Fifteen Minutes

by Sam Witt
January 24, 2001

After I finished reading House of Leaves a couple of weeks ago, I found myself thinking a lot about time, space, and our perceptions of them in a gaming context. Time and space are both tools in the arsenal of the GM, and as such, they are as fluid or as concrete as the need be. In one session, days may fly past as characters travel through a scenic countryside, but in the next the tense seconds of a conflict are handled with the precision of an atomic-clock while space is neatly divided into 10' by 10' hexes to allow an examination of tactics and strategy.

But in online games, things have to be a little more stable. Time passes at the same pace for everyone, because the real world serves as a measuring stick, but it's impossible to say just what that pace is. Should a minute in the real world equate to a minute in-game? If it does, how can we justify the lightning speeds at which characters jet around, or the speed with which they accomplish tasks? And the same goes for space and distance. They have to be related to time, but the balancing act between realism and fun is often difficult to maintain.

Players want worlds that feel vast, filled to the brim with interesting content that takes days to fully explore. Yet, they don't want to have to travel more than a few minutes to get to the meat of the game. An informal survey of about a thousand players gave me a fair measure of the time people want to spend moving from one point to another in a game, and it's fifteen minutes. Long enough to feel that you've gone somewhere, but pretty easy to swallow, really.

An extension of that idea is that fifteen minutes is about how long you have to convince a new player to stick around. From the moment the game client pops up, the clock starts ticking - if you want the player, you have to sink your hooks in almost immediately. In an age of instant gratification, positive feedback and tantalizing content has to be right up in the players' faces right freakin' now.

That means that character creation as we know it must go away. Throw a basic set of concepts at the player, let them pick what appeals to them, then get them into the game. Leave room for them to add the details later, but don't waste their time with exhaustive skill lists and five hundred types of hairstyle. All of that can come later, let the character's actions in the game determine what type of person they will eventually become, and allow them to fill in the details of their appearance over time, whenever they feel the urge. Deep thoughts can come later – for now, just get their hands on the wheel, and their feet on the gas.

As always, let me know what you think, my fifteen minutes are up.