games "respecting" one's time (or not)

King of Posters
1

was going to reply to someone on social media who used this turn of phrase but i thought better of it and decided to post here instead.

does the phrase “this game doesn’t respect my time” only rile me up or do other people here find it odd too? from my point of view they have the responsibility backward but maybe they just mean “there are things in this game i don’t like” and i’m being overly pedantic about their word choice.

my argument goes something like this:

  1. experiencing something has the inherent risk that you may not like it, and you’ve implicitly accepted that risk by trying the thing
  2. if you continue to engage with something after you’ve found out you don’t like it, surely it’s you who doesn’t respect your own time

like isn’t this line of thinking how you get to 1000 hours played negative reviews on steam? (which in my experience reveal much more about the person reviewing the game than they do about the game itself)

possible exceptions?

  1. marketing or presentation was intentionally deceitful and made you believe it was something it was not
  2. developer is intentionally designing mechanics that they themselves don’t like as a way to get paid more in some direct or indirect way (retention, in game currency, whatever) or to prey on psychology/addictions

i personally have never felt “disrespected” by a game because i usually see the writing on the wall well before that and uh just stop playing it. to get a game to value your time, you must first value your own time or something idk.

has anyone here felt disrespected by a game? and if so where does the developer’s responsibility stop and the player’s start?

19 Likes
2

I basically parse that phrase as “game’s padded the fuck out” which… yeah I’ve definitely felt that about some games. It’s not like a game is a black and white “good or bad” situation, I’ve played numerous ones where I enjoyed them but they really stretched things out or seemingly put in things to just extend its total playtime and while it didn’t move me all the way to hating them it certainly lessened my enjoyment of them.

15 Likes
3

I tend to feel this way when I actually very much like some specific aspect(s) of the game, like the artwork, storytelling or “crunch” in the animations. So some part of me wants to keep playing to get more of that, but at the same time the game design is forcing me do stuff I’m really not into to progress.

When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of pulp fantasy novels. They tended to be quite good at action, cool magic elements, or tense/witty dialogue, but then they all had those obligatory paragraphs when the author would freeze the plot and rotely describe a setting or a character’s appearance. “The town lay in a valley surrounded by rolling green hills”, “Alesha’s piercing blue eyes shone through the opening of her chainmail helm”, and on and on like that for most of a page. It’s not very imaginative, it doesn’t really influence the rest of the story at all, but the editor must’ve told them the reader needs that to feel oriented in the world, or something.

But fortunately, these bits actually didn’t harm my reading experience much because I could just rapidly skim to the end of the description whenever I saw one starting.

In videogames, even some that otherwise have a lot to recommend them, the rote/uninspired parts are not just isolated sections, they can even be the majority of the game. And there’s usually no equivalent of “skimming until the next good part”: it’s a hard choice between sucking it up and going through the required motions, or quitting.

As long as the player hasn’t quit, the game developer holds most of the agency on what the experience is like and how long things take: from the smallest details like overly long animations, to big-picture issues. And when they wield that agency in service of abstract design goals instead of focusing on what they’re doing to the player’s moment-to-moment experience, that can feel like a disrespect of sorts.

16 Likes
4

I feel like it’s when a game that is otherwise pretty good has mandatory portions that feel like they are only there to pad the game out to meet some arbitrary game length. Usually with some JRPGs, it feels like they are trying to hit a 50 hour minimum play time, maybe to avoid some kind of backlash.

Examples:
FFVIIR with its “go and do side stuff for a while before you can move on to the next main story segment” (it’s kinda optional, but they make it feel mandatory due to how they lock you out of completing quests if you don’t do it in that chapter, and you’ll potentially miss stuff that will make the later game more manageable etc)

Judgment forcing you to do side stories as part of the main story just to stretch things out.

Many JRPGs that signal that you’re at the home stretch, just a little bit more .. except there’s a 5 hour stretch of dungeons in a floaty purple void where each main character has to reiterate their convictions and all the big bosses have to be beaten again.
My personal opinion of RPGs is the last dungeon should be the shortest. The penultimate one can be the big test of all that has come before, but once you tell me the big bad is all that remains, just give me a 5 min walk through a corridor with maybe 2 bends

10 Likes
5

The last game I said this about was Blue Prince and I quit and uninstalled the game when I became fully cognizant of this, because it falls afoul of both

  1. marketing or presentation was intentionally deceitful and made you believe it was something it was not
  2. developer is intentionally designing mechanics […] to prey on psychology/addictions
19 Likes
6

Im firmly in the ‘respect your own time’ and quit or cheat if the game gets slow.

There seems to be a lot of games that include a lot of drudgery and bullshit work that people obsess over completing. Its toxic. Like mmos where to play the new expansion you have to be “level cap” and it takes 100 hours to get there. Thats just abuse of people who don’t have the disposition to just quit.

Another kind of time disrespect is in excessive time to execute a plan. Rollercoaster tycooon gets me like this, vampire survivors gets me like this. Tower defense does this bad. Its that feeling when you realize you screwed it up in hour 1 but you can just now see it in hour 10.

10 Likes
7

The distinction between the two I would draw is that there’s plenty of games with stuff I don’t like that are really snappy, and get that stuff all up in my face, and it’s easy to identify them as such, and you walk away. And then there are games with good elements, or good bits, and the developers are either padding things, or possibly even have trouble recognizing what’s really working for the game, and you wind up in a situation where you realize too late that you’re dragging yourself through something that you should in theory be enjoying, because sometimes you are enjoying yourself, and you have that what the fuck am I actually doing feeling.

I don’t think it’s something that happens with only games either, although I think it’s more pernicious with games because they’ve really been hit with “ooh more hours is good” stick. Goodness knows I’ve sat through a lot of 90+ minute movies that only had 30 minutes of good ideas tops.

14 Likes
8

alright so i think some of my reaction is because i’m very quick to quit things i’m not enjoying, and when i do stick with something i’m not exactly enjoying parts of, i tend to frame it as like trying to “learn to like” the stuff that’s not grabbing me. so it never feels like my time is being wasted, exactly. fwiw i don’t think of it as “black and white” either, only that in practice there’s a tipping point where the unknown benefits get outweighed by the known or extrapolated costs and i quit.

what really muddies this topic for me is that people i respect often purport to enjoy things that are almost entirely unenjoyable to me. for example, some people really connected with void stranger which i pegged as having a certain tedious structure early on, and promptly stopped playing. i was pleased to learn later that my fears about it were true and thus i was justified in my early bail, but some of my friends loved that structure and the mystery and replaying things over and over with different contexts.

to be disrespected you have to imagine intent on the other side, but it’s hard for me to imagine that the developer of void stranger did that to artificially pad out the game because i live in a world where people i respect like what it did and i don’t see why the dev would try to pad out like a $10 indie game to 40 hours or whatever, especially when i was a fan of their previous work. i’m encouraged to believe, at least through proxy, that the devs think that experience it’s providing is meaningful in some way.

like obviously developers are sometimes intentionally padding a game for marketing or perceived value or whatever the fuck stupid reason and i’m positive there are real examples of this, but when it feels “padded” to me, my first assumption is that i’m not the intended audience and i move on. it’s not that i can’t be disrespected by a game, but rather, i tend to give the benefit of the doubt up until it’s blatant/egregious. like, you’re trying to take your experience of the world and apply it to some dev you don’t know who’s had a different life experience to guess why they made certain choices and there’s a lot of potential for error, here!

on the flip side, many people do not enjoy a type of game that i enjoy, where mistakes can force you to replay sections, potentially many many times. for someone that just wants to see the rest of the game, that might look like padding, but to me that IS the game and it loses something essential without it. is it the intention of the developer of a smw romhack to waste the player’s time, or are they trying to communicate a feeling they only had in other romhacks, where a problem that feels like a wall slowly gets chipped away with practice and breaks away to elation when you finally get through a section that a couple hours ago you perceived as impossible?

(fwiw i do think some romhackers are just making things to show off how good they are at the game which i DO think is disrespectful. even antagonistic games need to be focused on the player, not the person making the game).

so yeah idk i do think there is a line, but many people use this phrasing way before where i think the line is, and often about mechanics they were clearly aware of soon after they started playing. to use a real example, i have a hard time believing dark souls is disrespecting you by having corpse runs; they’re building tension and stakes and it takes some negative emotions to communicate positive emotions in a meaningful way. it’s fine to not like that mechanic and say that it’s hampering your enjoyment of the game, but saying it’s “disrespectful” sort of makes me roll my eyes. not only do i think there are real reasons the mechanic exists and the people that made it actually enjoy the mechanic, but also you willfully accepted the contract when you learned it was in the game and continued playing. to me it feels like you’re misattributing the source of that negative emotion to the developer, but the developer has been about as forthright as they could be about what the game is.

12 Likes
9

I’d say wasting my time but then there are a lot of good timewasters.

I think respect is what makes the phrase feel heavy. Like I’m full on roleplaying the consumer at the complaints desk telling the manager why he’s disrespecting me when in fact I am disrespecting myself by not moving on.

Better to say this game is a slog or similar.

9 Likes
10

I would similarly think that the corpse run would be a mis-application of the term for the reasons that you mention (and would be annoying to encounter as such), and somebody using it would be better served by explaining why they don’t like the mechanic and how it affected their experience.

I also think it’s crucial that in this phrasing, it’s the game disrespecting your time, not the designer of the game, so doesn’t have to be about intention necessarily.

I got a little curious about this phrase, as I suspect it originated with somebody on the IC forums, or writing on the IC frontpage, and may have been @azurelore or possibly Tim. Looking at Google Trends for the search terms, there’s a clear huge spike in May-June 2008, so possibly something that got more widely linked around that period.

4 Likes
11

I wouldn’t use this particular phrase, but there is a particular aspect of many video games that is fundamentally time-wasting and gets on my nerves: making you redo executionally demanding sequences over and over again from the top until you get it right. i.e. the most inefficient possible way to train your motor skills. Sometimes it can be fun, getting a little further, faster every time, discovering what’s around the corner, trying to manage tension. Most often it’s only this way because that is how video games are, and it’s easier to program, and infrequent checkpoints are more demanding and gamers will feel good about having driven their face through the wall.

It’s particularly egregious in music games that let you die in five seconds after 2 minutes of easy perfect play, with no option to train on the challenging part or even just like, look at it. Dumb.

I accept it in literal arcade games that are out for your coins, at least there’s a reason for it. Otherwise it’s, oh, you didn’t really think about it did you.

7 Likes
12

I think there’s lots of ways a game can not respect the player’s time, not just padding or being unenjoyable. I’m most likely to complain about time respect in games I like!

some people (me) have strong time constraints. storytime: I started Mudrunners: Expeditions recently, “would you like to do the tutorial?” hell no! not just because it would be more fun/harder, or that I had played the other games (I had not), or that I know how to drive 4x4 in real life (somehow?), but because I had until 6pm before family dinner time and couldn’t spare a second

Cult of the Lamb doesn’t respect your time because you can’t save mid-crusade. Slay the Spire does, you can drop out mid-battle and come back later. Magic the Gathering: Arena has a Concede option to instantly take back control of your time. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom lets you skip all dialogue, including important plot information, leading me to “huh???” and work out objectives myself

when a game doesn’t let you pause, save, decline optional sections, skip or fastforward pointless storytelling, the developer is sending the message “my game is the most important thing the player has to worry about”, and it’s not true. we have phone calls, family obligations, power cuts, scheduling fuckups, other important things. and video games just don’t compare

sometimes also the game wants you to do one thing, and it sucks and another thing is much more fun. like deducing the objectives from first principles instead of reading text. when a game takes that option away from you, insisting that it be experienced the way the developer intended, I’m mashing the buttons impatiently, not watching the screen, waiting to get back to what I find fun.

games that respect your time respond to that. they guard against button mashing when player control is enabled. they are polite about railroading. they arrange their UX so that it doesn’t get in the way with slow transitions, dropped inputs, imprecise options. they pace things when you might lose progress to keep the time ‘investment’ loss low, and time-to-retry snappy. they make the game studio logo intros skippable, and start loading assets as soon as possible before the continue prompt appears

plenty of games are still fun if they ignore this, they can even be more fun! or the point of the game

13 Likes
14

i think this is where the concept of “addiction” comes in

there are some highly addictive substances out there but social alienation is often a prereq for having them fuck up your entire life, and you can base your addiction based emotion regulation strategy on things which do not cause withdrawal symptoms, for example, i once met a man addicted to stealing shit by abusing the amazon returns process in response to feeling undesirable emotions

the social fabric has been rent asunder by capitalism, therefore skyrim is popular

personally i like replaying short sections until you get them right, and i still enjoy multiple plans on different timescales taking a long time to play out but it’s often a queasy enjoyment because of the compulsion to remain engaged being front and center. it is part of the class of experiences where i can feel the historically contingent design of my brain being subverted by language and tool use, and so of a kind with lots of stuff i don’t like

on the other hand having these experiences as entertainment throws them into relief elsewhere. maybe if you cover your brain with too many track marks it’ll be harder for the poison to get injected

12 Likes
15

i don’t majorly disagree with what anyone has posted so far so i think my issue is largely with the word “respect”. anyone who has demanded “respect” in my life has tended to be a pretty shitty person so people claiming disrespect immediately puts them on watch. and i don’t know what “respect” means when applied to an object incapable of respect. respect implies intention or perception of intention to me, so disrespect would necessarily imply fault of the person that made the object.

6 Likes
16

I think it does mean something if you’re willing to anthropomorphize. I personally anthropomorphize all the time in full knowledge that strictly speaking it’s a fallacy, because it really expands the ways I can express myself. And when I do that, I also tend to be more casual about using harsh-sounding words that I would never use with people, precisely because nobody has a thicker skin than an object does.

Of course in this case it’s pretty ambiguous because there are also some specific humans fully responsible for the object. So the phrase is in some superposition between anthropomorphizing the game itself and accusing the game designer.

4 Likes
17

I will be pedantic and say “not respecting my time” is different to “disrespecting my time”. the latter is intentful imo, the former can come about due to a combination of factors

but the developer always has responsibility for their game

8 Likes
18

I’ve never respected my own time, that’s why my life is like this

8 Likes
19

i don’t really think i relate to treating either the developer or the game object as being responsible for the kind of experience i have, or at least it feels like it’s been a long time at this point that my play has often operated in vague opposition to the “author”

that and i imagine many design concessions considered respectful of the player’s time might not feel respectful of a developer’s time to implement!

6 Likes
20

at least where i grew up (midwest us) “you’re being disrespectful” and “you don’t respect me” are functionally equivalent statements and that’s coloring my perception of this a lot.

1 Like
21

i see that but you can definitely be respectful to someone without respecting them, i’ve been doing it constantly for like 30 years now

6 Likes