“Time spent” is not a measure of challenge. It is not a measure of content.
“Risk” is not a measure of challenge. It is not a measure of skill.
Too many games are built around time, not content or challenge.
Too many gamers want to be coddled instead of challenged.
Alas.
A few relevant links, thanks to some very eloquent bloggers:
The Lost Quadrant by Stubborn
The “Twit” Generation by Chris
Less Time Doesn’t Mean I Feed on Burgers by Syl
Redefinitions by Tim
edited to add: What is Skill? by Gazimoff
…and an attendant point: I submit that it’s the desire to string along players and get their sub money that is the root of a lot of the changes in game design that veterans are fussing about. If these MMO things were sold via “single sale” pricing, the design could easily be “take it or leave it” and pretty much left to be accepted on its own terms.
edited again to add: Class Warfare by Azuriel
…and then there’s an old relevant article of mine, just in case you need some filler, Full Spectrum Challenge
Time and challenge aren’t quite independent. A about of content requires B time to complete it if th player is going to enjoy it. Think of it like watching a movie on fast forward, or, on half speed. Both will give the same content, but neither speed is quite appropriate. This was one of my problems with WoW: leveling speed to have a fast-forward button, followed by raiding and dailies done at half-speed.
It also takes time to develop skill. Time is inextricably interwoven with pretty much anything in our mortal existence, but the bigger point is that time functions differently for everyone because their skill, challenge acceptance and risk tolerance are different. You can’t calibrate around time except in the most average guesstimates, and that’s usually only barely helpful.
It’s much stronger design in my mind to worry about providing great content and challenges appropriate to varied tastes, whether that means varied content or just difficulty settings like DDO’s dungeon settings. Let individual players sort out their own schedule. This is also why I strongly support selling content over selling time.
I think we might be using different meanings for time here. I’m referring to something like “should this quest be to kill five troggs or ten?” Ten will take more time, which might be a good thing. But maybe ten is too much time, and eight would be a better number, with five troggs being too few. It’s not quite scheduling as much as time/content ratio.
But what’s the content, Kleps?
If troggs are the content then killing 8 troggs is less content than killing ten. If quests are the content then it’s more.
I think both are the content.
@Stabs
I’d say neither the troggs nor the quest are the content. The content is the experience of fun, or the development thereof (plot, sense of scale/danger, immersion, etc).
If troggs are content, and troggs respawn, then technically the argument there is that these games have infinite content, right? Same with daily quests. I don’t look at a 500 page book as automatically having more content than a 100 page book – the 500 page book could simply have a bunch of blank pages, a bigger font, or a badly paced and meandering plot that could have been edited down to 100 solid pages. The solidity is the content, not how much time it takes to consume it.
Back in the day you’d have stories told around the campfire about ants and lazy grasshoppers and other stories.
The stories didn’t have content so you could sit there, as utterly entranced as if you were doing drugs.
Well, partially it did. Part of it is suger. But part of it is medicine. Or atleast what the story teller thinks is medicine.
If you forget about the idea of content and instead think real life cultural progression, then it becomes a bit easier.
Because if you don’t, then content may as well equate to being utterly coddled.
What is content if it’s just supposed to be ‘fun’? How is that any different from being coddled?
As designer M. Poppins once said, a spoon full of suger helps the medicine go down.
But what were getting today is mostly just bags of sh…suger…
Deus Ex seems to be trying to keep up the medicine amongst the suger method, though…