The Logical Fallacy Of Using "Hours" To Value Games
I see it all the time: questions like, "How many hours does this game take to complete?" Back of boxes will boast that a game has tens of hours of playtime. In a capitalistic and competitive world, numbers can be helpful when used correctly, but more often than not, they are parsed incorrectly.
The number of hours a game takes to complete wasn't really something that was a critical thing to advertise back in the early days of gaming. The ultimate goal of playing videogames was to have fun. If you could have fun with a game over and over again, it didn't matter that there weren't 100 levels or mandatory hours and hours of grinding to do.
I remember gameplay-hours becoming a marketing-point on the back of boxes and from the mouths of PR people, starting from the mid-'90s. After Final Fantasy VII was a commercial success, publishers began publishing more RPGs in the West, and one of the bullet-points on the backs of boxes became gameplay-hours. "100 hours of gameplay!" Wow!
The problem with equating more gameplay-hours to more value is that there must first be an assumption that the game is fun to begin with. If the game is not fun, what is the point of spending 100 hours playing it? That would be torture. Now if the game is fun, then I see the argument that more of a great thing is better than less of a great thing.
The other logical flaw comes from the capitalistic, left-brained mindset of consumers. They want as much as possible while spending as least money as possible. If a game takes 100 hours of content for it to achieve the same subjective value as another game that is shorter but more fun, then there's a problem here. Have you ever gone to Chili's, the restaurant, or a Mexican restaurant? They might give you or you might have the option buy endless tortilla-chips. "That sounds great," you might proclaim, but think about it. How many tortilla-chips does it take to feel satisfied, or even full? You might eat a hundred chips before you even start to feel full, and you might never even feel satisfied because they are just empty carbs without much fat or protein.
A game should be as entertaining as possible in as little time as possible. It should be satisfying. If you can play a game for 15 minutes and feel satisfied, that is not a failure of game-design; it is a success. There are games that you play for 15 minutes and want to play more. Why? You are not satisfied. You do not feel like what you did accomplished anything or was any fun, so you are constantly chasing a proverbial, dangling carrot that you might never catch.
The number of hours a game takes to complete wasn't really something that was a critical thing to advertise back in the early days of gaming. The ultimate goal of playing videogames was to have fun. If you could have fun with a game over and over again, it didn't matter that there weren't 100 levels or mandatory hours and hours of grinding to do.
I remember gameplay-hours becoming a marketing-point on the back of boxes and from the mouths of PR people, starting from the mid-'90s. After Final Fantasy VII was a commercial success, publishers began publishing more RPGs in the West, and one of the bullet-points on the backs of boxes became gameplay-hours. "100 hours of gameplay!" Wow!
The problem with equating more gameplay-hours to more value is that there must first be an assumption that the game is fun to begin with. If the game is not fun, what is the point of spending 100 hours playing it? That would be torture. Now if the game is fun, then I see the argument that more of a great thing is better than less of a great thing.
The other logical flaw comes from the capitalistic, left-brained mindset of consumers. They want as much as possible while spending as least money as possible. If a game takes 100 hours of content for it to achieve the same subjective value as another game that is shorter but more fun, then there's a problem here. Have you ever gone to Chili's, the restaurant, or a Mexican restaurant? They might give you or you might have the option buy endless tortilla-chips. "That sounds great," you might proclaim, but think about it. How many tortilla-chips does it take to feel satisfied, or even full? You might eat a hundred chips before you even start to feel full, and you might never even feel satisfied because they are just empty carbs without much fat or protein.
A game should be as entertaining as possible in as little time as possible. It should be satisfying. If you can play a game for 15 minutes and feel satisfied, that is not a failure of game-design; it is a success. There are games that you play for 15 minutes and want to play more. Why? You are not satisfied. You do not feel like what you did accomplished anything or was any fun, so you are constantly chasing a proverbial, dangling carrot that you might never catch.
There can be all types of games, from satisfying to unsatisfying. There can be games that are replayed over and over again, to games that are played once for 100 hours and then never touched again. To each his or her own. The point is that there seems to be an insidious maxim in the industry that more gameplay-hours is better, and this is simply not true. More is not always better.
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