"Will I be forced to play a few select games per year as I grow older and other parts of life take precedence?"

That's exactly what happens, (un)fortunately. Losing game play time is a good and bad thing, though. I'll explain why.

As a happily married man, (2.5 years, baby!) I can say that video game play time has been drastically cut since my glory days in '91-'93, when I could safely play 3-4 hours of Super Nintendo every day without real concequence. Things like university studies/projects were just the beginning of my weaning from constant/extended gaming.

Now, earning a living and spending quality time with my best friend is a priority, and a very good one, at that. Our time together is fulfilling. Human interaction is very under-appreciated in a game-centric life. Crono and Link never had much to say to me.

On the flip side, however, earning money and being a grown-up can be very beneficial to a gamer. Even though you have to work, when a really good game does come out, you can afford it right now and enjoy playing it over a long period of time. (Case in point: I just finished Chrono Cross for the first time last week! Whatta game!)

In addition, every so often, you can find a game that you and your spouse can enjoy together. Our top 5: Final Fantasy 8 and 9, Mario Tennis, Banjo-Kazooie and F-Zero X. Just imagine always having a partner to play your favorite game with, and be able to talk about that awesome overhand smash you had in that last doubles tournament... Or wonder about Vivi's confusion over the manufactured Black Mages while you go to sleep! (Don't tell me what happens... I haven't figured it out yet.)

Just maybe, if you're lucky, you'll find someone who'll be your best friend and enjoy what you enjoy. Maybe you'll play less often overall, but when you do play, it'll be better than it ever was when you were alone.

DMarsee
-looking forward to lotsa multiplayer co-op RPGs on the GBA

What about the games? I can play GB games at my lunch break or on the bus or on businness trips. As for consoles, I have plenty of time for that in the evenings, and in the weekends if I don't go to work (I have to be available 24x7). I can set aside a day or two for going to the movies, I don't miss my sitcoms or my anime... I even have a webpage and love to write and draw when inspiration strikes.

Oh, by the way, 90% of the games I play are RPG's. How do I do it? That little controversial thing that most people say take the fun out of a game: Strategy Guides.

Not for them to tell me how to get through a game (which I can do on my own), but also how to get 100% of every little trinket in the game. I'm not about to lose countless hours of my life trying to figure out what item is needed or where to find it to obtain the ultimate weapon / armor / spell / badge / star / whatever. I mean, why waste my time trying to figure out something that's sometimes impossible to figure out on your own? (Doomtrain in FF8, for example).

So, I could rush through a game and finish it without the best items, but I don't like that. I also don't like that whatever thing I needed I should have acquired 10 hours ago, so I have to replay the whole damn thing. Playing the same game twice is not for me. If I like it I tape it to relive it.

Is the fun gone? Am I buying 60+ dollar interactive movies? I don't mind. I still have to go around and come up with my own strategy for the enemies, to suit my style. I don't have the time to wander around countless hours trying to figure out a secret. And if most of that time is waiting for the PSX to load the next screen, well...

-----
Danny, who actually does enjoy running around in Paper Mario discovering stuff without a guide (so shoot me).
And who doesn't have children, only cats.

P. S. : I do have time to fulfill my marital duties, that's what save points are for! :>

This topic strikes a chord within me, as I've been thinking about this lately. I'll be going off to college next year, PS2 in tow. However, I don't think that I'll have time to play FFVII and Xenogears each three times through (as I've spent hours doing). Already, the time crunch has begun. I write about videogames for a commercial website, and that money goes to games. But the more I write (and consequently the more money), the less time I have to play games. Add college to this and I don't see much time for building up my characters in FFXI.

In short, growing up isn't kind to videogamers. No games are marketed to the 30+ age group, since they wouldn't play them a lot (in theory). It makes me sad that this hobby has an expiration date.

--The Steve, thinking that Peter Pan had the right idea...

Or maybe Malaysian civil servants just have too much free time on their hands, I don't know.

DMJ

It all gets tied together in the end. If M rated developers cannot advertise their games in a format where they can reach their target audience(read:gaming magazines), sales for said M rated game will drop. If the sales drop because they can't advertise, the developers are making less money per M rated game they've developed. If they don't make money for making M rated games, then the incentive to make the games drops.

The end result is that we're have a bunch of sugar coated games made for kids, because all the developers will have no interest in making games for the more mature gamer.

The IDSA, if this is passed through, will effectively lock in video games for a certain age group. Innovation in gaming will stop, because developers won't have any incentive to innovate. To allow the mature gamer's wants in a product to be dictated by a minority is inconcievable.

This goes far beyond eliminating gore and T&A in games; I can name a few games where such things were an artistic necessity. Can you really say that games like Silent Hill and Parasite Eve would have been as visually interesting or innovative as they were if there was not the incentive there to shock the audiences?

This proposal will hurt the gaming industry as a whole. If games are percieved as "just for kids" by the baby boomer generation that didn't grow up with them, we'll be stuck in the same rut animation in the US was for years, where the very format of the medium dictated who it was marketed to.

If video games are to be recognized as a legitimate medium, such restrictions upon their content must not be allowed.

Etiam, delenda est Carthago.
BJ Chavez

Time restarants are a thing of dismay to many of us aging players. Back in the day when i first got Final Fantasy 2 (before i knew it was 4), i was able to play it and finish it in a week. lots of time on my hands, wham i was in school before work and income became an issue.

But today i finished FF9 (did you cry at the end? i did) and looking back it took me a little over a month to complete. i spent the same amount of in game time on the 2 games, but i am in school, trying to become a programmer so that i can make the next big RPG, and holding down a job so that i can pay for school and my addiction to these games. But i enjoyed 9 now as much as i did 4 then.

The time it takes to play one of these games thru hasn't changed much. Just the people who played them. I feel that if these games were shorter than they would lose some of their finesse. And i don't want to see that happen. I would hate to go to work for squaresoft (gods willing) and have them tell me that my game is too long. It stifles creativity. I would rather take a month or 2 to finish final fantasy X then to have it "sized down" to meet a time requirement. Didn't The Abyss make more sense when the edited out scenes were put back in?

Enjoy your games people, how ever long it takes to play them. If you get bored with it, get another, thats what the game makers want. But don't complain that the game is too long, quality should speak for itself.

Path Evermore (Now should i go for Legend Of Dragoon or my newly Acquired copy Of Final Fantasy One)

Yes, we'll have less time to play games when (and if) we grow up (haha, then again, how old were you again?), but that doesn't have to mean games will get shorter. Games like MGS2 have always been 15 hours or, usually, less. Remember, in the eight-bit days most games could be completed in a couple of hours, and even a game like FF1 only took longer because you had to level-up a lot.

No, I think games have gotten longer and more involved in part to appeal to the mainstream. The best way to attract non-gamers is to make a game recognizable : making it more like a film, more of a story. And besides, if people can watch thirty minutes of some soap every evening, they can make time for videogaming as well. We'll just play less games, that's all.

Sir Farren, who did hold a full-time job once.

The topic o' the day is actually something I've discussed at great length before in other venues, and I'm sticking to my guns here: game length strongly affects my willingness to start a title. A lot of RPG nuts scream in anger when they're "ripped off" by a game that is "only" 15 hours long, but for me those games are generally far more satisfying than some dreary 90-hour epic.

To contextualize my point of view, I'm an adult - I'm one of the "old people" Chris W. mentioned. I work a full-time job, often have several freelance projects running on the side, and maintain a website which I try to update daily. I think I probably net more free time overall for games than I did in college, but it comes in smaller, more even doses (no summer, spring or winter break for me, alas). If I have an hour or two every day to play a game, a 60 hour epic will take me an entire month or more to complete, and that's just way too long. I can watch an entire season of an anime series in a week of free time; I can read a good novel (or two) in the same duration. Are video games really so much more compelling than other forms of media that they merit 4 or 5 times the work to complete once through? Not very bloody often.

It takes an incredibly special game to keep my attention for a sustained interval of time like that, and I've found that the law of diminishing returns is very much in effect when it comes to game length. Metal Gear Solid takes 10-12 hours to complete if you want the full experience; Breath of Fire III takes 70 hours for a single playthrough. I've played through MGS three times and BoF3 only once - but despite having only put in half the time with MGS, it was a much better investment for me. That's because I judge the value of a game by fun/hour rather than hour/dollar. But while time is a less common commodity than money for me, I sympathize with those for whom the inverse is true; I can remember being a poor junior high kid trying to eke maximum value from my NES carts, and I would have killed for something with as much playability as Final Fantasy Tactics back then. But games which can maintain such a high calibre of fun over a long game duration are rare - give me a broad range of brief and interesting titles any day over something like Grandia, with its 20 hours of plot padded to a mind-numbing 60.

Ben Franklin once said "Fish and visitors stink after three days." Most RPGs stink after about 30 hours; I wish developers would acceed to counsumer demands just a little less to maintain their product integrity. Look at the way Vagrant Story was padded from 12 hours to 30 - great game, but there were entire sections which were simply duplicated to appease demands for more game length. Yuck. The Final Fantasy games usually strike a good balance - about 20-30 hours of structured game leading up to a point of freedom where you can tackle the final dungeon immediately or track down sidequests until you forget the main plot.

Of course, no one style is right, and diversity is great. Let the kids have their epics. But every time I think back on sleep-inducing hour 65 of Xenogears I appreciate the snappy brevity of a Parasite Eve, Megaman Legends or Symphony of the Night all the more.

Remember, length isn't everything -
J. Parish

Yesterday's entire column (especially letter #1) seemed so incredibly ignorant and overreactive to me that, at the risk of people finding flaws in my own argument, I felt compelled to write. I apologize in advance for being unnecessarily verbose in any area.

First, this IDSA document is a leaked, unofficial proposal of a proposal. It is so many steps away from tangible regulation that any discussion other than a passing note is unwarranted. This is an internal memo desiring commentary and critique by the people it will affect, the members of the IDSA.

Second, this is not a new rule. "Since 1994 we have had a provision in the ad code which prohibits the marketing of games to persons for whom they are not rated as appropriate." The regulation has existed for nearly 7 years, and they are just now getting around to defining what the rule really means.

Because it's a convenient organizational tool, let's go down the list once more:

"Ads for Mature rated games may not be placed in magazines where 45% or more of the readers are under 17."
Far be it for me to oppose the Gamecenter news story that reported this issue, as they undoubtedly have access to statistics I do not, but their claim that only 3 magazines nationwide that would be exempt here seems dubious. Simple anecdotal evidence from reading countless months of "Letters to the Editor" indicate otherwise. Whenever a person writes in complaining about "mature" content, the response from the magazine is invariably that while their magazine may be read by kids, they target (and have) a predominantly adult audience for which such content is appropriate. Sure, Nintendo Power may kick out the Mature ads, but then, I liked them better ad-free. And the same standard has always gone for R-rated movie ads. You simply don't find ads for "Hannibal" or "Traffic" in kid-targeted magazines: they aren't allowed.

"Ads for Mature rated games may not be placed on programs where 35% or more of the viewers are under 17."
To say that we won't see such ads on NYPD Blue is ludicrous: I'm sure many kids watch it, but the fact is, it's a very adult oriented show and the majority of the audience is adult. Heck, I didn't even find it entertaining until a year or two ago, because it simply wasn't designed for me. And while it's true that you won't see such ads on MTV's TRL, I wouldn't rule out the "10Spot" and shows like (the horrible) "Undressed." The primary audience for these shows is adult.

"Paid ads for M rated games shall not be placed on web sites where 45% or more of the visitors are under 17."
This will be an extremely difficult provision to implement and enforce. Privacy issues on the internet are so hot these days that people are afraid of cookies, much less the collection of demographic information. And let me emphasize here that none of these regulations affect content, only advertisements. There will be no censorship of editorial material or screenshots or similar items.

"Game publishers shall not enter into promotions for Mature rated products...if it is reasonable to believe that...a substantial audience of persons under 17 years old."
This proposed regulation is much more vague and subjective. As the document acknowledges, the nature of said events makes it very hard to accumulate meaningful data about the audience, and it will therefore be up to the good judgement of event organizers in determining the primary audience. To say that the intended audience of a Marilyn Manson concert would exclude Mature rated games is a poor conclusion.

"All E-mail marketing has to have an explanation about the game's rating and a description of it's content. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the same thing as a commercial? Gee, thanks for the free advertisement, there, guys!"
Reread this. It's ridiculous. A free advertisement in E-mail marketing. It is an advertisement! Now they simply have to explain why it's Mature, easy to do.

"Companies shall not use persons under 17 for product testing or marketing focus groups for titles rated Mature or reasonably likely to be rated Mature."
This is perfectly reasonable, and is simply a mirror of practices already in place in the movie industry. You wouldn't put minors in the test audience for "Magnolia" or "American Pie". This is common sense, and you very well can tell if a game will be Mature or not.

"Products based on the publisher's Mature or Teen rated titles...shall...include the following statement: 'This [state item] is based on a [Mature or Teen] rated video game."
Also perfectly reasonable. A simple content descriptor. This will change nothing. The action figures will still be there, and purchasable by anyone. All this can affect is providing additional information for the parents who want it.

Finally, notice that all these regulations are for persons under 17. The age of 17 is not included.

These decisions were indeed made by intelligent and well-informed men and women, and they are carefully reviewing the effects of their actions, before they are even proposed.

- MeekayD
Last time I checked, Shenmue was rated Teen, not Mature.

Well I want to talk about the Nintendo-Sega RPG, even if you don't. I just want to say that I wish people would stop thinking of something like Sonic zooming around the Mushroom Kingdom collecting badges and flower points whilst interacting with a whole cast of friendly Nintendo and Sega characters. Has it been confirmed that the mascots will even be used? Personally, I'm looking forward to a serious RPG wth original characters, and it'll redefine the whole genre with the combined genius of Shigeru Miyamoto and...some clever Sega guy. What do you think?

Snail