Not Every Game Should Be War and Peace!
Whilst one of my greatest passions in life is reading, believe it or not, there was a time when I barely read at all. Back in the days of school and university, very rarely did I actually read for pleasure. Obviously, being in higher education demands quite a lot of reading, and though a textbook or scientific research paper doesn’t exactly equate to the same thing as a paperback, I believe they do occupy a similar space. Sure, a physics textbook is dull when you compare it to the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey (side note, best book I’ve ever read! The film on the other hand: yawn!) but they both demand a certain level of attention and wakefulness that other mediums do not.
In the same way I can’t imagine chefs go home after a ten hour shift to cook themselves a three course meal from scratch, or car mechanics go home after a long day in the garage to tinker with their kit car, as a student, funnily enough, it was exceedingly rare that I’d finish a long day of education and think to myself, ‘yeah, I’ve been reading pretty much all day, but now I fancy doing it for fun!’ I’d normally read a couple of books over the summer, but beyond that, if I picked up a paperback, my normal train of thought was along the lines of, ‘I should probably be studying right now instead.’
Back in my younger days, the way I tended to unwind was in front of the PlayStation with a controller in my hand. Since I first unwrapped my Gameboy Colour aged nine, I was hooked. A couple of years later, there was a PS2 under the Christmas tree, which marked my entry into console gaming. And the rest is history.
Around the age of eighteen, when the PS3 was building steam, I first started buying games for myself. Everyone claims you always remember the first game you went out and bought with your own money, but honestly, I can’t. What I do remember however, was that when I did start buying games with my own money, I started gaming a lot more. Suddenly, I wasn’t limited to a couple of games a year, mostly coinciding with Christmas and Birthdays. If I had nothing new to play, I could just head out and pick something up for the weekend.
Now, when you mention video games to anyone who isn’t a gamer, the things that spring to mind are normally Call of Duty, FIFA, or, as seem to be popular today, Fortnite, and Overwatch. I for one have never been taken with any of these franchises, however. Because, like novels, films, and TV shows, video games fall into genres. Online multiplayer games have never really held too much appeal to me. They lack substance. You boot up the game, play a few matches, and that’s it. You keep going until you get bored. It tends to be the same thing over and over again. Its all just a bit mindless—a good way to unwind undoubtedly, if that’s what you’re looking for, but I can’t understand how people can keep coming back to the same game every day for months at a time, sometimes even years, when the moment-to-moment gameplay seldom changes. That’s not to say I’ve not had fun playing the likes of Call of Duty—I have. But after about ten hours or so over the course of a fortnight… well, it always just got a bit too samey. The games I play need to have a story, and a good one at that!
For me, the greatest genres of video games will always be a classic action romp, and a good old RPG (that’s a Roleplaying Game for the unenlightened.) Now, action games used to be all the rage. We’re talking Tomb Raider, Doom, Uncharted, Bioshock. Like action movies, they are high-octane, usually shorter in length than other genres, but with a great level of polish and few dull moments throughout. They are often described as ‘on rails,’ in the way that, like a rollercoaster, there are a lot of thrills to be had, but you are fixed on a path throughout the campaign with little or no chance of deviation from the intended route the game takes you on.
Conversely, RPG’s are perhaps the complete opposite to action games. Whilst they more than likely will still have their thrilling high-octane moments, they are nearly always a lot more drawn out, and the overall pace is slower. They focus on choice and player decision, with moment-to-moment gameplay more likely to be conversation and exploration than action. RPG’s tend to have big open worlds to discover and branching storylines where players’ choices effect the outcome of the world they are thrown into. Characters, and sometimes entire races and civilisations, can live and die depending on the decisions the gamer makes. There can be good choices and evil choices, or as I find more interesting, a lot of morally ambiguous decisions that can actually prove quite difficult to make.
The comparison I’d make for open world RPGs to action games is TV to film. Today, with the advent of epic TV shows like Game of Thrones, the Mandalorian, etc. the budget for a series of television is comparable to a summer blockbuster, but with films being far shorter in length, more money is spent on each minute of runtime, thereby resulting in a higher level of polish overall. Where TV wins out against film is that, with a far greater runtime, the creators have much more freedom to tell an epic longform story. Sure, moment to moment, film is more exciting than television, but you can lay a lot more groundwork for your story and characters throughout a TV series, thereby creating a deeper world with better payoffs at the end of the story.
Now, go back about ten years and action games used to clock in somewhere between nine and fifteen hours on average. There were obviously those that were shorter and those that were longer, but the times I’ve given often seemed to be a happy median. RPGs on the other hand had a bit more of a range, but forty to sixty hours was a good sweet spot. Obviously, the run time depends on whether you open every chest, explore every side mission, and grab every collectible, or if you just burn through the main campaign with littler regard for what else is on offer. But, back in the days of the good old PS3 (and Xbox 360 if you are one of those kinds of people) that was the status quo.
Action games were abundant. RPGs were a fair bit more niche. But boy, how things have changed! Gone now are the days where you could pick up a game on a Friday, burn through the story over the course of the weekend and see the credits roll in the early hours of Monday morning. Action games, though still present, have been supplanted by open world RPGs as the standard. All games are longform now, and RPGs are bigger than ever!
Action games are now hedging towards twenty hours start to finish if you just plough through the main story alone, whereas RPGs frequently surpass a hundred hours in length if you don’t want to leave vast swathes of the game unexplored. Every game seems to have become this immense epic that’ll take you months to complete! Sure, I guess games are now better value than ever, but I ain’t got time for that!
Things have changed since my days at university. I’m no longer a manchild anymore, but just an actual man, with manly stuff to do. I have a mortgage. I have to take the bins out. I’ve just realised that cutting the grass is pretty much a weekly affair in the summer! Now more than ever, I have less and less time to play games. Sure, that’s an inevitable part of getting older, I expected this, but what I didn’t expect was for videogames to start demanding more of my time as well!
If I only get a few hours a week to game, I don’t want something that’s going to take a hundred hours to complete! I like completing games, not leaving them half-played, in the same way people like to finish the book they are reading and the films they watch. In the same way that The Irishman has sat unwatched in my Netflix list because of its epic length, there are games in my library I haven’t started because I know that once I do, it’ll be months before I see the end of them!
Imagine if every novel was suddenly the length of War and Peace or Les Miserable! No one would ever read anything! People like seeing their progress—they like wedging their thumbs in between the pages of a book an seeing how much they’ve read, comparing it to how much they have left. Finishing a book brings an immense level of satisfaction, but if you are reading War and Peace, finishing a page is just a drop in the ocean. Two hundred pages in (the entire length of some shorter novels) and you still have another thousand to go! It’s the same with games. I like turning off the PlayStation at the end of a session, feeling like I’ve made some decent progress through the overall campaign. I like seeing the percentage completion ticking up. I like looking at the world map and seeing that I’ve unveiled and cleared a good chunk of it. I like knowing that the end is in sight. Because, as much as I usually enjoy the game I am playing, I am always excited about what I’m going to play next. Just like I want to read every book, I want to play every game. An unrealistic and greedy goal, perhaps, but it always pays to be ambitious.
And so, to use the mixed metaphor of the title of this piece: not every game should be War and Peace!