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Shorter games are the future?
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 26th March 2008
Are shorter games like Portal a good thing for busy adult gamers? Let us know what you think in the forums.
Speaking about how the time-restrictions of modern living may have affected the length and design of Valve's Portal, Wolpaw and lead-designer Kim Swift had this to say:
"They're constantly referring at Valve to people who really think a lot about games and play games, and many of my adult friends never, ever finish games anymore. Like, they don't finish them. We just thought it would be nice to have a game where, if you play it, you probably will finish it, unless you just don't like it."
From there Wolpaw and Swift speculate on what this might mean for games in the future, pointing out that they can use the Steam stats system to monitor play and completion times for games played over Steam. It takes most players around three and a half hours to play through Portal apparently.
"it seems to be a trend. In Call of Duty 4, the single-player is awesome, but I think it took me five and a half hours or something. So it's not super-long either. That seems to be the trend. BioShock was pretty long, but it almost seems like a throwback, in how long it was."
"There's a practical constraint on time for people who aren't 14 years old...A lot of games I would like to come back to, but there's this barrier of reentry, in which I don't remember what the hell I was doing a month ago," Said Wolpaw.
So, now we put the question to you - how many of the games you buy do you actually finish and do you think shorter games are a good or a bad thing? Let us know in the forums.
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