Slow Playthrough Quarterly
Games played to the end
Practice
Paper logs
Hours, not scores
Retail copies only
Slow Playthrough Quarterly
Games played to the end
The working rules behind every essay in this journal, written down so that readers can judge the method as well as the argument.
Every writer keeps a handwritten log while playing: a date, a session length, and at least one sentence about what happened or what they noticed. This is not a scientific instrument and we do not pretend otherwise. It exists for two reasons. The first is that the hour counts we publish come from it. The second, and more important, is that writing one sentence at the end of a session is the smallest available act of critical attention, and it changes what a writer notices in the next session.
Logs are not published. Figures drawn from them are, and where an essay quotes its own log the quotation is marked as such.
Each essay states the hours its writer recorded and whether the game was finished. That is the only quantitative claim we make about a game, and it is deliberately a fact about the writer rather than a verdict about the work.
We do not rank, star, grade or recommend. If an essay's conclusion is that a game is remarkable, the essay says so in sentences, and anyone who wants that view has to read them.
An essay may only discuss a game its writer completed. Where a game has no terminal state, the writer names their stopping point explicitly — a season, a campaign, a self-set goal — and reports the hours to reach it. Where a writer abandoned a game, they may write about the abandonment, and the piece is labelled as such rather than presented as a full account.
Nothing is published within three months of a game's release, and in practice most essays appear between six and twelve months afterwards. This is a deliberate handicap. It costs us readers and it removes any possibility of competing on speed, which is the point: an essay that could have been written in launch week is not one we need to publish.
Every essay is read by at least one other contributor before publication, who is asked for one thing only: to identify the sentences that are performing rather than thinking. Arguments are not softened for balance, and we do not require a writer to be fair to a game they found tedious, only to have finished it and to say why.
Figures, hour counts and any timed measurements are checked separately against the writer's log.
The consequence is that we are slow and poor and that no essay here has a commercial reason to reach one conclusion rather than another.
The images in this journal were made for it and are not screenshots. We use photographs and illustrations rather than captured footage because a screenshot of a long game shows a moment, and the essays are almost never about moments. Every image is described in its caption; none is intended as documentary evidence about a game.
Factual errors are corrected in place with a dated note at the foot of the essay stating what was wrong and what it now says. Judgements are not revised retrospectively: where the journal has changed its mind, it argues the other side in a later issue and links the two.
Brief quotation with attribution is welcome, in print or online. Full reproduction, unauthorised translation, and use of this journal's writing as training material for commercial machine learning systems are not permitted. Our essays and hour counts may not appear in advertising or on storefront pages.
There is no account system, comment facility, mailing list or contact form on this site, and no reader information of any kind is collected or held. The privacy notice sets out what that means in detail.