Hit the Apex

Game length is a fairly interesting facet of design as it’s one of the most complained about but least praised aspects of many games, by both critics and consumers alike. How many times have you heard someone say that the length of a game is great? It happens, but it’s rare. Maybe it’s one of those things that you don’t appreciate until it’s wrong.

Interestingly, we hear people complain that games are too short all the time. Ignoring multiplayer aspects, I’m curious to know what the yardstick for length is, and if that’s a real number that complainers have come up with on their own, or if they’ve just heard that 10 to 12 hours is about right and are sticking with that notion, even if a short game is perfectly paced and wraps up nicely.

Why is that? Once a movie gets to the two-and-a-half hour mark it’s generally considered to be quite long, and it’s pretty rare that you’ll find a film that hits three hours. So why is it that we, or at least many vocal gamers who tend to speak for the quieter majority, expect a game to be four or five times the length of a film?

From my point of view (the perspective of which has changed over the years), I think most games are too long. I remember when I didn’t feel this way, back when I wasn’t married with a two-year-old at home and games were used to fill much of my free time. When I could kill five hours a night playing games, having a title stretch out over the span of a few days seemed welcome. Nowadays I’m lucky if I get in five hours over the course of a week.

Going back to the movie length comparison that I touched on, there is notably the difference that you’re supposed to watch a film in one sitting and that a gaming session can really be of most any length and number of sessions. That is indeed a big difference, but the number of sessions that you spend with a game is, at least in the case of this argument, irrelevant.

Instead, there are two main positive things that films offer but games don’t, both of which you can attribute to their far shorter time commitment. First, theater-going costs aside, you can take a risk on a film that you think might only be OK and see it through to the end. It’s only two hours – you can watch something else afterward, tomorrow night or what have you. If you know it’ll take you 10 hours to complete a passably fun game, and you’ve got something else that you’re sure will be more entertaining to do, that 10 hour commitment makes for a hard argument. This is especially true if, like in my case, that eats up two weeks or so of free time entertainment.

Secondly, movies are far more capable of multiple viewings than games are multiple playthroughs simply because of the time investment. I’d love to play through Metal Gear Solid 4 again, but I simply don’t have the time right now, especially with a backlog of other games that I still need to play. On the flip side, I can watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off for the thousandth time tonight and do something else tomorrow.

With games costing $60 these days, there’s certainly the element of value (perceived or real), which is where I think all of this comes from. Rather than stretching what might otherwise be a tight storytelling experience into something that players feel is a fair value, however, I think the best way to handle that is to add plenty of side or alternate content. Fallout 3 is a perfect example of this – you can play through the main story part pretty quickly if you’re short on time, but there is so much side content that you can spend hundreds of hours exploring the Wasteland if you want to. GTA, though also filled with side missions and challenge, is different; there’s tons of side stuff to take on if you want, but the main story is still very long. It’s not something that you can easily finish in a weekend.

Games known for multiplayer have it pretty easy. Some folks view the single-player portion as an added bonus, so if it’s only five hours long then so be it. If you’re creating a single-player-only title that doesn’t really have a lot of room for side quests, then this becomes a much trickier puzzle to solve. In Heavy Rain’s case, there was a fair bit of replay draw to see what the different endings might be. Had the game been more straightforward with only a couple different outcomes (ignoring the core gameplay implications this implies), it likely would have been hit a lot harder on length.