Video games come in all shapes and sizes of varying scopes and length. Some are best experienced in almost sparsity as the repetitive nature of a sports simulator lends itself quite easily to pick up and play a few matches prior to moving onto another game each gameplay session. Similarly for racing games or arcade style games which focus on a repetitive gameplay loop. While that isn’t to say I haven’t lost many a night to game after game of Halo, Call of Duty or more recently Woah Dave! (take a hint with the frequency with which I bring it up) such games can work over a prolonged gameplay session or in short bursts each day.
In contrast to this more recently we’ve seen what I like to call “single sitting” or “one day playthrough” games (I’m not looking to define a term and if one already exists then I’m unaware of it). These are games which are best experienced over the course of a day or in a single sitting, games that you should aim to start and finish within a single day. Games such as Journey, Brothers, To The Moon or Gone Home all of which are short enough to dedicate a day to just sitting down and experiencing the game as one single experience. Typically they aren’t the usual first person style blockbuster campaign and instead often focus on more uncommon design and narrative techniques. Now granted your average Call of Duty style single player campaign can be started and finished on a lazy Sunday but that isn’t the style or type of game that comes to mind when I think of these “one day playthroughs”. It hardly matters how many times you start and stop playing a typical Call of Duty campaign in comparison to a game such as Journey in which one of the key gameplay features is travelling together with a companion. In some ways such games are a lot more personal than the traditional “Triple A” title. As if every last second of the development was spent on crafting the perfect vision of what the game was intended to be. Time spent ensuring every last second conveyed the designers intent as second wasted is much more substantial when you’ve got so few of them with the player.
So that’s what I’ve been thinking about today as I’ve started constructing a list of games I’ll only play when I can dedicate and entire day to doing just that. I’ve you’ve any suggestions feel free to post them below.
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