You Need 100 Hours of Gameplay [Design]

(with thanks to Dan Brady)

Most retail games end up in the second hand sales bin almost as quickly as they are bought. Most iPhone games get played only a couple of times and are then uninstalled. Most Facebook games only manage 5-10% engagement. However some games sustain players long after their initial purchase, invite continued engagement and even spawning wildly enthusiastic fans.

Of course the reasons for this are many. Differences of execution, idea, marketing story and other factors all contribute to fandom, but there is also an interesting commonality across successful games that goes ignored by developers. Great games deliver tonnes of interesting gameplay.

How much? 100 hours worth.

 

100?

Many games are built with content in mind, and their developers think in terms of level geometry as an equivalent to ‘hours’. Others (especially social games) are built with appointment-based structures, obliging the player to go away and come back later. Both are deceptive indicators of time, however, and convince developers that players really only want a few hours of actual entertainment.

Both are a case of developers fooling themselves.

100 hours is the amount of time, give or take, that it takes for a customer of your game to turn into a fan of your franchise. In order for your customer to engage with you for life, you need to make a game that they will find fun for a long time. And not just idle fun either. Appointment-based trickery (as social games often use) will not get the job done, for example. If you are serious about gathering fans to your standard, you need solid, extensible, engaging entertainment.

100 hours is a pretty arbitrary number, but I think it’s a good benchmark. 100 hours at 2-3 hours a night, works out to about 3 months of calendar time. 3 months is the length of time that it takes for any good relationship to form, and so for a player to really get into a game such that they fall in love with it and can’t wait for the sequel, 3 months is the goal.

Setting the bar at 100 hours strips all delusions away. There is physically no way that any game developer can actually create 100 hours worth of level geometry (ok, maybe World of Warcraft can) and so it obliges the developer to think in terms of how they will make their game world function on multiple layers. Liberty City is a pretty big place but you can actually drive across it in around 15 minutes. So what are you going to do with all that space to get the player to their 100 hours?

100 hours basically forces a developer to think about game depth.

 

How To Make 100 Hours of Gameplay

100 hours of gameplay does not automatically mean 100 hours of game world to walk around in. It does not mean 100 hours of dialogue, nor 100 hours of levels. It can include those things, depending on your game, but it doesn’t have to. Here are some examples:

• Poker has 100 hours of gameplay
• Tetris has 100 hours of gameplay
• Angry Birds has 100 hours of gameplay
• Sim City has 100 hours of gameplay
• Starcraft has 100 hours of gameplay
• Portal has 100 hours of gameplay
• Sensible Soccer has 100 hours of gameplay
• Left 4 Dead has 100 hours of gameplay

To get there, you need four coders. Secondly, you need to think about the following factors that might get you to the magic 100 mark:

• replays and retries as well as first-play time
• multi-player and single-player activity
• bonus levels
• reusable game world content
• creative opportunities

Not all games look or act the same, but a big problem with modern game design (and especially gamification and social game design) is that designers have somehow got it into their heads that the ideal game state (or ‘flow’) consists of a balance somewhere between being not particularly bored and yet also not anxious. Whoever coined that notion is talking out of their posterior, because all that actually results is poor amusements.

Pressure is a key aspect of why games are interesting. If games are empowering, simplified and fairer than real life, they still need pressure to create thaumatic situations. Such pressure does not have to be violent - it can just as easily be creative or puzzle solving - but it does need to be persistent. Its absence is why many a failed game is just dull.

If you want to get to 100 hours of gameplay, you need to incorporate pressure. You also need to incorporate extensibility. Extensible game actions can be built in several ways, such as through speed or level length, or cool powers. Extensibility changes the scenario of the game over time and empowers players with more exciting things to do as they progress, so rather than the game becoming repetitive, it invites repeated yet expanded play.

You also need to incorporate the seven steps to the epic win. Your game needs little doses of winning pleasure from actions and loops, but also needs to build up to something significant. Players need to fail a lot, but feel good about it, and so be encouraged to keep trying, learning and experimenting. They need to find larger achievements worth attempting in the game.

 

Who Actually Plays For 100 Hours?

The majority of your game’s players will never actually get to 100 hours of gameplay. They will top out at around 20-25 and move onto another game. So why think in terms of another 75 hours for a minority?

Because the objective of your game is not to make a game. It is to make a franchise. Single franchise publishing is about attracting and converting fans to your cause, not feeding consumer mouths, and by short changing the gameplay to only what the majority actually plays, you ensure that nobody becomes your fan. So nobody continues the conversation about your game, and you’ve fallen into the conversation gap.

100 hours of gameplay is what you need to build a real connection with your players and get them invested. Whether through content or game dynamics, what they need is to fall in love with your game world. They want to play within in, fail within it, and yet feel positive about it and themselves as a result of playing it. This only happens if your game gives them the hours to do so.

You need 100 hours of gameplay.

Comments

[Gorgoroth]

I played more than 350 h of Sc2 0.o

[Matt Rix]

I feel like this a chicken+egg scenario. The only reason someone will play a game for 100 hours is *because* they're already a fan of it.

I've played only about 10 hours of Minecraft, and I love it. Same thing for Portal. I only played Braid for a few hours, enough to beat the game, but I'll be buying The Witness the moment it comes out.

[Eolirin]

I disagree pretty strongly with this. It really doesn't even remotely match up to experience either. Plenty of very short games with no replay value and rabid fanbases. Take Portal, which you can be done with in less than 5 hours, yet is practically a meme in and of itself, and certainly much beloved, with a sequel that people are extremely hyped about. There's also the *entire* adventure game genre, and many narratively driven FPS or FPS/hybrid games, like Deus Ex and BioShock. And there are plenty of long games that don't deliver the same level of value, but still compel you to finish them; I'd take 5 hours of Portal over the hundreds I've spent in WoW, but the pacing of rewards in WoW make it difficult to stop playing even when the game has become rather dull, and there are plenty of RPGs that are mostly filler which would be improved, not diminished, by halving their length. Time spent is a poor predictor of anything other than dedication on the part of the player, but it's not the *only* way to gauge dedication. Time spent making "the cake is a lie" jokes on an internet forum is just as valid a sign of dedication as grinding up to level 80.

So you can definitely acquire very strong fans without a large time investment or deep gameplay. It's not just about mechanics; content matters. The same rules that apply to every other form of media apply here as well, just with the added element of gameplay to worry about; atmosphere, character, presentation, emotional connection, and everything else that makes people love things are just as important and just as likely to create fans. It's not all one thing, but the overall package that matters. If you've nailed everything else, and your gameplay is shallow, people won't care as long as it's not broken. Similarly, deep gameplay can make up for a lack of other things that aren't as tight, as long as they're not so bad that they detract.

When it comes to developing fans, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that vision and polish are much more important than anything else; the game needs to have a "soul". And sure, defining the "soul" of a game is rather hard to do, but the games that are really successful, that form the basis of franchises, have one. They resonate with people in a very deep way, and that resonance is far more important than anything else.

Having deep gameplay that lets players play for hundreds of hours sounds more like a retention method than an acquisition method to me; it's a way to keep people interested in something they already like rather than moving on to something else. It can help with competition, but not with actually building a user base. You can only keep people you already had by giving them more things to do; the people you didn't have are already gone long before that would matter.

[Tadhg]

Thanks for the comment Eolirin. I think there's a couple of things to say on this.

The first is that I include in the 100 hours all sorts of things like retries. In Portal, for example, I had to play some of the levels repeatedly in order to get through to the end and died a bunch of times - so while the game is physically X geometry long, in actuality it's somewhat longer.

Secondly, I'm including things like special achievement hunting, bonus levels, all sorts. If there's any aspect of the game that you can go back to and play some more, that's a part of the 100 hours too. Think of Angry Birds and the hunt to get a perfect 3-stars across all of its levels for example.

Thirdly (this doesn't really apply to Portal) I'm including multi-player modes, mod maps, and so on.

I think if you really sit back and add all of that up for even an apparently short game like Portal, the results start to creep up toward 100. That doesn't mean that's what every player plays (very far from it in fact) but the potential to keep having fun with it is there.

By the way, I also thoroughly agree on your points about soul.

[Eolirin]

Well, for an adventure game, there's none of those extra things, and replay doesn't really exist, except in the sense that sometimes you'll want to take it back off the shelf and experience it again like you would with a book. Though, adventure games are very "weak" games, from a game mechanics standpoint. The core appeal for them, more so than pretty much every other genre of game is rather explicitly not in the mechanics. They do tend to have the strongest characterization and narratives of gaming though, and so they can get by on not providing those things. Characterization is an extremely powerful way to generate emotional resonance, and that's a really powerful way to create fans. So there's something more going on there; the intensity of the experience matters too. Playing through Dreamfall, there are a few moments that I can recall with a level of near perfect clarity, because they were so emotionally impacting that they've stuck with me for years. On the other hand, I can't remember anything quite so specific that I've done in WoW; a lot of it tends to blend together. I would argue that intensity is actually more important than engagement for forging a fan... keeping them on the other hand...

So you definitely do need engagement, because otherwise you have a really huge die off of your fan base. But I think it's a mistake to think that that engagement has to happen through the game itself; time spent thinking about the really interesting philosophical question the game raised, or talking about it on a forum or Facebook (or in person even) all count as active engagement. If you've got a way to interact (not just communicate) with your player base in an active way, that can certainly pick up the slack for shorter gameplay as well. Running marketing ARGs (like ilovebees) in between game releases, putting out small facebook games, asking for feedback about upcoming games via community forums, and plenty of other things that I'm not thinking of should all help maintain fan excitement too. You do need something solid to tie all this too though, so I think the general principle can be more completely stated as such:

People will generally make up their minds about your game pretty quickly. Anyone that doesn't like it will bounce and won't ever really turn into a fan. Anyone that doesn't bounce can either end up indifferent or in love with your product; this is very much a function of intensity. People that end up in love with your product will only stay that way as long as you keep them happy and prevent them from becoming bored - engagement matters a lot here, though the amount required is dependent on the intensity of the experience; you need less work to maintain strong resonance than weak resonance. And, of course, you need to not make design decisions that alienate your userbase.

This points to an inverse relationship between the level of passion that your fans have and the level of engagement you need to directly provide - they'll make up things to do when they run out (the exception being community engagement; this gets more powerful) - and their tolerance for design deviation - hell hath no fury like a fanboy scorned.

[Jakeninja]

I found this site tonight and immediately plowed through at least a dozen of the articles. This is the first one that gave me pause and made me think, "Huh. That can't be right."

And it's not.

I played Portal through once. It took me less than three hours. I was immediately a fan, talked it up to all of my friends, and continue to rabidly recommend it years later. At PAX East last month, the very first place I went was to the Portal 2 booth. My Aperture Science t-shirt is one of my favorite pieces of gaming merchandise and I wear it as much as humanly possible.

Maybe that's an outlier story, but as I think back on the games that I've really loved, 100 hours is extremely steep. I'm maybe 15 hours into Mass Effect 2 on the PS3 and I already pre-ordered ME3. I was hooked on Angry Birds in the first 15 minutes. Canabalt took less than 60 seconds to suck me in, warranting an iOS purchase and the same rabid recommendations from me as much larger, longer games.

I just don't think it takes 100 hours to ensnare a player. Randy Pitchford sums it up the best in saying, in his interview with Irrational Interviews, "It's kind of like when you meet a girl-'Would I do her or not?' You make that kind of decision in five seconds and the customer's going to do the same thing."

Just some food for thought.