2485: The Value of Short Experiences

You know me, dear reader, I love getting my teeth into a meaty RPG as much as the next man — assuming the next man is as much of a loser as I am — but sometimes it’s nice to cleanse the palate with something shorter. Perhaps even something that you can finish in a single sitting.

I thought this with Outlast and its DLC, which I played recently, and I’ve also thought it with the visual novel Negligee, which I’m going to do a writeup for on MoeGamer later this week. I also think it whenever I play games that are friendly to bite-size sessions, like arcade-style games where the emphasis is on getting better at a short, sharp experience rather than slogging your way through hundreds of levels.

There seems to be something of an assumption among many people online these days that a game somehow lacks value if its developers don’t “support” it post-release with regular updates. Now, in some cases, this makes sense — massively multiplayer games like Final Fantasy XIV would grow stale quickly if they didn’t get an injection of new stuff to do now and then, for example — but in others, particularly games that are heavily story-based, there’s a great deal of value in simply drawing a line under it, saying “that’s it” and calling it finished.

This clamouring for constant updates is particularly pronounced in the mobile game sector, where a lot of games seem to have designs on being “massively multiplayer” experiences anyway, even when they involve little to no actual player interaction. Google Play and App Store reviewers (and, to a marginally lesser extent, Steam reviewers) will get seriously whiny if even the dumbest of timewasters doesn’t have regular updates with new levels or seasonal events or whatever — and even worse if the experience costs “too much” for what they perceive the mythical money-to-hours ratio is supposed to be — and it always bothers me a bit. Are they seriously saying that they don’t want that game to ever end, that they’ll be happy doing nothing but flicking birds at pigs or matching candy sweets forever? I can’t imagine feeling that way. I need new and interesting things to do on a fairly regular basis; while my longstanding love affair with Final Fantasy XIV would seem to run counter to this statement, that game does at least reinvent itself with new stuff every so often, and I play other things alongside it anyway.

Back to the original point, though: there is a great deal of value in shorter experiences that forego bloat and filler in favour of a concise but still enjoyable experience. Not everything needs to be a 50+ hour epic, at least partly because no-one has time to play all the 50+ hour epics that are already out there, let alone a new one.

Outlast would have got exhausting and tiresome if it was any longer than it was — the main game was already skating on that boundary by the time I finished it; I much preferred the snappier DLC — and Negligee tells the story it wants to tell in less than an hour, albeit with eleven different endings to encourage replays. A game that provides an enjoyable experience without taking over your whole life is something to be celebrated, particularly when you’re waiting for the next exciting thing to come over the horizon as I am right now with the imminent Final Fantasy XV. And I for one am glad that there are plenty of developers out there who don’t feel the need to add unnecessary bloat to their games for the sake of an artificially inflated playtime, or a set of Achievements, or simply because the ever-whiny general public insists that £15 is “too much” for a game that is over in two hours.

Short game developers, I salute you, and you’ll always have my business in that awkward period just before a big release! 🙂