High Dynamic Range Lying

I remember when there was a time when I felt sorry for my older friends, who said they just did not have the time to play 60 hour RPGs anymore. I considered that perhaps they just were not hardcore gamers anymore. It is a scary realization when you wake up one morning, and discover you have become just like them. You no longer have the time to play a 60 hour RPG, and one or two hours it takes to get an epic title into the prime of its content starts to grate on you. It becomes increasingly difficult to sit through long cutscenes and hours of exposition just to further a story that might not even be that good in the first place.Plenty of people have noticed that the core gamer is getting older.

The group that made Sega, Nintendo, Atari and Sony boatloads of money in previous generations have started to age. With age, comes heaping responsibility, and diminishing free time. I spend an excess of 8-10 hours at work. Many times I have no time to play games at night time after work, either because social responsibility calls, or I merely feel too drained from the day`s events to undertake a long play session.

I am not that old, but already I find myself fighting for time to play the games I love. In the last two years, I`ve seen a drastic change in the criteria I judge a game purchase by. In my high school days in Canada and university days in the US, I saw no value in portable gaming. I enjoyed playing games on my TV, and found myself only buying portable games if it was exclusive to the platform, and had no home console equivalent. I couldn`t understand why anyone would want to play games on a portable system, and could not find a consistent time in my schedule that would warrant portable gaming.

If I ever traveled, it would be by car, which meant I was more often than not behind the wheel myself. Because I spent so much time on campus, I spent a large amount of time at home, playing games. I preferred long RPGs and adventure games over short “casual” experiences because of the added value in the game`s length, along with a misplaced sense of gaming elitism. RPGs, I felt, were for “real gamers” who were willing to invest a serious amount of time in a specific game to reap the rewards it offered at the end of the rainbow.

This wasn`t the case on handhelds, though. I couldn`t sustain interest in a long game on the Game Boy and its ilk, purely because I had no long stretches of time to invest in a title of that scope. Short, action based experiences were the only types of games that could hold my interest. When I played RPGs or strategy games on handhelds, I would sit on my bed, wondering why I wasn`t playing the game on my, then huge, 21″ TV.

Oh how things have changed.

After college, I moved to Japan, to become an english teacher. I have to answer the work phone in Japanese, and I wear a suit five out of the seven days of the week. Location isn`t the only thing that`s changed.

When Dragon Quest 9 was revealed to be on the Nintendo DS a few months ago, many good friends were rather surprised at my reaction: I was beyond ecstatic. I actually rejoiced that the new installment for the game was to be on a portable instead of a home console, citing “I`ll have a lot more time to play it, now!” When Matrix`s Final Fantasy III remake for the DS released last August, I absolutely adored it, finishing the 35 hour adventure within the week I purchased it.

At home, the games I now find myself playing on my HDTV are actually not the long sweeping epics I once loved. Now, short multiplayer games, board games, and bite sized downloadable content dominates my library. Circumstance has changed my taste.

Like almost anyone my age, I work eight hours a day, five days a week. I still love gaming, but at first, I thought I had lost a lot of the free time I used to have. I equated the time I spent at home to the time I had free to play games. I found, that if I was going to keep my gaming habit up, I would have to rethink the way I game. I would have to be inventive. The change was not so deliberate as I make it out to be, though. I found myself gravitating to certain things more than before.

Since I moved to Japan, I began taking the train to work instead of driving, which left me with at least 45 minutes each day with little to do but admire the scenery. Then, at work, I find myself with a couple hours of rest time on my hands, yet again having little to do. Just a few short weeks after taking the job, I found myself bringing a DS to work each day, playing RPGs and long sprawling adventures with little hesitation. I would level and adventure on the train to and from work, and then catch a few minutes of play time at lunch time and subsequent opportune breaks. Super Robot Wars W offered the option to save at any time, letting players squeeze a few turns in before doing something else. It was a godsend for gamers like myself.

At home, conversely, I suddenly found myself gravitating towards games that offered bite-sized chunks of gameplay. I was not completely avoiding RPGs, but I was finding them harder and harder to stick with, if they followed a specific format that involved a large time investment. One game that managed to break the mould was none other than Bethesda Softworks’ Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Despite containing well over 100 hours of gameplay, the game gives players an incredibly helpful journal that logs which quests the player is currently undertaking (allowing for long breaks from the game), and also allows the player to save anywhere, allowing for stints of anything between 15 minutes and 2 hours. Catan, recently released on the Xbox Live Arcade, also does an excellent job of offering an incredibly addictive, but bite-sized board game experience for gamers on the go. Players who wish to play for a while can play a full 10 point game, but those looking to play a shorter game, can edit the options, and play a far shorter and compact 7 point game.

Going forward, developers need to start thinking about how their target demographic has changed. While Nintendo continues to reap the rewards of their blue ocean strategy, Sony and Microsoft have to realize that their red ocean is metamorphosing before their very eyes. Epic blockbusters on home consoles are not selling the way they used to.

John Davison of 1up.com mentioned on the May 11th 1up Yours podcast that EA CCO Bing Gordon recently spent time travelling to colleges and universities, talking to student gamers and those aspiring to create games for a living. Davison stated: “More than ever in his career, he’s seen that people aren’t as interested in the big, epic, AAA games as they used to be, and people want these little…micro experiences.”

Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii may be following the dollar signs, but he seems to also acknowledge the incredible amount of synergy between a train culture like Japan, and the popularity of the DS, having put Dragon Quest IX on the two screened handheld. With gamers getting older and busier, what better way to make it more and more accessible to diehard fans then on a platform that lets them play virtually anywhere, even at work?

What do you think? Is this a real trend, or a phase? Is it a sign of casual gamers taking over, or is the face of gaming changing for all of us? Is it ascension, or ruin? Let us know by dropping a comment!

UPDATE: This is an important point. I’m reading all over the internet that people are misunderstanding my article. People seem to be focus on the fact that I play shorter games on home consoles, and seem to forget that I keep mentioning that I’ve been playing a lot of very hardcore games on the road. Super Robot Wars W, Final Fantasy III, and a host of other DS and PSP titles take between 30-100 hours to complete. People seem to be looking at this article as a casual gamer’s manifesto, but it’s not. I love my RPGs, and long games, but as I mentioned several times in the article, I play those games more on handhelds now, because I have access to them for longer periods of time than my home consoles. Please don’t misquote the article to fit a specific agenda. If the original message fits that agenda, then have at you.