Finding Time With Mobile Games

Just to warn you ahead of time, I will not be making any sweeping declarations or forcing our reader to have an epiphany of Torahic proportions.  It is just an observation.

There are a few games that I play on my phone and of those few, even fewer that I play on a regular basis.  Actually, since both lists are relatively small, let us just do some listing of the games in alphabetical order, because that is how they are organized in my phone.  Yes, I am that way.

• Angry Birds
• Blitz (Bejeweled)
• Bloons TD 5
• Clash of Clans
• Dead Space
• Desert Bus
• God of Blades
• Humble Bundle (Not a game, I know, but it is an application for games)
• Munchkin Counter (See above)
• PvZ2 (Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time)

That is it.  So of the ten listed, two of the applications are not games, so it is really eight.  Of those eight, I play two on a daily basis.  Of the remaining six, I have played, maybe two in the last month.  From those four, I still have them on my phone because I have not beaten them yet.

So as you might be able to tell, I do not spend a lot of time on my phone playing games.  Plants vs. Zombies 2 I will play once a day, usually for no more than five minutes and then it goes back into the vault.  This is because, as somewhat stated in my update from January, the game has become less fun and all I really look forward to are the Piñata parties, which now happen once every 24 hours.  I go through the single stage and if I am able to complete it, great!  If I fail the first time through, I put the game away rather than spend 1000 gold to purchase a replay.  Recently, EA/PopCap updated the game to include a variation on the Vase Breaker mini-game from the original Plants vs. Zombies, but I might go through a single stage then put the game away.  There is maybe 10 minutes tops.

In Clash of Clans, I will go into the game, collect gold and elixir from my mining sources, check to see if I have enough gold/elixir to upgrade any existing buildings, check the time remaining on any buildings which are being upgraded then exit the game.  If I had recently been attacked, I will watch the replay of the raid.  This takes all of, at most, 7-10 minutes.  Do not get me wrong though, I am fairly addicted to this game but I know there will be a point when I stop playing rather than saving up a weeks worth of gold to upgrade a single piece of the wall.

Dead Space, of which I will write an article about in the nearish future, while a fun game, has one major flaw.  The game cannot be manually saved, but instead is auto-saved when you reach a checkpoint, which happens at the end of a "chapter."  Chapters in this game last anywhere from 15-20 minutes.  This is the flaw and where the nugget for this article sprang from.  If I could manually save, as in the main games, I would not feel that I had to find and dedicate 20 minutes to playing a game on my phone.  But why would playing a game on the cellphone versus on the 3DS feel so different if they are both video games played on a 3-3 3/4" screen?

Maybe it is the already short battery life of my cellphone or the fact that it is a cellphone that I do not feel as inclined to play games on it as much as I would with my 3DS.  The primary reason for my phone existing is so that I can make/receive phone calls (when not obstructed by my apartment) and text messages; those who know me can already attest how much I already do not talk on the phone.  Playing games on my phone is only secondary and something that I do when I am out-and-about and I do not have my 3DS on me.  Although feeling publicly chastised for playing games on the 3DS vs. the cellphone is a whole other nest of flesh eating elder horrors that I might cover at a later date.

Maybe it is the fact that a lot of cellphone games are free-to-play and are designed around microtransactions in order to keep the games action flowing.  But, when someone like myself who does not spend real world money to buy gems/gold/energy to continue playing or reduce the week it takes to upgrade a mortar canon, play time is greatly reduced.  Reduced playtime on cellphone games has possibly wired my brain to not want to spend more than a couple of minutes playing games on my cellphone, which is possibly why is has taken me three months to go through the Dead Space mobile game which should have only taken me only four hours.   I am intrigued by the story told in the game and how it will connect to Dead Space 2, but it just seems that the platform is what is holding me back.

Just something to think about (or not, that is cool too) this weekend.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Never Ending Soul Ripping

When Is A Game Too Much Game?

I have a queue of unplayed games and this time I'm not referring to just the games that I haven't played on Steam (although that list might be growing again due to Steam's Winter Holiday Non-Denominational Sale), but also the games for the PSP and 3DS that are patiently awaiting their turns to embed themselves in the emotional center of my brain.  This queue of games has recently gotten me thinking about the amount of time required to play all of these game to their conclusion. 

Now, when I say that I beat a game, I'm not referring to "completing" a game with every available character/car/plane, watching every ending and achieving every single achievement.  I just mean beginning a game and playing through until the credits finish rolling.  If I happen to unlock new features and earn achievements in the process, then bonus points for me.

I recently just completed Dead Island after playing roughly 62 hours.  That is a lot of time to spend on anything, let alone a video game.  Recently though, I have noticed that some games are becoming almost too long, or more likely, I am drawn to games that take up a lot of time.  Between the two of us, Conklederp and I have clocked in 571 hours on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and expansions; I currently have 115 hours on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and have only just completed the main quest, not to say anything about either the Bloodmoon or Tribunal expansions; on Final Fantasy XII, I spent around 125 hours and I still didn't finish all of the hunts or collect all of the Espers.  When Grand Theft Auto V was released last year, it was touted as having over 120 hours of game content.

When does game content become too much content?

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and Dead Space took my about 16 hours each while Amnesia: The Descent took 18 hours, but Gone Home and Evoland both took only 3 hours.  Those were perfect lengths of time for their respective games.  Horror games are a hard thing to do for an extended period of time.  I have never played a horror game that lasted as long as, say Morrowind and maintained that level of tension and fright.  Is it possible to maintain that level of tension for 50+ hours?  I honestly don't know as I feel like game length is relative to both the game itself and the person playing the game.  

For myself, as long as the quests make sense, I don't really mind fetch-quests for which both Skyrim and Dead Island are pretty notorious for.  I understand the argument against them as they do eat up a lot of time, especially if fast travel is not an option, but again, I enjoy exploring and looking at the worlds that I explore.  But, as is the case with anything in life, too much can be annoying.  Too many fetch quests to gather supplies for an outcome that is never witnessed is too much. In Morrowind, I was tasked with taking 20 jars of sujamma (local liquor) to the middle of nowhere.  What irritated me was that I had to reallocate my inventory to accommodate 60 lbs of items and travel to a mine just so that some miners who were most likely slaves, could have their liquor.  What I didn't mind was that I was travelling to a part of Vvardenfell that I had not visited so I was exploring. 

So how long should a game be for it to be both entertaining and fulfilling?

I don't think there's a correct answer here.  

Some games work better as a five hour short story while other games, primarily sandbox games almost demand that they last 100+ hours.  And there-in lies one of my problems:  I like sandbox games.  GTA, The Elder Scrolls, I like these games and I like to experience the worlds and the people who populate them.  I recently just started the Assassin's Creed series and I can see Fable, Mass Effect and Dragon Age on the horizon and I know that I will spend as much time in those worlds as I have in others. 

What I have come to realize while putting down my thoughts, is that I am drawn to long, drawn out narratives.  While I do enjoy playing shorter games like Evoland, Dear Esther and Nightsky that may take up only a couple of hours, I also love spending hours upon hours being immersed in a world and it's fictional culture.  Sure, I'll play some games that I know that I can finish in an afternoon, but maybe with the exception of a few games that I cannot recall at the moment, but that doesn't make them any less worth playing.  Sometimes a game that can be played in short segments is just what I need between the doses of massive epic quests.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

I'm Not Ready To Make That Kind Of A Commitment