'GAME LENGTH' SPECIFIC

At the very least it's gotta be more accurate than people describing how good their game's story and gameplay are. And I think it's a way that a LOT of people really do filter out which games they're willing to play.

One way to deal with fuzzy numbers could be to have overlapping lengths in the choices. This would also account for the fact that different players spend different amounts of time. Something like:

Less than 1 hour
30 minutes to 4 hours
2 hours to 10 hours
5 hours to 25 hours
More than 12 hours

I'd like to think that most people are at least aware of whether they overestimate or underestimate their own game's gameplay time, even if they don't know by how much. At some point in your life you've gotten one friend to play something for you, and you've either watched them struggle to figure out what to do because none of your directions make sense to anyone but you, or watched them skip talking to every single person in your entire lovingly crafted town and run from all the fights because they aren't necessary.

I also think there's a lot of merit in doing something similar to howlongtobeat.com, not exclusively for measuring game length, but to also gauge where player dropoff is and help developers find weak spots within a game.

If you look on howlongtobeat.com's individual completions for a game, it gives a little space for a comment. Often these are things like 'skipped as much dialogue as possible', 'finished all sidequests', or 'played through half of NG+ for trophy X'. Sometimes it's something more like 'beat boss X, which I'm going to call completing the game, even though it totally isn't'. And that's what made me think.

Rather than demand a completed time be given, it could easily be used to say how far one was in the game when they quit, in addition to how long before they quit. This doesn't have to be anything super-specific, even something like 'got bored in the third dungeon', 'had to grind too much after water palace', or 'didn't know where to go after getting the flute'. Because, and I just might be wrong, but the vast majority of people don't actually finish RPGMaker games. That is at least some form of meaningful feedback besides a full-fledged review, of which I know are far and few between. Failing that, it's at least a measure of how long most people play the game, and whether or not that's a more important metric than time to complete it is a separate concern.

EDIT: Later noticed that howlongtobeat.com actually HAS a thing like that, in the Retired tab. Doesn't really change my point, though. And yes, I'm aware there's a certain nature to say 'I'll get back to playing this', and never actually do, thus never submitting anything, but the option being there is more important than it being used in ideal circumstances.

author=halibabica
I'd be surprised to see a game that was 5 to 25; how does one drag their feet for 20 hours?

Well I'm sure you can imagine an open world game that was 99% optional content. But that's not really what I meant.

Really my suggestion was to intentionally make the ranges much wider than anyone would ever pick for their own game, just to make sure it's accurate even if the developer is WAY off with their estimate. So if the developer thinks their game is 10 hours, they can mark their game as being in the 5-25 hour range, and they'll still be right whether people take half as long or twice as long as they expected.

Darken's idea is better than mine though. Do that instead.

I also like Darken's idea but how would we go around implementing it? Have save files upload and read by the site? Have it manually input by the players themselves after finishing the game? Have it part of the review process, but linked to a stat on the page and a search feature?


I'd probably pull for part of the review process (so that there'd be an option to put in a general hour pick in a drop-down box and that can be averaged on the part of the game page. So if two reviews are added where one reviewer said 2 hours and the other said 5 hours, it'd be set at around the 3.5 hour mark.

Even then it'd be pretty freakin dicey depending on the amount of reviews and the differences between them.

Hell, even with a 'how long did this take you to complete' question (hm...idea) we'd have to average the answers to get one number to cover all (unless we did it so that it picked the lowest time and highest time and presented that as 'between x and y'. Even then, someone might just put a big fat 0 as their answer and fuck the results. And how would that tie to search? Would it look for the highest or lowest time? Or both? Averaging might work but then it'd still be inaccurate based on the answers given and discrepency between them and the amount of answers given, too.)

Save files sounds too complicated given the variety of engines and methods there are, and they're just as fallible as an anecdote (did the user leave the game on to make supper etc.?) and can be edited anyway. It would be nice if it were as streamlined as Steam, but alas.

I think pursuing this idea involves accepting that playtimes will be submitted with the assumption of good faith. It's always going to be a super rough estimate the less people there are for each given game, but I think people can understand that. For example a 5 star review on a game is pretty obvious to people that it may not be the most conclusive impression so far (I would hope). Besides, measurements of quality are a much bigger deal than measuring quantity. I think people just want a vague idea when it comes to how much time they're going to likely invest.

As for reviews vs straight up any user submitting: The issue comes down to getting a good sample size vs wanting some hoops to be jumped through in order to not come off as a sockpuppet account. I think I'm leaning on it being added to reviews since there's already an approval process, a highschool level assignment, and a simple rating required to do you might as well add it to the pile so you don't have to make a completely new form for such a thing. If the person admits they didn't beat the game it just doesn't become part of the average, there's just at least some prompt for the reviewer to inform readers.

On the side of "any user submits" my devils advocate is that if it works for howlongtobeat, it'll probably work for RMN. They're different sites but having a large sample size is tempting and democracy should overcome weird discrepancies. The authoritarian inside of me thinks there should be at least a tiny hoop to go through before submitting but it sounds like more stuff to add to such a feature. Again, I lean on reviews as it's just additive that way from a implementation standpoint.

tldr My take boils down to that even a vague idea of a game's playtime can be useful to users. Adding it to the existing review submissions seems the most convenient and would at least be a start. Any foreseeable issues probably lie with how avg review ratings work anyway. Straight up answering "am I playing a 40 hour experience or a 1 hour romp?" through a system would more than accomplish the goal.

There's not really anything to gain by making fakes or intentionally lying about a game's length like there is with a review. Unless you're aiming to target a specific kind of audience or think it'd be hilarious to have your game's average playtime as 13:37 or something dumb like that. For the former, all I can see is you just kicking the game from one audience to another, and chances are, irritating your new target when they find the misinformation. Besides, how exactly do you moderate a number? Unless they know something's up, it's pretty hard to prove its falsehood.

I also wouldn't fret too much about which way takes more effort to code in; they both require checking a particular dropdown box, and finding the average among those reviews, whatever form they take. Or at least, that's what comes to my mind.

And again, all but the most popular games here struggle to have more than one or two reviews, and all this talk about averages kind of demands a certain quantity behind it (I also believe there's a certain stigma/intimidation factor that prevents as many people from writing full reviews that hinders this, but that could me as an extreme outsider looking in). Also, those who go into a game with the intent to review probably have a different mindset and pacing than those just looking for a good time. Putting it only on full-length reviews would push it to the high end of the spectrum, just as letting the developer set it would push towards the short end.

author=Liberty
We did talk about this at some point but then realised that creators can under or over estimate the time for their games to play. Some people say "under 2 hours" for a game that might take over 5, mainly because they know everything about the game and the players don't.

The amount of times I've played event games that were supposed to be around the hour mark and ended up a couple of hours is well documented.

If people want it we can look at it, but it's not going to be highly correct information for the most part.

Still think it's an idea. Just widen the game margins to Under 10 hours, 10-20 hours, 20-45 hours, 45-75, 75-100, 100+.

I think there's a lot of value even in imprecise measures here.

author=Liberty
If someone downloads an 'under 1 hour' game expecting something around half an hour long and then get an hour and a half or two hours of game because of how they played vs the creator, then the descriptor just wasn't useful for them.

It's less useful than a descriptor that would have accurately told them that it would take them an hour and a half to two hours to finish. But it's useful if they were thinking "I want something pretty short, I don't have time for something that'll take me 5+ hours or so."

Or, if a game developer says on their page that their game should take about 8-10 hours to beat, and someone finishes it in 6, they might be a little put out, but they'll probably be a lot less put out than if they downloaded it under the mistaken impression that it was going to be a 30+ hour epic.

If someone is using game length descriptions as an element of how interested they are in playing the game, then a lot of the usefulness of that measure is going to be retained even at low levels of precision. A person who's interested in a fifteen hour game is probably also going to be interested if the game actually takes them about ten hours, and a person who'll go for a one hour game will probably also go for a two hour one. A person who's interested in a fifteen hour game quite possibly isn't interested in a two hour one, but self-rating by a developer is unlikely to result in a discrepancy that large.