thread: 2005-11-14 : Long and Short
On 2005-11-15, timfire wrote:
If I may rant for a minute, a good focused game is hard as hell to write. It is a misconception to think of them as easy or somehow lessor than "long" games, whatever that may mean. Both take the same amount of effort, playtesting, development, and production. They just require different design goals. [/rant]
I believe a focused design puts the designer in the position of being responsible for things like situation in ways that a broader (aka "longer") game doesn't. A focused game requires that the designer knows how to "wind up" play, so that things can be moving from the get go.
Honestly, I don't know about broader games. Right now I'm struggling to design a "medium-length" game. With a broader game, I can leave certain aspects of situation up to the players. Actually, I think I have to leave certain things up to the players. A broader game must have room for different types of situations. But I need to figure out how to control pacing over the long run. (My goal is to have an over-arching plot that develops with the game.)
This makes KM go "Yup!"
This makes JBR go "Same Effort =!= Same Time"
I'll let the same amount of effort comment pass without too much comment, but your earlier marginalia comment was about *time* which is not equal to effort.
This makes BL go "Joshua, stop"
You're talking about something that you don't have direct experience with.
This makes BR go "I don't fully agree with Josh, but I do see what he is getting at."
Look at Bankuei's posts about gamism and long term play and reward cycles (here: http://bankuei.blogspot.com/2005/10/good-gamist-challenge-stuff.html - and here: http://bankuei.blogspot.com/2005/10/iron-heroes-mid-levels.html). The problems he is talking about, and Josh is referring to, are problems that are often not properly playtested for because games are not, traditionally, playtested from 1st to 20th level in a solid block of analyzed, scientific play. One of the reasons they have not is that doing so would take a long time, and due to the economic pressures on most mainstream game developers this will not happen. (The other main reason is that analyzed, scientific playtesting is something very few people know how to do, run, or organize.) So, it isn't any easier to playtest a short game, and it can take a very long time to do right ??? possibly just as long. But a lot of gamist trad RPGs do fall down because they did not take the time to playtest properly through their assumed years-long reward cycle. So long games may not take longer, but in most cases the required amount of playtesting needed is just longer than the game was actually playtested for.
