Two Hundred Hours in One Room: What a Very Long Role-Playing Game Does to Attention

The first forty hours of this game were the ones everybody wrote about, and they wrote about them accurately. The systems introduce themselves with unusual patience, the early quests are unusually well written, and the sense of a world with its own business to attend to is established more convincingly than in anything else of its size. All of that is true and none of it is what I want to discuss, because forty hours turned out to be the least interesting fifth of the experience.

What I want to discuss is hour ninety, and hours ninety through two hundred and four, during which the game changed into something the coverage had no vocabulary for.

The point at which tasks become routines

I can name the transition precisely because I keep a paper log, and my note for that evening reads: did the eastern circuit again, did not check the objective list once. The eastern circuit was not a quest. It was a sequence of six locations I had begun visiting in a fixed order, for reasons that had been practical forty hours earlier and had since become simply what I did when I sat down.

By hour one hundred and twenty, I had four such circuits. None of them were designed. They emerged from the intersection of where the game placed its resources, which vendors restocked on which schedule, and a set of preferences I could not fully reconstruct even while acting on them. The game had stopped issuing me tasks and started hosting my habits.

A long game's real subject is not its story but the version of you that emerges from spending that much time inside its rules.

This is normally reported as a defect. The reviews of games this size are full of phrases like begins to feel like a job, and I understand the complaint, but I think it mistakes a description for a criticism. Yes: it begins to feel like a job. So does a long relationship with any place. The question worth asking is not whether the routine forms but whether the game is any good at being lived in once it has.

What a game that is good at being lived in does

Three things, on the evidence of my notes.

The first is that it keeps changing at a scale smaller than its quests. Around hour one hundred and ten I noticed that a particular market square had gradually acquired more stalls, and I could not identify a single moment at which this had happened. The game had been adjusting the settlement in response to a supply chain I had been unknowingly feeding for weeks. Nothing announced it. My log records me standing there for several minutes trying to work out what was different.

The second is that it lets you be wrong for a long time. I spent roughly thirty hours convinced that a faction's leadership was structured one way, acting on that assumption, and being quietly disadvantaged by it. The game never corrected me. When I finally understood the actual arrangement, at around hour one hundred and fifty, the correction was retrospective and enormous, and it recoloured thirty hours I had already had.

The third is harder to name. The game is comfortable being ignored. There are days in it when nothing is happening and nothing is trying to make something happen, and the absence of that pressure is what allows a routine to become a routine rather than a schedule.

The log, and why I keep one

Not for accuracy, though it produced the hour counts below. I keep one because writing a single sentence about what just happened is the smallest available unit of critical attention, and because it changes what happens next. On the evenings when I wrote, I noticed the market square. On the evenings when I did not, I did the eastern circuit.

The shape of that table is the argument of this essay. Two-fifths of the experience occurs after the point at which the game stops introducing anything, and almost nothing has been written about that portion of any game of this kind, because almost nobody who writes about games is given the time to reach it.

The second playthrough

I did not intend one. I began it to check a specific claim about the faction structure and continued for another thirty hours because the early game, played by somebody who understood the late game, was a different and in some ways better text. The market square, on a second run, is legible from the first visit. Whether that makes it richer or merely smaller is the question I have argued with myself about for a month and have not settled.

Against the phrase "content"

One last thing. Everything I have described here would be classified, in the vocabulary the industry has given us, as content: hours of it, to be consumed. But the eastern circuit was not content. Nobody made it. It was the residue of a system that was indifferent to my presence, and it is the part of two hundred hours I remember most clearly.

I do not have a better word. I would like us to find one, because for as long as the only available term treats a long game as a quantity to be got through, the most interesting thing these games do will keep being reported as the moment they went wrong.