Games for Adults

Executive Summary:

"Gamey"-style games which can be played stem-to-stern in under an hour can easily be enjoyed by an adult. "Immersive world" style-games which focus on dozens-to-hundreds of hours of continuous story can not. Darn.

The details:

When people talking about games for adults, they tend to focus on the content. (Some) sex and (some) drugs and (a shit-ton of) violence.

The big problem I have with many games is that I simply can't fit them into my schedule. I want to enjoy epic RPGs and immersive action/adventure games, but I find myself increasingly turning towards sports games and quick multiplayer games since those are the only things I can shoehorn in.

Here's an average daily schedule for me. I'm sure many others have similar schedules.

Hours Task

.5 Wake up, pack bags and lunch, out the door
1 Gym
10 Work
.5 Chores (cook + dishes, laundry, bills, etc)
.5 Eating dinner
1 Practice spanish
.5 Get ready for bed + next day, wind down
7 Sleep

That's 22 hours, which leaves 2 hours for random other things. Which could mean 10 hours of playing games during the week. Except that 1 night a week I have Spanish class. 1 night a week I usually have some meeting/lecture I'd like to attend. And 1 night during the week I like to do something social/fun.

Which leaves 4 hours during the week of potential game playing time. Unfortunately, I also like to read, and watch a DVD now and then. So, knock it down some more.

Basically, this makes playing a "short" 12 hour action game occupy a month, and a "decent-sized" 30-40 hour game taking up the better part of a season.

So, the types of games I now gravitate to are ones with quick rounds, so I can start and finish a game within an hour (and preferably a half hour).

Madden and MVP baseball are great for this, and the franchise modes provide just enough connective tissue between each round to make the long-term gameplay interesting.

Advance Wars and RTSs are pretty good for this, although they sometimes take a little too long. You can save in the middle though, although how many times do you watch half a movie one day and the other half some other day? Errm, I guess sometimes.

Halo 2 and other multiplayer games also work really well because of the short turn-arounds. The big problem with these is you tend to compete with people who have lots of time on their hands, not to mention better reflexes.

Still, there is some room for story-based games which still have clearly-defined rounds which end in under an hour. RTS's such as Starcraft have a story mode which essentially focuses as a tutorial for the multiplayer mode, but also lets you enjoy the fiction of the universe in nice bite-sized morsels. "Episodic gameplay" could do this as well, and there are many games which could be easily broken down into episodes (Sly Cooper 2 was explicit about this with named episodes, although each took around 2 hours to complete so they fall a bit outside the window of quick consumption).