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."

Re:Opposite.

[jandrese]

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?

Odd complaint.

[SanityInAnarchy]

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?

Is the game intuitive?

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

I see a lot of people saying, effectively, that long=good but I don't think that they've missed the real problem. There are many games that simply lack a way to intuit what should be done. Things like ladders in pitch black corners have huge potential to make the game boring and even frustrating. A good game should be like a good GUI where to go and what to do next should be easy to deduce. When one has paced all the corners of the room, investigated every item and used all your ammo shooting boxes, grills and barrels one only hopes explodes and no means of exit has presented itself, it not only makes the game long, but very boring as well.

Effectively what I'm saying is that long may be good, but also, long can easily be bad.

Re:ok, so the game gives him MORE than promised

[CastrTroy]

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.

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Re:Opposite.

[gstoddart]

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.

That, and kids nowadays seem to have almost preternatural reflexes on video games.

I've watched my nephews play, and both of them can process more screen information and do more accurate controls than I ever could. Granted, I'm getting closer to 40, and games used to have two buttons and a joystick. :-P

I think kids who have always had video games are *way* more skilled at game play than most other gamers. It's eerie!

This is why I'm gonna buy a Wii -- hopefully the games will be more favourable to my aging hands and crappy reflexes. I doubt I could finish Tomb Raider (but I've stopped buying games for my PS2, so I have no idea.)

Cheers

Unreal 2

[@madeus]

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!").

I have NEVER used "time to beat" as a metric:

[acvh]

I have been playing video games for as long as they have existed. Never have I timed my usage of a game, never have I looked for some magic number of hours of gameplay.

Certainly we remember the people who could run through single player Quake in 24 seconds: does that mean Quake sucked (or, was that fact WHY Quake sucked?)

I am older now, and have a stack of unfinished games like the author of the article. I have had to become more discriminating in my choice of game to purchase; I just can't invest the time or mental energy to complete a Final Fantasy anymore. I did get through Star Wars Lego with my 6 year old daughter.....

Re:Hardcore gamers vs. gamers with jobs.

[bcattwoo]

Indeed. With my now four month old I am lucky to get in a couple of hours of gaming a week and that is only if my wife and daughter take a nap together while doing other things like working or mowing the lawn. So, a forty hour game would take me a mere five months or so to finish off. I usually settle for a few rounds of AA knowing that I likely will not get very far in a storyline-type game and it may be a couple weeks until I get back to it.

Game Time vs Cost vs Fun

[Wakk013]

Ok everyone is gonna have their own opinions on this. Let me put this into the light of how I perceive games and time to play.

OK, figure a movie by yourself in my area is going to run you roughly $9 for a 1.5 hour movie (granted you pay the same for a 60 min or 300 min movie). Then you buy soda ($5), popcorn ($3 for a small), and maybe candy ($3) and your out another $11. So for roughtly 1.5 hours of entertainment which may or may not be good, you're willing to pay $20. All bases on my area, market, and personal tastes to spend at movies. Now add a date to that, and cost goes up roughly 2x.

So you paid $50 for a 40 hour game which, again may or may not be entertaining, typically is interactive, can be saved, and played multiple times. Add in a MMO, ranging from $5-20 a month for how ever many hours you invest in it. Figure a full time gamer addict plays 16+ hours a day for a month, they get around 480 hours (guestimation not accounting for non play days and what not). Or the gamers that are casual that get maybe 5 hours a week for about 20 hours a month.

I really don't understand how people will pay approximately $20 for a 1.5 hour entertainment that doesn't involve you directly, typically walking away happy, and yet complain about paying $50 for 40 hours of entertainment that does interact and make you part of that world.

Well thats my 2 cents.

Re:Is this really a problem?

[mattbelcher]

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.

Re:Dude!

[complexmath]

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).

Re:Strategy Guides

[Monkey]

Dude, you nailed it. Shadowgate for the NES was the most aggravating exercise in futility I've ever experienced in my 20+ years of gaming. It was nearly impossible to progress past some parts of the game without detailed knowledge on how to manipulate select items from certain areas in specific ways. In the pre-Internet days, the only solution was to call the $1.00 a minute help line prominently displayed in the back of the manual.

Re:Opposite.

[TubeSteak]

If I start a long story-based game, then I get busy at work and have to stop playing for two weeks, when I come back, I might be totally unable to progress because I forgot that I need to deliver a plucked blue chicken to a one legged chiropractor three villages away in order to trigger the rest of the story.

So what you're really saying is that more games should have a quest-log which tells you what tasks you've completed & what tasks you can choose to do.

Sounds to me more like a design flaw than a problem specific to casual gamers

A suggestion for game designers

[caitsith01]

I have this problem - I work long hours and have a pretty busy life outside of that, so I struggle to find time to play games even though I love them. I tend to pick up a game for a few hours but then have to leave it for weeks at a time. It's especially hard in games like Civilization IV and Deus Ex (or System Shock II and Freespace 2, which I'm trying to play through at the moment), in other words, games which either present an extremely high level of complexity or a very detailed storyline.

I have always thought it would be super-cool if such games provided a sort of "last week, in Civilization IV" recap option when you load your game. For instance, Civ could give you a little potted history of the last hundred years or so - "After the Greek attack on the Germans, Japan and Russia entered into a mutual protection pact, while the Americans began stockpiling arms..." and so on. It could even be presented as a history lecture or news bulletin to fit into the game world. A game like Deus Ex could give you a more story-driven update - "You've just returned to Hell's Kitchen, and your brother Paul is nowhere to be found..."

I can't imagine this would be hard to implement.