{"id":1269,"date":"2011-04-14T12:46:07","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T10:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=1269"},"modified":"2011-04-14T15:57:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T13:57:10","slug":"games-getting-shorter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2011\/04\/14\/games-getting-shorter\/","title":{"rendered":"Games are Getting Shorter (and that is Good)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ars Technica has a good discussion of <a href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/gaming\/news\/2011\/04\/the-incredible-shrinking-game-the-truth-of-game-length-in-the-modern-industry.ars\">how and why games are getting shorter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I do think that (single-player) video games still tend to be too long. When was the last time you completed a game in which major parts didn&#8217;t feel like filler?<\/p>\n<p>The article notes the problem of <em>time<\/em>, which I also discussed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/casualrevolution\/\">A Casual Revolution<\/a>: However much players would like to put 40 hours into a game, there is only a tiny audience with that kind of time. Here are the completion rates for various recent games, from the article. (Note the <em>Red Dead Redemption<\/em> 7% completion rate!)<\/p>\n<p>[Note: The graph should probably be titled <em>Completion achievement rate <\/em>&#8211; it represents the percentage of users who have earned the achievement for game completion &#8211; which means the percentage of user who completed the game (rather than % of achievements earned that it may sound like).]<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/achievements-21.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1270\" title=\"achievements-2[1]\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/achievements-21-450x337.png\" alt=\"Game completion rate\" width=\"450\" height=\"337\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/achievements-21-450x337.png 450w, https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/achievements-21.png 640w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 85vw, 450px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I like to joke that games should have twice-as-expensive but quarter-as-long <em>Executive Editions<\/em> for players with busy lives and more disposable income.<\/p>\n<p>Part of the issue is that we may intuitively feel that a longer game gives more bang for the buck, even if we end up not completing it because all the filler is so uninspired. As the article says, hopefully we are starting to move beyond that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ars Technica has a good discussion of how and why games are getting shorter. I do think that (single-player) video games still tend to be too long. When was the last time you completed a game in which major parts didn&#8217;t feel like filler? The article notes the problem of time, which I also discussed &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2011\/04\/14\/games-getting-shorter\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Games are Getting Shorter (and that is Good)&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}