In the past few years a new criteria has slowly emerged as a staple of self-styled cultivated deliberation on any given game’s quality: whether or not it “respects the player’s time”. I have to admit I’ve been consistently confused, and increasingly bothered, by it: what does that even mean?
I’ve heard it deployed to discuss things like a game’s reliance on randomness to increase its playtime, or its (un-)fair difficulty, or the UX features it provides to let the player focus on content they may appreciate more. Sometimes a game apparently disrespects the player’s time because it repeats gameplay segments too many times, like boss phases or corridors that need to be backtracked through; on the other hand, a truly time-respecting game would supposedly let you save right before a challenge or show you where to go next without letting you wander around aimlessly for too long.
Well: I call bullshit on all of this!
It doesn’t convey anything
My first reaction when I encounter this style of criticism is to wonder why we can’t just… say the thing. If you find it irksome how game requires talking to the same characters repeatedly to progress: you can just say it’s too verbose. If you find its menu navigation is overly convoluted and tedious: focus your thoughts on the UI specifically. The most obvious issue with “this game doesn’t respect my time” is that it obscures the actual complaints, transforming them into fairly useless remarks: there is potentially zero overlap between what’s meant and what’s interpreted.
It’s also an easy way out, an escape hatch saving you from actually engaging with your feelings. Let’s say a game demands constant backtracking – is the real problem the backtracking itself, or that its environments aren’t developed enough to sustain repeated visits? Or does the backtracking simply highlight an unsatisfying traversal gameplay? What is the core of the issue? It’s certainly not that a quantity of time was ‘wasted’ – because, by definition, time spent playing cannot be wasted.
Games can’t waste your time. They’re games. Some would say the very act of wasting time is what playing entails, though I’d argue play sidesteps that notion entirely and is unconcerned with whether your time is properly used. Saying a game wastes your time is like saying a book doesn’t do your laundry. If your laundry needs to be done, put the book down for a bit and go do it. The book is innocent in this matter. The game is not to blame for your poor prioritization.
It introduces an insidious perspective
Of course, many games are intently crafted to make you forget about anything else in your life that might need your attention. And indeed many games will use your slowly growing guilt about how much time you’ve invested in them, to push you to spend real money towards making the game happen faster – most obviously F2P games, which, having opted out of an upfront price, need to monetize something. Fair point: that is the only instance where I’d concede a game is wasting the player’s time. Though I’d also argue these are more exploitative tools for resource extraction than they are games.
And because the notion of “wasting the player’s time” is lexically adjacent to exploitative mechanics, using it in unrelated contexts frames all games as subject to these same rules. In talking about games in these terms, we’ve already fallen into the trap of thinking about them with a productivist mindset. How much you enjoy a game becomes dependant on how much time you spend playing it, and whether that time is ‘productive’, i.e. if it presents a satisfactory “time spent / content delivered” ratio. This is all the more true for big budget games that, while perhaps not overtly dangling ‘time saver’ boosts in your face for you to buy, still use ‘time spent in game’ as a key performance indicator – competing with other time-consuming activities like Tiktok. The natural consequence is design mandates that aim to keep players in the game at all costs with little concern for whether they enjoy their time spent playing, and take inspiration from the same exploitative F2P design practices. And so on one hand virtual worlds are filled with superficial activities; and on the other hand ‘time-saving’ shortcuts and UX features are implemented, not because they are inherently beneficial but because they keep the player hooked.
In truth, the only way that ‘time spent in game’ makes sense as a criteria is if you think of games in an adversarial fashion. And the only reason you might be worried about your time being ‘wasted’ is if you approach play as a task that needs to be optimized. As if completing a game was a chore that players want to do as efficiently as possible, and developers want to extend as much as possible – a battle for brain minutes where no one is actually having fun, even if they’re sometimes tricked into thinking they are. That’s not what games should be!
It misunderstands what games are about
Games are not tasks. Games are not instruments devised to consume your time. Games don’t owe you a good time. Games don’t owe you anything. And you don’t owe them anything either! As a player, you can just walk out! A game will do what it needs to do, and if that’s not to your liking, you’re free to walk away. And as a developer, you can reject the notion that time needs to be a part of the equation at all. We all need to fully detangle ourselves from this idea that the amount of time we spend playing a game is correlated to our appreciation of it, and that this time must be profitable.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, it’s: Play is not a transaction! I implore you, as a player, to move past this lens that suggests an investment of time ought to be rewarded in equal measure with moment-to-moment pleasure; and as a creator, that the measure of a good design is its ability to convince (or trick) the player to continually invest their time in the game.
Only then can you look at a game that seemed to never have a moment of friction and perceive its interesting flaws; and only then look at a game that’s pushing you away and decide: “actually, I’m gonna stick with this for a little while”. When you are free from the drive to fill every second with endorphins, you can finally contemplate why you feel the way you do. You can bask in the discomfort or the dullness. You can understand what it is that’s making you feel this way, and maybe recognize the intent, adapt your playstyle, perhaps change your mind, or simply end up at the same conclusions and move on – but with the satisfaction of having engaged with a work, with the medium. And having learnt more about yourself in the process.
What better use of one’s time could there be?