Are games converging on standard play lengths?  Other media forms have de facto ranges:  movies at 90-120 min, popular music at 2 – 4 min, concerts at 2 – 3 hours, etc.  There are plenty of exceptions, but even those are almost always within the same order of magnitude.

What about games?  Lighter, more casual fare allows for play sessions of a minute or two (everything from solitaire to various Facebook titles).  Many console titles ask at least 20 minutes of you.  And it’s hard to imagine having any meaningful experience in World of Warcraft in less than an hour.  These all feel a bit muddier than other media types though, and there’s no consistency across a given platform or market segment (i.e. the ranges are huge compared to movies, music, et al).

Does this lack of clarity help or hurt games?  Does it create tension for the user to not know in advance what they’re getting into?

Or have we gotten to a point where people do have expectations associated with a given platform or segment, even if many games aren’t following those standards?  Are they then disappointed when it doesn’t match, or worse, do they not bother to try a game because they assume all titles in that category require a certain time commitment?

I do think standard play lengths are a potential problem for all media forms going forward.  The interesting question to ask though, is whether consumers are helped or hurt by these formalized expectations (or for that matter, whether content creators benefit from these implicit constraints).

When I speak of desire versus friction, I’m talking about a player’s desire to play versus the friction that keeps them from playing.  Desire is driven by a number of factors:

• production values — not just audiovisual assets, but quality of gameplay
• perceived investment — how much time has the player spent already, how much stuff do they have or progress have they made
• game playing community — both the range and variety of people, plus the personal relationships within the game
• content interest — is it a compelling subject or type of play to this particular consumer

Friction can be external or internal to the product, such as:

• having to pay to continue playing, or having to pay too much or by a means unavailable to the consumer
• having to play too long in a given session, or being not very interruptible
• not having the platform to play the game
• not knowing the language
• steep learning curve, or difficult to understand
• it’s too hard, or inability to make progress/succeed
• takes too long to start playing
• have to remember too much from session to session

I’m sure there are plenty of other examples.  The point I want to make is that total desire needs to exceed total friction for the player to keep playing.

That’s all well and good, and rather obvious.  To take it one step further:  a game must introduce friction at some point  – for play or economic reasons — at which point you risk raising total friction above total desire.

The key is to widen the gap between total desire and total friction to the point where it’s safe to introduce more friction.  That’s particularly important if you’ve made it difficult or unappealing to continue play without coughing up some dough.

One final thought:  total friction and total desire are unique for every individual.  You can manage them to the best case scenario for your entire audience, but that’s no better than setting a fixed price for your downloadable game and being happy with your 1% conversion.