Da klicksch:
http://www.next-gen.biz/blogs/lengthy-arguments
Und hie no igfüegt:
A while back I wrote about how repetitive gameplay over long periods of time can provide a depth of familiarity unique to our medium. That’s true, and great, and whatever, but to be less sunny about it my honest opinion is that most games don’t achieve this ideal, this gradual osmosis of artistic intent. Most games are just way too long. Presumably, you also hardly ever finish games you start, and those you do finish involve some punishing, boring slog solely for the sake of completion. Right?
One of the things that’s supposed to keep us playing is story, but let’s face it, most videogame stories suck. My favourite game stories, the ones I was really impressed by, are maybe those from Indigo Prophecy and GTAIV. I found the characters unusually multidimensional and their plights relatable. But if you stitched all those cutscenes together, the result would suffer in comparison to all but the most ridiculous films, like 2012 or The Phantom Menace. The state of the art of story content in games is horribly impoverished, and on top of that, or probably related to it, these stories are incredibly long. The opportunity to watch a crappy story for nine hours is a poor incentive for me to keep playing a game. That’d be like watching Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III back to back. It would be a sad day.
Fallout 3’s story topics are no better. Making a tale about fire-breathing giant ants supply lasting value to my life requires more work than exhibited by Bethesda’s thin, campy material. Where Fallout 3’s fiction shines is in technique – storytelling as opposed to story content, the fact that story choices are woven into gameplay, triggering side quests that advance my character, that sort of thing. This alludes to the real merit of Fallout 3, which isn’t story at all. Wandering the wasteland provides an experiential appeal with true longevity, one I can imagine revisiting for the foreseeable future, in part because there is no story to demarcate the time.
Obviously, the real reason we play games is for gameplay. The best games present some innovative, compelling new interaction that you haven’t already experienced and is worthy of your precious time. How long does it take before you’ve explored the mechanic pretty fully, tried it in different scenarios, met your personal goals and are feeling satisfied? A few hours? So what are the remaining six or more hours for? At GDC this year, Chris Hecker ranted about the importance of creating enough content to explore the central game mechanic to the depth it deserves. His concern was games that don’t achieve enough depth, and my point is the complement: games that reach the bottom and hang out doing nothing.
Why is the 12-hour-or-longer game the industry standard? Because consumers demand it. They would rather have a company expend their effort unnaturally stretching a three-hour concept over a dozen hours than have them really focus on making those first three pre-exhaustion hours, the ones you are actually going to play, as perfect as they can be. Isn’t that weird? You might really love a movie, but does that mean you want it to last all day? Or perhaps you actually gain more satisfaction from the fact that the movie reaches a natural conclusion after a couple of hours? Some people report that they enjoy the mechanical, mindless repetition of playing a game on autopilot. That seems odd, but who I am to judge? After all, I like to go hiking, but it’s not like I’m actually trying to get somewhere by walking. It’s a question of different values.
So, fine, videogames elongated specifically for the purpose of wasting the player’s time should be permitted to exist, but does that duration need to be so ubiquitous? Here’s the thing that happens to me: I reach the point of satisfaction two or three hours in where I think fondly of the game, have had a good time exploring the mechanic, and feel done. But the game disagrees with me, pointing out that I’ve only seen a fifth of the cutscenes, four of the power-ups and just a couple of levels. I believe I’ve had a graceful arc with a satisfying point of closure, but the game argues that I’m just at the beginning. We have to part ways disagreeably, the fondness diminished, akin to a break up. The box haunts my shelves, like it would be awkward to play again in the future.
Here’s my proposal: let’s make two- or three-hour games the new standard. Games that we will actually finish. Games befitting a mature, adult media consumption habit. Games where the player’s natural arc of satisfaction with the experience is in harmony with the game’s arc of the story and other elements coming to conclusion. Let’s make these games replayable, so that we can opt into more hours of an experience we really loved. And, yes, let’s provide a free-play mode where I can wander the wasteland all I want, returning to the romance in a way that’s not so awkward.
Fail. Und Q.E.D.
Ok, er differenziert nid gnue zwüsche verschidene Genres, redt aber implizit wou vo Mainstream Blockbusters ir Längi 12-20 Stund (was ja us sine Bispil hervorgoht).