14 DAY TRIAL // How long can you go on playing Killzone 3 for? I played it for more than 12 hours, both single and multiplayer since getting the game towards the end of last week and I plan to play it all through this week too. What if we changed the game? How long can a gamer play Gran Turismo 5? How long can someone engage with a deep strategy game like Hearts of Iron III or with something taken from the Total War series?
There's a difference between how long one “can” play a game and how long “one” should play a game, with the former being clearly limited by the amount of content that the developers have included in the game while the second one is linked to the way the players view the experience, to social pressure, the amount of free time one has and the way the wider gaming echo changer evaluates a title.
I ask this question because I find myself returning to a rather limited number of games, including Hearts of Iron III with mods, a heavily modified version of the Pro Cycling Manager 2011 and the Dune Wars mod for Civilization IV, when I am not playing the most recent releases, like Killzone 3 or Test Drive Unlimited 2 or Bulletstorm.
And I can safely say that the three titles that I come back to have received more than 100 or 200 hours of my game time, which sometime makes me think that I should abandon them in order to have more time for new releases and past experiences that I might have missed the first time around.
On the other hand, these experiences are right up my gaming alley and offer fresh challenges each time and keep me interested and engaged even if I know them inside out.
There's also that elusive “fun” to talk about and although Dune Wars, HoI 3 and PCM 2011 often frustrate the hell out of me they still make me feel more accomplished when winning than any skill kill in Bulletstorm or any Helghast defeat in Killzone 3, to mention two of the hits of the moment.
As more and more gamers grow older and other engagements take chunks out of their gaming time, the discussion about how long one can and should play any game will become more important than ever, and developers and publishers will have to come up with some good answers to make sure that the public engages with a big number of games as deeply as possible.