Sometimes I wonder how the other half lives these days, that other half being kids that are like how I was when I was younger. Do they sink hundreds of hours into games like Yakuza 4 like I sunk into Uniracers and Super Mario World? Do they feel the full sense of completion and satisfaction from them that I felt from those games? I'm not sure that I can say one way or the other, that either the time I spend on games or the amount of each game I finish has an ultimate bearing on how much I enjoy myself, but the thought crosses my mind more often these days. A recent interview I read with one of the guys who is making one of these Hitman games had an answer from him in there that said that 80% of the people who play this new Hitman game will not see the last level, it is just metrics, he said, it is the truth. It kinda makes me think that no, people aren't really playing all this game, they're losing what it was they were after somewhere along the way.
When I was in my teenage years, buying PlayStation games with money from my crappy summer job—spent helping my inexperienced coworkers at the drive-in clean exploded ice cream flurries off the walls—each dollar had to mean something, had to mean that for that dollar I'd have "more game," a longer playtime, cause I couldn't get games so often and each one had to last. Now I'm richer than Al Borland and swimming in games, which has that interesting and horrible effect that rapidly aging fans of gaming are all too familiar with: less time to spend on each one.
Perhaps as a reaction to having so much choice on the new systems, lately I've been spending more time with older games, stuff from the original NES era. Off and on over the last month or so I've played a couple seasons of Tecmo Super Bowl, an outdated arcade-style football game featuring famous athletes from twenty years ago. It might seem pointless on the surface, but there's something about its compactness, its smallness, that gives me more of a sense of pushing the boundaries, of discovering new things, than the bigger games do. There are fewer parameters to manipulate, more limits, less goin' on outside that game world. Is that irony? You'd expect the smaller, more restrictive games to feel limiting! But instead, in the limits, I find the game, I find the boundaries and explore pushing them. And the great part is that these older games are short enough that I can replay them, or even turn them off halfway and start over from the beginning. The thought of starting Yakuza 4 over from the beginning makes me want to puke stuffed animals.
The more I kick it around, the more the answer becomes obvious—it's never been, and never will be, about what I have to show for my invested time, about that percentage. I'm just realizing that for as much as my gaming tastes and my hobbies have changed throughout time, my gaming sensibilities are still very much the same as they've always been. Shorter games—smaller games—give me opportunities to really find that Thing there, to experience it, understand it, control it, push it. Longer games seem to just give me more, more!! But more's never what I've wanted, really, even when I was sinking those ice cream dollars into Xenogears. What I really wanted, all that time, was something to draw me in and keep me there for as long as I could stand it. Maybe the fact that 80% of players won't see the last Hitman level might mean you should make a Hitman game with less levels. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that you don't always need to have more to be more.