Follow Up: It Doesn't Respect Your Time
Posted
So after considering briefly whether I should do some sort of supplementary videos to provide follow-up and additional thoughts, I decided writing articles would be more my speed. And it would let me use this website more. Last week on YouTube, we talked about the common criticism that games "don't respect your time" and why it's bad. Thankfully some people seemed to understand the nuance I was trying to take - made me feel like the first section talking about where the phrase could be used but rarely is wasn't a waste of time. But just to be clear, because I knew some people wouldn't get it: The point was not that games shouldn't be criticized for wasting your time. It's that "it doesn't respect your time" is a poor phrase to use, since it's imprecise, often hyperbolic, and so rarely used to critique games that show the sort of active malice that would justify taking a moral stance against it. It more often is leveled at small things that border on nitpicks, or simply to add a moral dimension to the commentator's views that shorter games are superior. Things that really aren't a matter of "respect" at all, and aren't the result of the sort of ill intent that term implies. And the use of such a loaded term was always the important part.
I have a lot of notes for this, but rather than make an over-long article that loses the plot (okay maybe I did that anyway), I want to focus on one idea. A way of describing the conflict around how games treat your time that I felt was one of my best ideas... That naturally came up the day after I'd already posted the video. And that is...
Wasting Time vs. Spending Time
It's a distinction I really wish I had made in the video. I get close to the subject, but didn't hit upon the phrase. Though I might have cut it anyway, since I already cut a section on the subjectivity of how long games "should be." Wasting time is definitionally bad. Spending time isn't. But what counts as wasting time and what counts as spending time is highly subjective. And there's the rub. What to one person is padding and wasted time can be immersive and engaging to another. Meanwhile some games can make things like intricate RPG systems that take time to navigate engaging, while in others it just takes time while adding nothing. And so often commentators will focus on just their knee-jerk reactions, without also trying to figure out what it's trying to do. And then immediately jump to the most extreme expression of their opinion.
It's why I find decisive and moralizing statements to be a problem. Because they often imply that games "should be" a certain way, to the exclusion of other factors or nuances. Taking someone's dislike for a certain thing in games and thus discrediting any game or genre that doesn't conform to what they want. It reminds me of that era when some would claim that single player games were obsolete and would disappear over time - of course that one feels like it was mostly pushed by corporate executives. I also dislike these sorts of statements because, as some comments unfortunately showed, these often lead to conflating your opinion with objective fact.
It's no longer just games you don't like that are wrong, it's people who do like those kinds of games who are wrong. If someone likes games that you find tedious? Well it can't possibly be that they have a different but equally valid viewpoint. They must just be stupid. Or maybe they're some loser with too much free time on their hands. I wish I were exaggerating, but such are YouTube comments. I find the inability to even acknowledge someone else's preference to be... Concerning. (I am sure someone will accuse me of doing the same thing by critiquing the use of "it doesn't respect your time" - if that's you, please re-read the first paragraph. The problem is not their opinion, the problem is that they are assigning hostile intent to the thing they dislike.)
Perhaps some of why I find this whole thing so strange is due to my age. I wouldn't say I'm old, but I'm old enough to have seen lines of discourse come and go, along with games themselves changing. So I have a bit of historical context. Specifically, the late 7th console generation and early 8th console generation feel relevant to this discussion. At the time, the most popular genre of game was the shooter - mixed between first person shooters and third person cover shooters, with most of them having fairly short, linear, under 10 hour campaigns and a big focus on the online multiplayer. While these did have their fans, when combined with a general perception that games had been becoming too easy (another thing that feels wild with the modern difficulty discourse in a post-Sekiro world, but that's another episode), there was also a significant backlash and these games' campaigns were seen as lacking. A backlash that prepped the gaming public for the next major trend: Open world games - games that had been picking up steam with titles like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry 3, but would hit their peak in relevance in the late 7th and early 8th console generations, before falling off a few years later.
While eventually they would fall off in popularity due to feeling padded out with busywork, as well as oversaturation, they would enjoy a period of popularity. And a lot of that came to do with a mindset that longer games were worth more because they gave you more game time for your money. And honestly with all the discourse around game prices these days, I'm surprise there isn't more tension between this and the frequent argument that a game "doesn't respect your time." I'm surprised there's no discourse about balancing respect for your time with respect for your wallet. Although I have my suspicions, that has more to do with my cynicism around internet discourse than any salient point. But maybe keep in mind that many things that you see as "not respecting your time" may to others still be filler, but filler that's stimulating enough to feel worth it in the moment and that does increase the value of the whole package by increasing the time they get with the game for their money.
But I think the line between wasting and spending time can best be illustrated by a divisive class of games that are nonetheless one of my favorites. Online RPGs of the early 00s. Stuff like Phantasy Star Online and Monster Hunter have been some of my favorites since I first played their series. But they're definitely not for everyone. They are grindy games, and this often is what turns a lot of people off of them. Indeed, those more inclined to be hardline with their criticism may describe these games as "not respecting your time" because of how long they can take to finish. But I think this misses something important about these old games, because it's something atypical: In the absence of a now standardized endgame focus, these were games you were generally not meant to "finish." Perhaps this is me attempting to justify it, but in my interpretation, these were games you were meant to simply play for as long as it was enjoyable, and then quit. The grindy design was meant to make it so that you could play it for as long as you liked, come back as often as you like, and that others would do the same and maintain a healthy playerbase.
I'm sure some people are pointing out "but subscription fees" and yes, that is sometimes true. There is a financial motive there. But to be honest I'm just not inclined to care as much? Because these games still had to be engaging the old fashioned way, and then just stretch it out. Simply being long so that players can keep playing and keep paying subscription fees feels almost wholesome compared to the modern era of live service games. Live service games which aren't content with simply keeping you playing, but which have to monopolize your time through manipulative tactics, so you'll be tempted to make more purchases and so that you don't have time for other live service titles. And the fact that it supports their business model doesn't change the fact that an online RPG would struggle to maintain a playerbase if you could 100% complete it in 40 hours.
And that's another aside I will make? While it was a brief blip I feel like there was some trend of criticizing the length of optional content? And that's just... Look, the devs already made the content optional, you're the one choosing to do it? I think it's a particularly extreme example of a trend towards seeing "completing" games as being more important than experiencing them. If you enjoy challenging yourself going for 100%, go for it? But don't then hold it against the game if the extra stuff is too much or too difficult.
But I guess my point is that these sorts of absolute moral stances are bad for art? Some games do benefit from being longer and not obsessing over "respecting" your time. Large-scale RPGs also are also games that benefit from a long runtime to sell you on the scale of the world. And stuff like Skyrim is meant for you to get lost in and carve your own story, not to do every little thing.
I think I've lost the plot a little, but I probably covered most of what I wanted to. After all, these articles are meant to be a little looser. Not quite as focused as the videos where I feel I need to cut more aggressively. I could have also waffled about padding, or talking about how the phrase "it doesn't respect your time" seems correlated with problems in the discourse over difficulty and friction in games. But in the end, the question of wasting time vs. spending it seemed most important. So I guess I can only say this: If a game is enjoyable, then it's hard to say it's wasting your time without effectively saying all games are a waste of time. (Live service games do complicate this, but let's ignore them for now - I often try to do so anyway.) And a game can be a worthy use of your time even if you don't "finish" it.
That's probably another source of this problem? The increasing view of media as "content" you must completely consume. Partly fueled by the fact that there is more media than ever competing for our time. I've seen some similar complaints about "filler" in TV shows (not to be confused with filler in anime where it is specifically meant to fill time so the anime doesn't overtake the manga it is adapting), that an episode that doesn't advance the main plot might not be worth watching. But some of my favorite scenes and episodes are the ones that can just focus on the characters rather than the plot. Meanwhile you see the rise of slop content - the sort of stuff that really is meant only to hold your attention and waste your time. And to be clear I do not think "slop" should be used to describe something bad or that you merely dislike - it's a specific form of mass-produced low-quality content that exists primarily to be content that consumes time, not with any greater artistic ambition or even the relatively humble goal of "being something people will enjoy."
I think there's a good instinct buried under all this bad criticism. Time is valuable, and there is media that is meant to waste people's time out there. As the economics of entertainment have changed, the focus is often less on creating a specific piece of media that will leave an impression on the audience that will draw them in to come back for more, but rather on keeping them hooked for as long as possible so that they stay on your platform. But so often this instinct then leads to other media being criticized just for what its creator saw as a good use of time not matching up with the audience's. Maybe it's just a symptom of this weird era we're in that commentary on media that would become distorted. But that's another episode. Or article. I keep waffling away from actually ending this. Now the article is done.