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A common term in board games (and at least roguelike games) is “coffee break” games, which usually take ~5-15 minutes.

I remember going back as far as the 00s, RPG games that didn’t have at least 40 hours of gameplay were criticized as being too short.

Is there enough room between Flappy Bird, “coffee break” games, and epic (J)RPGs for a lot of terms about how long a game takes? And what do you mean, like a session? A run-through? There are games where you don’t have access to a save point all the time, and others where you can just turn it off and walk away and later it’s exactly as you left it. There’s that game Desert Bus that takes ~8h but you can’t even really stop to use the bathroom.

There’s games that have more or less replayability, or dozens of hours of depth that you can explore but only if you like.

There’s so much more to the medium than there is to books. I don’t see how it’s necessary or useful to use a length metric to describe games. It feels like asking “how many pages long is this game?”.

Those are all good points but I'd say but I feel like it's important because game developers can better signal to their audience the type of game they made and what the audience should expect from it. Especially in terms for how much time the player will need to invest to get the proper experience.

Games have a “replayability” factor, so I’m not sure the analogy with content length matters. Someone can play a multiple hour RPG just once, while another can devote a life to mastering Tetris or Street Fighter.

I believe games fall into some spectrum between movie and sport, the experiences are very different.

That occurred to me too, but I wonder if there's a way to caveat that the length descriptors refer to some threshold of player investment that expresses "You've experienced the basic gist of the game and a large majority of what the developer wanted to convey. You can move on to another game or continue to improve in this one, your pick."

As a player, I'd love such a classification. Increasingly I just don't have the time to slog through an entire Elden Ring or Starfield. Give me a way to easily find more Rocket Leagues and Cocoons.

IIRC, RDR2 does exactly this.

The issue is that you know exactly what percentage of the game you haven't experienced and exactly how good the game is and it makes it next to impossible to stop playing.

But you have to start playing the game before you get that information. I want that information before purchasing it.

best you'll find is howlongtobeat.com

You put it into words better then me.

The formula is something like the longer a game is the less linear it needs to be to have a high replay value.

'The Last of Us' is incredibly long and among the best linear non open-world games ever made. That said, it's entirely linear and the thought of sinking such a massive amount of time into a game that's effectively a very long movie give it a very low replayability factor.

Likewise, Skyrim is a massive open world game that's incredibly linear and repetitive, giving it a low replayability factor.

Rockstar has several very long open world games that have massive replay value and don't get stale with repeat playthroughs. On the flip side, if you haven't played through 2 or 3 times you've generally missed a decent amount of content. GTA San Andreas, RDR2 and GTA V all fall into this rare category of long games that are highly replayable.

With open world games the key to high replayability seems to be NPC AI quality and providing different outcomes for different actions and the order in which you do things in-game. Allowing you to do lots of missions in whatever order you choose goes a long way to breaking up any feeling that you're watching a movie.

Replayability isn’t the only metric for open world games though, a bigger part is “Is the open world interesting enough to invest time in outside of the main plot?”

You might spend 20 hours playing through a main story, and another 200 running around doing other stuff without ever actually starting over in a new game.

> Likewise, Skyrim is a massive open world game that's incredibly linear and repetitive, giving it a low replayability factor.

I may not be the biggest Skyrim fan in the world but this is just patently false from my experience. I know tons of people who've played through Skyrim multiple different times with different playstyles and allegiances.

> GTA San Andreas, RDR2 and GTA V all fall into this rare category of long games that are highly replayable.

I can't say I've ever felt the need to reply any Rockstar games so much as continue playing them. The story missions are tedious compared to just messing around exploring the open world.

Interesting examples you have there. The Last of Us is 10-15 hours long: Short by full-price standards. There's 100 hour games out there, many made in Japan. The issue with replayability is that the story is better than the gameplay, and few want to go through said gameplay twice.

Skyrim is a game that, shockingly, people still play today. There's players with 1500 hours. It's not my cup of tea either, but putting it as an example of a non-replayable game is more than a little dubious. Especially when GTA V and RDR2 have basically the same practical problem, yet you find them highly replayable somehow.

What a game needs to be replayable is a fun gameplay loop that is enjoyable when the novelty of story has worn out. Even simple gameplay loops like the one of Hades can make the gave very replayable. If you like, say, the gameplay of Spiderman for the PS4(another game longer than Last Of Us), playing it again will still be fun anyway. If you are going in it for the story only, it will not. Very few games spend the effort on making all the little decisions have relevant story consequences: Basically all you ever get is illusion of choice. It's the fighting, driving, shooting, or strategizing that has to be so fun that doing it for 100+ hours can be rewarding to some people.

There are the length of playing the "whole" game, the length of a minimum/typical/maximum session, and the length of a supported unit of play, and each can be long, short or irrelevant.

For example, an online PvP game has discrete games (e.g. a worst case of 2n minutes to play chess with a time limit of n minutes), one often plays a few games in a row depending on fatigue and available time, and replayability is infinite.

Flappy Bird never ends (practically ... I think?), how could you call it short? Pong is a two player sports simulation game, is that relevant? Is snooker an epic or a novel game/sport?

'A Short Hike' may be a short game but it's not a small game/experience. The mechanical complexity alone far outweighs that of the "small games" by this article's author. Consider telling your friend that 'A Short Hike' is a short game and they should/shouldn't play it. It's a perfectly reasonable and intelligible thing to say (probably -- you wouldn't say it to your friend unqualified if you expect they would get a seriously different meaning from it).

... I don't think this is a problem that needs to be solved.

Also, "time to beat" is just not something you can reasonably measure. But even if you think it is, it's not analogous to word count. A novel's "time to beat" would be "time to read", surely.

games are a new medium

you're right that software engineer and programmer types (of persons) would do well to learn form other older media formats that precede games.

but let's not pretend that games are anything like what came before.

interactivity is a new element to put into the storytelling toolkit. but the point is how games can do a much more than tell stories; it's like puzzles are part of the story somehow... but answering how exactly goes quite deep.

Video games are about half as old as film as a medium. I wouldn't call that new.

New is relative, of course. Movies are a perfect example of that. Think about how far movies came in 50 years and think about how much gaming will progress in that same time.