Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Do people who play a single game exclusively have the right, um, idea?

The Thinker: Chris Dahlen

The Source: GameSetWatch

The Quote: A $60 game purchase can either be the best value for your entertainment dollar, or the worst. On the one hand, we have games that are disposable entertainment - an experience that can be consumed in 8-10 hours and set aside.

While bonus achievements or a token multiplayer mode might extend the short lives of Dark Sector or Condemned 2: Bloodshot, you're really supposed to treat them like this week's Hollywood blockbuster: catch it on opening night, forget about it by the next morning. As a critic, I see plenty of these disposable games. Vampire Rain. Viking: Battle for Asgard. Bullet Witch. In the crit biz, we call these "rentals."

But let's look at the other extreme, where a new game isn't like a movie, but a sport. You can obsess over Rock Band or Warcraft the same way that a golfer keeps hitting the links. Yes, you're shelling out for the sequels, the expansions, the online fees and other add-ons, but at heart you could play the same game and stick with it for months - all while finding new partners and competitors to challenge and fuel your rise to dominance. Isn't that the mark of a great game?

And what if the industry focused more on one-game players? Instead of jumping on the next big thing and finding out it's Heavenly Sword, or worshipping the graphics of an E3 demo only to find out you've been drooling over Assassin's Creed, or wasting even an inch of copy on the latest movie tie-in game--what if the biggest factor in how we judge a game was its durability?

The Reaction: First, let's do the math. $60 for 8-10 hours of gameplay equals $6.00-7.50 per hour. That's more expensive on a per-hour basis than a two-hour movie (but cheaper than, say, a Broadway show). Even worse, if you've spent $60 for the game, gotten a couple of hours in and determined that it's not as good as you'd hoped, your choices are to a) put it away and waste the money you've spent; b) play on, grimly, in an effort to wring the full value out of your expenditure (though as we've said previously, your playtime also has value); or c) trade it in to GameStop for some fraction of what you paid for it and use that store credit for something else. If, however, a game provides you with 80-100 hours of entertainment, you're looking at 60 to 75 cents per hour. That's a great value by any medium's standards.

Of course, as we learned with our post of last year titled "Expansion Pack: Which Would You Rather Lose, a $60 Videogame Or a Save File?" not everyone looks at their playtime in such mercenary terms. Also, Dahlen and the monogamous gamers for whom he speaks may simply be wired in such a way as to focus on a single interactive experience to the exclusion of all else. But much as Mitch Krpata's "A New Taxonomy of Gamers" (our The Big Idea post for April 8th, 2008) can serve as an excellent way for developers to think about the varied impulses that drive different players of even the same game, Dahlen's post offers another worthy category: fidelity. As a gamer, are you a serial monogamist, who plays one game at a time before moving on to the next? Are you polygamous, playing multiple games to various stages of completion? Or are you monogamous, playing one game exclusively, forsaking all others, until boredom do you part?

If developers were to more explicitly consider these categories as they build their games, there could be benefits for all gamers. We've previously discussed such concepts as gaming density, or the idea of gameplay per square inch in a titles as varied as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, with its time-based game design, and Halo 3 with its Skull modifiers, campaign scoring and Forge map editor. Prompted by a Vs. Mode discussion of Criterion Games' Burnout Paradise, we extended that idea further with the concept of The Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment, saying:

The Everlasting Gobstopper of Interactive Entertainment, however, is the logical outgrowth of the dialogue we've been having in this Vs. Mode exchange. The idea isn't that Burnout Paradise morphs into Gran Turismo or MotorStorm, but rather that it maintains and expands its support for multiple styles of play without ever losing the essence of what makes it Burnout. A number of gamers, including myself, are sad that Criterion didn't include circuit races and Aftertouch. Some might also miss the police cars from previous editions. All of this is stuff that Criterion could bring back as downloadable content, overlaid on the existing world of Paradise City.

You wrote a post earlier today about Halo 3 and its content expanding features like Forge and Arcade scoring. What if Criterion and EA not only released a downloadable file establishing circuit races, but also let you create your own circuit races simply by driving through the city, automatically blocking off the surrounding streets, as if two "Tron" lightcycles were tearing side-by-side through Paradise City? What if Aftertouch and Pursuit were one of many modes that you could turn or off, like the game-modifying skulls in Halo 3? What if Criterion added a car customization mode, letting you swap out not only Boost Types, but also paint jobs and decals--or design them yourself, as in Rock Band? What if they--gasp--brought back classic Crash Mode? That's what I mean by the Everlasting Gobstopper approach to game design.

In other words, since a variety of assets are already going to be built around a few dominant modes of play, why don't more developers consider alternate types of gameplay that can be built on top of those same assets? After all, the medium is malleable enough to support it. By considering the needs of the monogamous gamer and how far down the rabbit hole he or she might like to go, developers might discover other modes of play that would be of interest to serial monogamists and polygamists--or they might simply provide a welcoming embrace for those who start out playing the field, but subsequently settle down and embrace the simple pleasures of videogame monogamy. It's worth thinking about.

The Verdict: Green. Still, we're not sure we're ready to be monogamous in our gameplay--no matter how much Rock Band wants us to settle down.