The Role of Game Length
We had six players at Neil's this past Thursday evening for the game night. That is a tough number for splitting into two groups, so we elected to play one game. With four individuals strongly in support of Dune we settled down to play this excellent, if long, game. Ahead of time we agreed to 11:00 P.M. as a cut-off time. As it turned out there was general agreement at that time to play one more turn, which ended around 11:30.
We had spent three (very enjoyable) hours playing ten out of the fifteen turns of the game. With rules explanation the game can last about five hours. This particular game has a sudden death ending, and I actually have rarely seen it last the full time, but this session looked like it may be heading that way.
Afterwards there was much discussion of whether the length was a drawback, methods for shortening the game, and so forth. As an aspiring game designer this interests me greatly. Is the length of this game an artifact of the systems in it? Does it merely reflect a different time in the hobby, when players expected to sit down for longer at gaming session? Is it a necessary piece of the design that allows players to confront each other early and hold grudges until later in the game? In short, if you could shave the game time to be half as long would it be an improvement?
I'm not someone who believes that there is an ideal length for all games. Some last entirely too long at thirty minutes, while others are a great deal of fun whether they last for two hours or four. There are other games that I have grown to dislike specifically because they could last five minutes or an hour, and I don't want to be stuck on those occasions that they last an hour.
I have come to the conclusion that there are different game types that fit into the time available. It is often the longer games that allow for more of a story to be told, and for a greater feeling of history within the game to be developed by the players. These are exactly the sort of games I find I especially like. As a result, I'd advocate against trying to keep games short merely for the sake of fitting in a time slot. That smacks too much of the formula that led to the television sitcom.
posted by Brian @ 7:17 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Great read! Plenty to chew on here. In regard to Dune itself there doesn’t seem to be anything that rubs me the wrong way. The design is solid, achieves its goals and does them effectively. The game can be long by modern standards and so this could be a problem if you just don’t have the time to play the game as is, however I think that it would be possible to just tweak things a little bit to speed things up so that it can fit within an evening. Cutting the time in half would be going to far for Dune, but cutting a quarter or third of the time off wouldn’t hurt the design.
I too like games to tell a story and have a sense of history built into their play. One of the elements I find anemic about eurogames is the fact that your typical game doesn’t impress upon me any experiences that I can recount later on, save for when the players themselves get rowdy from the play. I did have enjoyable experiences with hundreds of eurogames, but their designs are too quick and abstract to generate context that can to talked about later on, unlike countless roleplaying and miniature wargaming experiences I’ve had.
A big reason for this is the time issue. A game needs a certain length of time to develop if you want a story to unfold and there needs to be disparate elements in the game to add flavor for people to hold onto. Dune is wonderful for this because each player has special rules that are tied directly to the basic mechanics of the system, and which are wildly different from each other. The special rules are inter-dependent with one another and create friction that drives the players to create context for the game. However, for these mechanics to work really well they need to go through a churning process. You have to have a revolving “interaction engine” to let the context grow, and so that means kicking back and giving the game enough time to run through the process.
The logical follow-up question is what is that length of time that is necessary to allow a story to unfold? I'm wondering if we are all stuck reading and writing novels, and whether there is a good way to distill it down to a short story.
One thought that comes to mind is that a game needs a lot of variability to have an interesting story in a short time period. Card games fit in this category. While not every hand will be special, there are occasionally hands that are very memorable.
Yep, what is the magic formula? From the hip I'd say that you need at least 2-3 hours for game mechanics to swirl enough to see something interesting happening, however that assumes a game with typical boardgame mechanics. An RPG in 45 minutes can be completely immersive and successful in terms of story and likewise some freeform improve style storytelling games could likewise pull this off in a short period of time.
I think a problem is that when you introduce victory conditions and abstract mechanics then it's all too easy to shove aside the "chrome" and just focus on how to win the game with the mechanics. A lot of eurogames have this as an issue because the mechanics fail to simulate, in any intuitive way, the subject of the theme. Knizia is free to stretch his imagination till it's taut trying to view T&E as a battle over developing civilizations, but Civilization is able to effortlessly present the theme to the players because it meanders eight hours down the thematic road smelling the flowers all along the way.
Wargames are probably the most successful "story" games of all. They use game mechanics largely to simulate dramatic conflict. Since the mechanics are so tied to the theme it is much easier to keep intact that sense of story, unlike the "pasted on" effect from many more abstract game systems. Of course most wargames are unmanagably long and normally two player.
So, how do we get story games which are short and managable? Lots of player action and mechanics which are intuitive to the theme help out a lot. Moving away from victory point systems also helps, since those tend to drift towards a sense of optimization and abstract racing, both of which are much more analytical processes than intuitive ones.
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