I have had it up to here with people who measure a game’s quality by the number of hours spent on it, and how the industry, as a result, prices games in these terms. It is for this reason that when you ask adventure game developers if they would please stop inserting unfair and nonsensical puzzles into their games, they respond with a whiny “but if the puzzles were too easy, then the player would finish the game too quickly!”

Now, I understand the importance of pacing in storytelling. Television and movies, a fixed-length affair, go through great pains to get this to work properly. Still, what about the oft-forgotten practice of reading a novel? The way I measure a novel’s worth to me personally is how quickly I find myself reading it; if it takes me too long to get through a book, it usually means that it isn’t very interesting, and that I’m probably never going to finish it. When it comes to adventure games — which, I argue, have more similarity to books than visual media in that the player controls the pace at which the story progresses — the same applies: the games I consider to be the best are the ones I speed through quickly, even if I need a walkthrough to do so. And they are the ones I’ll play again and again to see what I missed the first time around, just like I do for stories I love in other media. And it’s usually these subsequent playthroughs I end up enjoying the most, because now that I know all the solutions to the puzzles, I can better concentrate on exploring the story instead.

Does anyone else in the universe feel the same way about this? Anyone?