![gorogoa right wrong gorogoa right wrong](https://img.youtube.com/vi/LMNvnb10l4c/0.jpg)
The gaming equivalent of literature's short story only really became feasible with the rise of the Internet, which reduced distribution costs down to practically zero. And today's high-end games increasingly have to justify their ballooning development costs by stretching out the amount of time those beautiful, expensive art assets appear on players' screens. While costs came down in the CD-ROM era, the ability and compulsion to pad out games with more (often repetitive) content only got worse.
![gorogoa right wrong gorogoa right wrong](https://steamsolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/gorogoa-100-all-chapters-all-achievements-in-video-en-fr-gorogoa-768x768.jpg)
So games of the era got padded with extreme difficulty spikes or gameplay tweaks that extended the "value proposition" of the limited ROM storage space (think you beat Ghosts and Goblins just because you got through the last level? Think again). Thus, "quarter munchers" that kept players paying through addictive loops and/or punishing difficulty tended to be the cabinets that survived.Īs gaming transitioned to cartridge-based home consoles, there was still market pressure for developers to justify the relatively high price (historically speaking) of all that shipped plastic and silicon. In gaming's early arcade days, encouraging players to keep dropping quarters was an economic necessity to pay for expensive cabinets and computer chips. There are important economic, technical, and social reasons that games historically weren't designed to be finished in a single sitting. Instead, today the game seems more likely to be buried in Steam's absolute flood of indie copycats and those "forever" games taking up more and more of our gaming attention.
![gorogoa right wrong gorogoa right wrong](https://img.xboxachievements.com/images/achievements/5090/150929-hi.jpg)
If an experience like Kids came out as a diskette for early '90s PCs and Macs, I think it would be a minor cultural touchstone on the order of Flying Toasters. I don't really want to spoil the entirely unique experience by saying any more than that, but this 30-second trailer gives a good feeling for how the game's smooth animation and striking, minimalist, black-and-white characters create a creepy, claustrophobic aesthetic that's hard to shake.
![gorogoa right wrong gorogoa right wrong](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/items/557600/a375bb7ee7e193a874d1e57531db601387aa3122.jpg)
The latest fine example of the form is Kids, a "game of crowds" that "allows you to move with and against crowds until everyone is gone," as its Steam page puts it. But there's also something to be said for a game that makes its impact quickly and lingers with the player for much, much longer. This class of "lunch break" games-single-serving, single-player narrative experiences designed to be played once, in about an hour or less-will never be as big or as popular as games that can demand thousands of hours of player attention. These days, though, I'm frequently more fascinated by games at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. There's something to be said for these kinds of endless experiences. The idea in each case is to create an experience that can engage a critical mass of players for hundreds or even thousands of hours over a span of years. This overarching genre of "forever" games encompasses esports like Hearthstone and Overwatch, social hangouts like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, and endlessly repetitive grinds like Destiny 2 and even Candy Crush Saga. Further Reading Keep playing, keep paying: Ubisoft seeks games with “longterm engagement”These days, the game industry at large seems to be focused on games that can keep players playing, and paying, indefinitely.