Small long games

[droqen]

Regarding a327ex's
"Small long games"

[droqen]

Essentially, you can think of games as either big or small, and either short or long:

Big vs. small refers to how long the project would take to complete and/or how many people. Short vs. long refers to how long the game lasts to the player. A game that lasts a few minutes or a couple of hours would be short, a game that lasts tens or hundreds of hours would be long.

The space of big games, either short or long is explored by lots of people. The space of small short games is also explored by lots of people, generally indiedevs. But the space of small long games is largely ignored.

Perhaps ignored it too strong a word, but for some reason people assume that projects that last people a long time should also take a long time to make, but to me it seems like this isn't true. So I've set my sights on exploring this space, largely because it aligns well with what I'm interested in making.

The above is pretty much the entire piece that I'm responding to. Seeing Empathy as play, and vice versa, I find myself wanting to make a 'small long game' again because of how 'replayability' lends itself to this form of play for other people, and for myself: I'm going to have to spend a long time working on a game in order to make it complete. It needs to remain playable to me throughout development. For that to be the case... it needs to tend towards small longness.