far as focus is concerned, I think older people can do that fine. Ever played chess? It requires a lot of focus. I don't know of any 10-15 year olds winning the chess championship, do you? And you know ADHD is five times more likely in males than in females. So even if there were more male gamers in those early days, the incidence of ADHD won't help their focus.

What about how exploration has changed? In older games, like Zelda, you'd have to run around for hours finding things. It wasn't reflexive and didn't require focus. In more modern games, the exploration time has been reduced and it's not as easy to waste time. So while a player can explore, it won't be for hours, and it's much harder to go down a dead end. Yet how is this attached if at all to the demographic? I don't think it's. I think games evolved as time went on and just did away with the aimless tedious exploration parts. They replaced this with puzzles, content, action and other things. They got better at making games. And more to the point, dead ends are often the result of insufficient testing. Better design and development methodology reduces it. By dead ends I mean those areas in games where you didn't know what to do and spent fruitless hours seeking answers.

Thank God things have changed. I HATED Zelda because of the wandering. Was just boring.

Ther's also another recent phenomena. Games like Zelda and Diablo and many MMO's have been called Skinner Boxes. What's it mean? It means they keep you playing like a lab rat. So what's the solution? I'm not sure. I know gaming addiction is something which is started to be noticed. My guess is games will attempt to be less repetitive and shorter in length. Yet there's an inherent problem. WHY would game makers make a less addictive game which is going to cost them more money to make?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

Her'es an interesting foray into this topic and others:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131494/behavioral_game_design.php

 

I love good, complex and long games!
Yes, I have much less time than I used to for gaming. I almost only play games at the weekend or during holidays, because during the week I study and work, and Fridays I spend the whole day with my girlfriend, oh and occasionally I go out drinking with my pals. Sounds like I'd be the perfect audience for short 10-hour games that can easily be finished on a single weekend, without frustrating setbacks or anything, right?

Fucking wrong. I hate short games that are over before they really started. I love long games that take me months to finish, as long as they're good. The one game I play most is probably Thief with its many lovely fan missions, and my favourite missions are those where a single mission takes me one or two hours to complete. When a game is fun, there is no reason anyone would want it to be short... because that would mean LESS FUN while all you want is MORE FUN. And if you only have the weekend to play, where's the problem? Savegames have been a thing since the fucking 80s. Play 5 hours on the weekend, save your game, look forward to another weekend of playing that one really good game you're on!

People not having time for long games is fucking retarded bullshit. When you have a hobby, you make time for it, and games can always be stopped by save + exit and continued whenever you like. Case in point: Bethesda's games are among the most popular and top-selling games ever, and people tend to spend hundreds of hours on them.

Games being too long only sucks when the content is artificially stretched out by mandatory filler combat, like Dragon Age's infamous Derp Roads. People stop playing games like that not because they have little time, but because they can't be arsed spending their time doing repetitive and tedious bullshit.

 

I second JarlFrank, I only have enough time to game on the weekends, maybe 1 hour on some weekdays, but I don't care. At least when I play, I really enjoy it, because I choose games that I like very much, not some mediocre crap which is just a short adrenalin burst like CoD.

 

Actually, having little time makes you seek out good quality games on pupose rather than going for short bursts of casual gaming. Casual gaming is for people who have too much time on their hands and need to waste it. People with little time prefer to spend that little time they have on quality shit instead.

 

This is also true. My first gaming approach was via my mom's C64 (circa 1985), and I'll be damned if those games were intended for a kids/boys audience.

 

As JarlFrnk said, what I want from a Game (or any media that I consume) is to be entertained. The Problem is not that I have less time for gaming the problem is I have less time which can be wasted without me regretting it. So I put up with a lot less bullshit then I used to (this also goes for every aspect of live, be it hobbies like gaming, movies, comics etc or social stuff like friends). A day only has 24 hours and I try to put as stuff in theese hours as it is possible between stuff I simply have to do like work, shower, eat etc.

When I was younger I could aford to waste time, I had enough of it and if something turned out to be not very good no point in regretting playing it or watching it. If you have about 5 ot 6 hours a day for everything essential you have to do and your freetime, and you put in a block of 2-3 hours gaming in this day I would consider that much. Then I hear stuff like "give it time it gets better after 20 hours or so - yes the story really gets better after 30 hours!" well 30 hours is a fucking week of my live I have to give the game to simply get less boring?

So what a dev should really think about is not if I have time or not for his game or how long that game should be, he simply should consider what other options I have to spend this time, and that not only includes games. If every new game is shit I dont magically start playing the shortest shit, I do the next best thing and go out, or read or watch a movie, I simply fill the slot shich was reserved for gaming with something else or give another activity an extra timeslot.

I am willing to spend lots of theese timeslots exploring, or beeing stuck, or finding things out in an rpg if the process of doing this is interesting. He may pad his game with hundreds of hours of sidequests if he wishes, and I will go through all of them if they are interesting. The Problem that theese devs have is now, as I am older I ahve other options of things to do and games to play, if yours is shit I wont buy it, even if the shit only lasts 2 hours.

 

While obviously personal preference is the main drive here I don't think quality and quantity are that intrinsically linked. There are good long/short games and there bad long/short games. The problem with saves in long games though is that there is significant audience drop off, I think every person on the Codex started a good game that is long and gave up on it some point past the latter half.

 

Sure, even I did that often enough, just to return to the game a year later and either continue my save or start over.
But with games that have shit tier filler content, I am much more likely to just leave it and never return. And I guess many players who put down a game don't do it due to length alone, but due to the design of the lengthy content - there are games which are long because they're chock full of quality content, and then there are ones that could potentially take long due to lots of optional content you may very well skip (every Bethesda game ever), and then there are ones that are artificially stretched by boring and tedious filler (most of the modern Bioware games).

Those with filler are the ones people tend to ditch.

 

Will I do agree with you though not 100%...I have to say that this is quite funny considering that this thread exists http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ined-taste-that-you-never-could-finish.73155/

Also the concept of filler varies from person to person. I know people who LOVE grinding in jrpgs though I can't stand that personally.

I, for example, have a sort of fondness for the vehicle driving in mass effect 1. Yes it was unpolished and many people considered it filler but I actually liked driving on the surface of planets (I actually made the galaxy feel a little bit bigger, I didn't like ME2 and ME3 too much specifically because of the restrictive environment).