Time & Cost

Portal & such like

What with games being so expensive we really need to get our money’s worth out of the pesky things! However, it’s becoming apparent to me that gamers seem distractedly preoccupied with quantity over quality, and that this fixation is somewhat divorced from considerations of price. Even if the ticket price is small, games are still not free from accusations of inadequate content. Much of the commentary surrounding 2007’s Portal was about how short it was, a finger that was also pointed at the recently released Braid (Portal came as part of the astonishingly cheap five-game Orange Box and Braid sold for £10). The low price of these games was apparently not justification enough for their brevity, and though many did recognise and appreciate the quality enough to feel that it made up the shortfall, some clearly still remained unsatisfied. Personally, I wondered whether the length of these cheaper games was even worth mentioning at all let alone justifying with reasons other than price – it seemed obvious to me they’d be short because they didn’t cost much, but clearly some people expected more. So is there some arbitrary quantity of game, regardless of cost, that must be provided? And is price only relevant to the quality alone?

At the other end of the spectrum from Portal and Braid, huge games like Fallout 3 get much praise for their sheer volume of content at normal retail price, so we are at least consistent if nothing else. Maybe it’s me that’s got it backwards, thinking of the price first then equating a length to it, rather than primarily thinking about how long I want a game to be then judging if it’s worth the price. However, an arbitrary expectation of length can have negative effects, and the story or gameplay can be dragged out to meet it. Some games simply don’t have the creative depth to fill that content requirement, and I’d much rather they just remove the filler and make is shorter. It might sound like a bit much to ask, but I’d like to see games being consistently good all the way through, even if that means being shorter than expected. It’s better to be left wanting more than it is to not make it all the way through.

So I guess it sounds like I’m advocating a system where things are priced according to the amount of content. If we’re so concerned about value for money then surely this would make sense as things could be priced accordingly? Perhaps, but I wonder if that wouldn’t be opening Pandora’s Box to find the next installment of Fallout costing twice as much as before – hey that’s because it’s huge kids! Neither would I be happy about paying full price for a two-minute game even if it was staggeringly amazing. I suppose games, like movies and books, will never escape the fact that they are consumed largely in order to pass the time in an agreeable manner – the more time they pass enjoyably the better. Books, however, vary a little in price depending on size, whereas films generally don’t even though they can vary in length relatively freely, though I’m not sure I ever hear film critics comment on it. Still, a few more pricing options for games wouldn’t hurt I don’t think, and it looks like this is happening too with the growth of downloadable games.

Really my point is that, regardless of the real-world practicalities and preferences, I feel the overbearing hunt for value is one of the long list of things that retards the progress of games to full maturity. The length should be cut for the game and not the other way around. Sure, a full price micro game would suck (and is an absurdly extreme example), but busting a gut churning out content to meet some arbitrary content-value proposition set by nerd-raging gamers will usually just make the game suffer in the long run. We shouldn’t ignore quantity at all, but it’d be nice if the focus shifted slightly over to quality a little more noticeably, and it would be extremely nice if we, the audience, could appreciate that quality without the need for caveats about brevity.