Does length equal value?

Games cost a lot of money. Step into your local EB Games or Gamestop or what have you and you're likely to be bowled over by the price. In a lot of cases, the price you're paying is akin to what you'd pay for a season of television, and the game you're buying can occasionally be of a similar length as that.

It's no surprise, then, that for a lot of gamers, spending your hard-earned money on a game can often be boiled down to a series of points on a list. Is the game at least twenty hours? Does it have multiplayer? Does it have replay value? Etc. etc.

Unfortunately, this is an all-too practical and pragmatic view of gaming that often spills over into gaming reviews, and for pretty good reason. If you're going to be spending an entire day's pay on a game (or more), you'd damn well better be getting more than six hours of gameplay out of it. That's probably why reviews on major gaming sites often read as nothing more than slightly gussied-up checklists. It's not about critically analyzing the game, it's about "recommending" the game for the consumer. Now, as I've mentioned, there's been a bit of a nefarious cross-over of corporate interests and the review community for games which is deplorable, and I'm sure more than one person has been sold a game based purely on hype before in their lives (I'm looking at you, The Conduit). But the point still stands: people want value for their money.

Determining "value," though, is a little bit slippery. What to make of games that offer a tight, involving, six-hour experience? Well, this is a subject that comes up again and again every time a new Call of Duty game is released. For the series' fans, paying $70 for the new CoD game isn't a big deal, mainly because the games offer visceral thrills and don't require too much investment from the player. Mostly, though, it's all about the multiplayer.

I've never been a big participant in the multiplayer scene. Buying a game purely for its multiplayer capabilities has always personally seemed weird to me, and with a game like Call of Duty, it seemingly removes all of the context of the game into just another place where people can virtually kill each other. This is often the case with multiplayer, even in classics like Goldeneye, so this isn't a phenomenon that's specific to the Call of Duty franchise. But how does one assess the value of Call of Duty's multiplayer in terms of dollars?

Let me put it this way: if gamers are buying these games primarily for the multiplayer, why is there no option to just buy one Call of Duty game, skip all of the extraneous bullshit that gamers seemingly don't really want, and just upgrade the multiplayer? Well, because it's Activision for one, but also because this isn't a model that games are built on. We're not getting the appropriate value for the amount of money we're spending in far too many cases. Now, picking on Activision is pretty much the easiest thing in the world, but the problem extends far beyond that.

The problem for the critical analyst of gaming "value" is that money really shouldn't be the issue, but it ultimately is: gaming is an industry, like most others. From my personal standpoint, value is always a gut feeling. Whether I've just slapped down $50 for Super Mario Galaxy 2, $30 for a used copy of Blue Dragon, or $12 for the WiiWare release of Cave Story, basically the only way to assess value is, when I feel that I'm more or less completely done with the game, do I have remorse about buying the game? Do I want to sell it back? And most importantly, do I feel as though I'll return to the game one day?

That last question is probably the number one most important aspect to value, and it's the case with any artisitic consumer goods. Am I going to rewatch the entire Daria series? Will I listen to the new Tokyo Police Club album more than three times? With games, the stakes are obviously higher because of the increased cost, but there have been numerous games, like Sin and Punishment 2, for example, that have high replayability factors, despite only being about a five hour game. That's one I'm going to want to keep in my collection for a long, long time, because it's the type of game you can feel joyful about experiencing again and again.

There's a problem brewing on the other side of the spectrum too, and that's games that are WAY TOO LONG. 80 to 200 hour time-sinks aren't exactly the solution to this problem either. Sometimes you just want a game to end and not feel super flabby. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, as I've buried myself in Twilight Princess and Dragon Quest IX. Both games are well in excess of 40 hours of gameplay (and if you're Toronobu Itagaki, 400 hours for the latter), but the reason why they're so compelling is that they're made up almost entirely of gameplay, and not cutscenes or pointless leveling or what have you. I don't want to see games throwing in hours upon hours of uselessness just simply to appeal to the consumer's buyer's regret.

In essence, then, what games need to be is as long as they should be. As tight of an experience as possible should be the goal. And if that sort of experience can be delivered in the form of a rental, even, that shouldn't be something to scoff at – hell, don't you want to save a few dollars and not feel like you don't have time for other games because you've been playing it for SO LONG and you just need to see the end? It's a tough medium to keep up with, both in terms of time and money invested. Here's hoping that developers can find an equilibrium and deliver the right kinds of experiences that make your investment worth it.