It was one where you had to draw the line to separate the colors and run through all of the dots. It was kind of rough and I knew there was a tutorial puzzle somewhere but I couldn’t find it. All in all it was a really fun game that stands out quite a bit in my experience at PAX.

One question. Most of the game went for a simple style but then located in the house was a very strange picture. Any chance you could tell me a bit about it?

Looking good.

Can’t wait. Thank you very much for sharing this so early.

I also saw you but wasn’t sure if it was actually you – I probably would have shaken your hand and thanked you for making Braid, one of my all-time favorite games.

Two reasons I will now go jump off a bridge, I think.

Still, people complain about games being too short, whereas I rarely feel a game is worth finishing. By about the 70% mark, it’s boring me to tears. If the mechanics are interesting, or I can do some good exploring, I’ll play forever. I must have put 1000+ hours into Counter-Strike over 4 years, and probably 120 into Fallout 3.

so the game could be all about mazes like the other all about time, with a goal of… discovery? you talk about games and that they are like movies. more movies than games more books thank games, like Myst, it’s not agame it’s just a “grapic adventure” or a visual book where you click and something happens, not so much a game… even the creators came out and said it wasd just some pointless shit.

i just remember why games have mazes, after seeing Inception i thought of some games and it makes as much sense as jumping on enemies. after i heard the talk about fractals, authorship and looking for answers in programs or making a question to something you started an answer with… you could use mazes everything.

there are different philosophies and manifestos of what a game should be, “you can’t write”, “all visual”, “voice is just noise”, “talked with machanics”, ” no logos”, “never take control away “, “acces what ever part at what ever moment” etc etc etc

but i guess one has to find creative ways to break the rules, like how to use voice or acces the game, how architure influences behavior in fp 3d. but i am very curious of how you will use lenguage.

i was just going to bring my 2 cents or what ever the term in english is but i forgot what i was triying to let you know.

if you are looking for architecture (not something to put in your game) there are designs like post modern wich based on details, materials and forms nd not actual space, wich is not very good, kind of like substance over stile. the key to open the perfection of spaces is to look for a valance or harmony between of form and function, function is critical to space its the meaning of the space but form is what inspires a behavior but the space must have a function it must be meaningful, unlike form it can not exist just cause.

if you want to look at some forms and spaces and look or find a valnce, there is some times good examples a t 2leep and i suppose the movie The third and the seventh has some inspirational stuff, nothing to put in your game, but just somethin to get you exited

I was on the edge and, as I generally like long games, I tend to defend game length. But I can really make my peace with this issue when it is put like that. Whatever it is that makes a game satisfying, IF it can do it in 3 hours, I’m fine with it.

That being said, I do think that game length in itself creates a certain atmosphere and “cutting out the boring parts” is the excuse many mainstream developers would give you to make shorter, duller games. Maybe it’s a good thing if dull games stay short. The only thing that bothers me are games that had the POTENTIAL to make really good use of lengthier parts dismiss that possibility out of principle, simply because more popular games do it or because it becomes some sort of dogma (“indie games can only be good if they’re under 3 hours long”). This all can be interpreted badly. Despite that, I agree that game length shouldn’t matter… but only if it really doesn’t.

To be “charette” means to be late. And so effectively, you work all night long to compensate it, because you preferred to drink wine or eat cheese all other nights before the dawn of the last day.

Guillaume, a french reader (sorry for my poor english)

http://www.memphis.edu/cium/images/20080829-Chinese_Painting_Landscape.jpg

Jonathan, it sounds like this is going to be a beautiful experience. Is the game intended to give us that same feeling of reading Basho? The Witness…

This is simple…

And non-skill based games that are alike movie expereiences take longer because it takes you longer to do things in a game than in a movie, as the movie sets the pace.

I think it’s unfair to judge the medium when the medium is dependent on the user, and the user is what slows down the enjoyment. Am I right?

For instance, Portal was a total let-down/disappointment. My brothers talked it up like it was this incredibly amazing thing. I finished it in 56 minutes. Yes, less than an hour. And I’d never seen or heard anything about it prior to firing it up the first time. I’d have been supremely upset if I’d paid $60 for it.

Then there’s something like Borderlands. I love that game inside & out. But there’s a way that some of the length was built-in to the way you navigate the Pandora world. Running or driving around probably accounts for 50-60% of my time spent playing. Granted, I was shooting other enemies at times while driving, but there is a place where perhaps some of that could have been shortened or condensed and still given the player the same experience.

One game that I think is the perfect example of length and satisfaction is Left 4 Dead (and Left 4 Dead 2). There aren’t any particularly grind-worthy spots. You can beat the entire game/story in about 5-6 hours (on Easy or Normal) and it feels compelling and riveting the whole time. I never felt like anything was added simply to make you run further. Even some of the longer levels keep you on your toes by not knowing if there’s another Special around the next corner.

For me, it’s not necessarily about the time… unless someone built up the experience and then it didn’t deliver. Portal was a thumbs down, Borderlands was a thumbs up with one caveat (from hype to delivery). Somewhere in the middle is where games should aim…

technogran: But surely its about the enjoyment you receive from playing a game that you don’t want it to end?And yes, there is also the expectation that if you have spent up to £40 or £50 on a game, you should get your moneys worth. I would feel cheated if I spent that money and a game just lasted a few hours.
But for most of the type of games I play such as Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect etc, I don’t want the game to end, its that simple.

Well, people usually think of computer games as escapist fantasies, so that’s what we expect of them. We don’t see why should the conclusion of the plot be able to stop our interaction with the world of the game… it’s like being thrown out of a bar after the last call.

Chess is another game which could be considered very short, but no one complains because it’s intended to be played again and again.

I think the problem is that if your level designs are created by human beings, they must have a finite length, and therefore the game must end. For gamers, the interesting thing is the gameplay in and of itself – being caught up in the mechanics of the game. If there is also an interest in level design variation, there must be and end, and you want to postpone that to keep up the fun of the gameplay. So you want a long game rather than a short.

Fundamentally, the problem lies in trying to combine something that has no duration but is a state (the gameplay) with something that must have a fixed scope (the content the creator has put in). By completely removing the variation, as in chess, or making it simply random, as in Tetris, you escape the problem.

If it costs the same as a movie ticket, yes.

Also in you comment above you mentioned that “The Witness” uses code from Braid, that was quite surprising as I realize that a lot of the base code may be the same between 2D and 3D games i find it odd that a 3D adventure game set on an abandoned island and a 2D time traveling sidescroller share any substantive amount of code, could you elaborate slightly? Also is there any blog post of interview in which you mention the basis of the method behind time traveling in Braid? Or is that something you would like to keep under-wraps as I’ve been looking allover the internet and so far Im still coming up short…

Are you going to populate it with critters? Or is going to be completely devoid of animal life?

For me, a college student and a life-long gamer, money is a big issue for me. As much as I may love a game like Heavy Rain or Portal, it’s extremely hard to justify shelling out 50+ dollars for a game that’s going to last me a few hours. Now, that being said, if the price is lower, as most indie games are including your Braid, it’s an entirely different situation. I am more than happy to pay out 5-10 bucks for a game that will only last me a couple hours if it’s the quality of Braid or Limbo, to name a few. However, if I’m going to shell out for a new, feature game, I hope that I will be able to spend more than a couple hours on it before I’ve exhausted it.

But as you can imagine, we are writing a whole bunch of new stuff for this game.

If you relate video games to gameboards, this opinion of the length of games is not valid. Besides, many forms of media take up more of a consumer’s time, like books.

I hope you don’t feel I’m brown nosing here, but Braid was a fantastic demonstration of how I think games should be. The narrative can be completed in 45 minutes (and I spent days figuring out how – best knee injury ever) but the first time I played it, I took about 5 hours over a few days.
I’d enjoyed it the first time through and was all but ready to shelve it, having decided in my head that the time trials were just for the obsessive and I’d never manage any of them.

Then one day I mentioned it to a friend and, I’m sorry to say, I commented on its length. Not that it wasn’t long enough, I just enjoyed it so much I wanted more. And he said “Did you get all the stars?”

STARS!?!?!

I went right back in and though it took me a while I found them all, and while mastering the (sometimes mindboggling) techniques I started to think “How long would a full playthrough take? Knowing what I know now…”
So I went for it, and did it in about 65 minutes, but I’d botched a few bits and tried again. About 55 minutes. Then 50. Still mistakes, I could see them as I was making them. I started quitting part way through when I fell to my death and new that a 3 second rewind was too much.

Finally I had a near perfect run, few small mistakes, and as I bolted through the epilogue I was thinking “I’ve almost made it, even if I miss it’ll be by a few seconds and I could see a few seconds worth of mistakes.” Final time: 42minutes 8 seconds!

The relief on seeing that time come up and the little “blip!” of the achievement was like the final climax of the game. One of the best feelings there is.

That’s what made me realise that I don’t want 40 hour games that I quit 10 hours in. I want 45 minute games that make me work for 10 hours to complete.

I think it really comes down to bang for the buck. If a game is a short experience, it must also cost less to be of value to the consumer. I think iPhone games are a good example of short games that are considered to be of the appropriate value. Sure, it’s a 1 hour or less game, maybe it’s fun on repeated plays or maybe not, but it’s 99 cents. That feels right…

For developers, the issue is really the time it takes to generate assets versus creating the content once the assets are in place. Many games can generate tons of content once they have a large set of assets, far beyond the scope of the initial concept. So what most developers will do, is generate a lot more content in order to increase the value.

I think the mistake is when all this content they generate after the initial concept is just filler, with no thought put into it, and no feeling of progression in the concept. What you end up with is this empty experience that just absorbs your time. No one really wants that, no matter how fun the initial concept is. The first Halo is a good example of that.

Yeah, everyone loved that game, but boy oh boy did they beat a dead horse with some of their levels.

Anyways, back to the point. There ARE short games out there. Many of them are satisfying experiences. Why aren’t short games popular in the mainstream? Because the blockbusters are still games like Halo, Starcraft, and other giant games that take multiple hours of play, and beyond that have a multiplayer component that can be played forever.

Why? Because they CAN be played nearly forever, and thus are of tremendous value to the end consumer. It’s basically what Blizzard banks on. People still play Starcraft 1… Everyday… Sometimes as an esport… For money…

So, to answer the question.

“Why can’t video games give me a powerful, high-density experience, so that after 3 hours I am satisfied, I feel like I have had enough?”

Because in order to feel like you’ve had enough, you have to feel like there’s nothing more to experience, but that will always have less value to you than a game that makes you feel like there’s always something more to experience.

Of course, not everyone feels like that. I have had those experiences, Portal and Braid being my favorites.

1. The game is just ENTERTAINING, that is, making fun, having nice graphics or sound, just cute, etc. (even if the game mechanics is dumb)
- Examples: Peggles (VERY relaxing), Tetris 4000 (good effects), Bombliss (old SNES-game, good sound experience on chain reactions), Pizza Frenzy (entertaining clicking stress), … and of course Braid

2. The game gives me “A-ha!” experiences and comes up with unexpected game play/behavior/results.
- Examples: Osmos, Miegakure could be such a game

3. Soving puzzles, tricky situations. That’s the typical adventure genre, however, I personally do not like long and complex stories and unlogical puzzle solutions or broadly scattered puzzle parts. It’s a good puzzle if you can EASILY overview the available possibilites but it’s not obvious how to solve it and/or if it’s just FUN to solve it.
- Examples: Day of the Tentacle, Myst and Riven, but not URU (unnecessarily long, boring, strange puzzles), but also strategy games like Master of Defense and Defense Grid (the SMALL maps are the key!)

4. Game allows to be creative, fostering to come up with a solution only YOU could have come up with.
- Examples: Crayon Physics, Game of Life, Spore

Braid is a very good example satistying these features (not so much the latter, however) WITHOUT requiring you to play hours on only one puzzling level.

Looking forward to “The Witness”!

Movies and books have more of a steady build to a climactic ending — a straight progression — whereas games are trying to replicate that in terms of the overall experience while, as I said, simultaneously wanting to keep you engaged and playing. So while the experience is “satisfying” in games, it’s not “the same” satisfaction because you don’t want to play for a couple hours and quit. Or put another way, you wouldn’t stop mid-way through chapter one and re-read a paragraph for the next 3 days straight because it’s such a good paragraph.

I don’t know. Maybe this is off base. But it’s the first thought I had as to a potential difference.

Most of my favourite games of late have been short enough for me to finish before I got bored and moved on: Braid and Portal are the two most recent examples.

Not only are they brilliant games in their own right, but they explore all their gameplay options sufficiently, without repeating – and then call it quits.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of games in my hall of shame list where I started, but didn’t finish: Fallout 3, Saints Row 2, Arkham Asylum.

I only finished Far Cry 2 because someone said the ending was worth the effort (not sure about that). And I’m 35+ hours into Dragon Age: Origins with no end in sight. That’s like 3 seasons of the Sopranos!

Sometimes less is more.

I think a video game can be a completely satisfying experience in only a couple hours of play. I believe the Rebel Assault games were only a few hours each, and a lot of old arcade games have only a couple hours of content as well. The problem is one of eliminating “down-time” in the player’s experience. Puzzle games aren’t really a good candidate for short form gaming since most of the time playing is figuring out the puzzles rather than really experiencing the content (most of the puzzle games I have are about 10-20 times shorter on the second play through as the first). A video game that is as dense as a movie or TV show has to railroad the player, keep them moving forward and experiencing the content.

Long games can be amazing experiences. Some games, especially RPGs such as Oblivion, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Baldur’s gate 1+2, and others deliver a long gameplay experience that requires the player to invest a lot of time, but in turn deliver a real sense of being an adventurer, and embarking on a quest. No movie let’s me do that. Books are the closest thing to that, but only if they are good enough to identify with the characters.

With my wife, kids, and work, I rarely have any time to play 30+ hour epics like I used to. I can only play one, or at most three, of those in a year.

But thank Zeus for the indies where I can download a title like Limbo and have a nice satisfying gameplay experience without it consuming so much of my valuable time.

Yes I loved the latest Star Trek movie and I felt great after leaving the theatre, but you can be sure I want to see a sequel. If I hear a good song on the radio, I want to hear the whole album. And if that’s good I want to see the artist put out more albums. Movies have sequels, music artists have albums, painters have whole galleries, comics have issues, TV shows and sports have seasons.

In the land of the consumer, the consumer always wants more. Almost every form of entertainment, as long as the product is quality, is long form. This is where video games have a leg up on the rest. They can give you more of an experience in one package. The one game is already long form. You don’t have to sit through an entire season of 24 or rent each Matrix movie. One package, one experience. And of course not every minute spent playing can be a winner, just like not every episode (or even season) of Lost pushed the story dramatically forward and there’s certain 007 movies I could have done without. Whether or not the time was worth the effort is something each individual needs to ask themselves. It’s a balance like everything in life.

A three hour game will never be completely satisfying, just like a single quality TV season or song won’t be. Entertainment will always be a “more” business.

If you want experience a similar short emotion like in films or short stories, you could try Interactive Fiction, there are a lot of amazing stories out there, and most of them are within the range of two to three hours of gameplay:
http://ifdb.tads.org/

For example, try Spider and Web, or A Change in the Weather, the two of the same author.

Regards,

That time window proved just long enough to be given two or three hits of puzzle-solving — then I had to leave to wait for my hardware to cool down and reset. While I waited my brain cooled and reset too, and I was able to approach each session with a clean mental palate.

Compare that to an online FPS. Let’s say Counter-Strike, since it’s split into discrete rounds. If you’re like me you play and play until you’re exhausted, and even if you don’t play again for days your palate remains clouded by that last session.

But have you ever gone back to a long-session game after a break of a few months? That feeling of deep satisfaction is exactly what I enjoyed during every one of my short R&D puzzling bursts.

This leads very quickly to the idea of enforcing short sessions by scheduling events — and behold!

Racing and simulation games tend to be very long on content, but the individual activities (races etc) are generally short, and it’s those bursts of activity that are the memorable parts.

The longer non-simulation games I’ve enjoyed (Oblivion, Far Cry 2, Diablo II, Half-Life, Mafia) have tended to have a lower level of mental energy required to play most of the time (Oblivion/FC2/Diablo), or had a sense of gameplay “segments” or “chapters” which avoid boredom (The Half-Life series is wonderful for this, and Mafia kept things varied).

In terms of a story-driven games, I would absolutely favour richness and density of content over length. If a game is outstaying its welcome, it’s being done wrong in my opinion, and with a reasonably busy life, I generally stop playing when I feel the game is no longer rewarding.

Long games like Oblivion, Diablo, and Fallout 3 have their place, but there shouldn’t be criticism for shorter -form entertainment being short.

The only counterpoint I have is that games are substantially more expensive to purchase than a DVD or Blu-Ray film, and generally require a higher upfront investment in technology (although with the PS3 being a very capable Blu-Ray player, this is less of an issue).

If some games are to become shorter-form entertainment, then they need to be correspondingly less of a monetary investment. I look at XBox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Store, and even to an extent the iOS App Store, and see a plethora of short-form games for very reasonable prices.

I wonder how these influence the creation of your future games.

My mother told me I can’t make a difference, my father told me I’ll never leave a mark. That when we die we wont be remembered, that art is a drug to escape our true senses, that we wont be as good as old poets or don’t think of anything but sex b/c we are so young, that we can’t achieve greater thought to make people aware or interested in an idea. When I grow up I want to be like you.

I wish their was an explanation somewhere of who thought this up and more importantly, how they convinced other people to be in it. Not that it isn’t an interesting idea, but I imagine it would be a tough sell.

As a side note, I feel they should have gone with a different font, and Tim’s reaction in part 5 to walking along the timeline was about the same as my reaction at first, too.

This is the form of simple beauty I feel needs to be put into a fully realized 3D game. If there’s anyone to agree with me, I should expect it to be yourself.

Density was my idea, but you can have it if you like
(All right, I stole it from a small game my friend syn9 made called Prompt Critical. More developers need to think of their game play’s utility function.)

Anyway if I end up liking it as much as Braid, I don’t mind waiting a bit more for the big reveal.

Anyway, does anyone actually know what The Witness is about? Old school puzzles? Playing with some interesting game play mechanic, like the time in Braid? Hms hms hms.

Isn’t the island supposed to be uninhabited?

Soo… You find audio/video recordings, or is there some sort of narrator?

(or maybe a-la Myst hmm was it IV? Where when you found books, you could read them with voice-overs).

I’m still very curious to see how this will differentiate itself from the Myst series (including the evolutions of the last few offerings) gameplay-wise.

Thank you, that’s shaping up as something I’d love to play. Also I like the idea that you have this place you can roam freely, enjoy the view, solve a puzzle or two at your own pace – without something chasing or fighting you (there won’t be something like that, right? please?) or constraining you in any other way.

It’d be safe to assume that similarity to prior games is at least acknowledged and understood if not explicitly deliberate.