I don’t make a habit out of agreeing with the Penny Arcade guys, but Tycho made a really good point on Monday. It’s something that’s bugged me ever since I moved out here and started working in videogames.

The problem is the weird dollar-to-hour value ratio people use when talking about games. You’ll frequently see a game review, or just public opinion of a game, focus on how the game is “too short.” Not that it was shallow, or ended too abruptly, just that it “only” took three-to-nine hours to finish it. (Yes, Half Life 2: Episode 1 took some reviewers nine hours to finish, and it was still “too short.”)

More often than not, this complaint will come immediately after the comment that the game was very well-written, had great dialogue, a great setting, and well-developed characters. But still, “too short.”

What I like about Tycho’s post is that he finally put into words what bugs me about this — it’s turning games from works of art into commodities. You pay x dollars for a game, you’re an American with an inflated sense of entitlement, therefore you sure as hell better get y hours of entertainment out of it.

What other art form does this? I’ve never read a book review that dinged the book because it was less than 300 pages long. I’ve never seen a movie that was only an hour and a half, and then demanded half my money back, because I got twice as much entertainment time out of The Lord of the Rings. Often you’ll see the exact same people who get all up in arms whenever Roger Ebert or somebody dismisses games as being incapable of being works of art, then go and complain that they paid $60 for Dead Reckoning: Vengeance of Kain 2 and only got 20 hours game time out of it.

There are three possible solutions, as I see it:

1. Introduce “standard” game lengths. Television is broken up into blocks of thirty-minute and hour-long programs, and people don’t seem baffled by that. Board games generally list play times on the box. Publishers can start releasing games of standard 4-hour, 12-hour, etc. lengths, and have QA report the “average” length of time it takes to play. If the people want filler, give them filler, and see how they like it.
2. Report the game length in reviews, but don’t make it qualitative. Game review sites love their decimal-accurate scores, so those aren’t going away. But a so-called “videogame journalist” should be embarrassed about writing good thing after good thing about a game, and then giving it a sub-par score just because it’s “too short.” Tell the readers it only took you x amount of time to play, and then review the game on its own merits.
3. Suck it up, people. We keep hearing how the average age of videogame players is going up; last I heard, it was around 23. People that age should have enough discretionary income that they don’t have to be such tightwads with their entertainment dollars. I can understand a twelve-year-old’s being disappointed that the game he spent his allowance on didn’t last him more than a couple of days. I’ve got a lot less sympathy for the dude who’s got a job and shouldn’t have that many hours to spend on a game in the first place. If you want videogames to be treated as art, then stop treating them as products.

I bought the World of Warcraft expansion pack, with about a billion other people, apparently, more out of obligation than anything else. I’ve kept my account open in the game for at least four months, without ever logging in, just to wait for the expansion pack, so I might as well buy it, right?

And since I installed it, I’ve played more out of a different sense of obligation — to validate spending money on the damn thing — than out of a desire to play it. Which makes a game that already feels like work, feel even more like work.

As far as I can tell, it’s a fine game. They’ve added a good bit of stuff, kept with their same winning formula with several improvements, and the kids seem to like it. They’ve even added some of the stuff — in particular, a PvP Domination-type game in the open environment — I wrote an overlong post about months ago, saying “wouldn’t it be awesome if they added this?” Turns out it’s not all that awesome.

So it’s a videogame that doesn’t really thrill me anymore and I’m not that inclined to play. As somebody with more money than free time, I’m buying, trying, and abandoning videogames all the time. So this would normally be too boring even for this blog’s low standards, and not worth writing about.

The problem is that with an online game, it’s not just a game failure but somehow a social failure. The meat of World of Warcraft is all about playing with other people. I’ve never had any luck at all with this, though. In the two years I’ve owned the thing, I’ve not once had a good experience finding random people to play with. I’ve got no doubt that they’re out there, I’d be that there are even more good people online than idiots, but hell if I can ever find them. Somehow the same goobers that yammer on sub-literately turn into game design experts who know how to play your character better than you do, as soon as you get into a group.

Tonight I joined a random group for a place I’d never been before, after not playing the game for about four months. Somehow I became The Weakest Link (even though I never caused the whole party to die, when everybody else did). I was being pretty gracious about it, and thought the rest of the gang was being pretty cool, and said I’d have to leave in a few minutes. Then all of a sudden I found myself booted from the team, with no warning.

On the grand scale of internet assholitude, that incident doesn’t even register. Still, it annoyed me. It’s just a little bit too like a date gone wrong. Both parties know it’s not working out, and aren’t even that interested in keeping the date going, but you still get dumped. I always thought videogames were supposed to be a substitute for dating. Where’s the escapism in that?

And of course, now more and more games are getting online. I haven’t had any success with the Xbox Live thing either, and there’s a lot less time investment required there. So there’s another venue to have people judging me and even getting a big visible star rating to show me how popular I’m not. I think I like the antisocial games better.

So if anybody wants a good deal on the World of Warcraft expansion, let me know. I think I’m done with the massively multiplayer thing for a while.