Longer + Harder

Being sick's never fun… but it is a good excuse to binge video-games.

Looking back at the video-game I picked to binge while recovering from a chest infection though, I can't rule out the possibility of the game's difficulty extending my illness even further, and yet, I don't regret it…

Because Project Gotham Racing 2 is still a really awesome video-game.

It's globe-trotting adventure across the real-life city streets with real-life DJ's speaking in their native tongue to present you that country's bespoke collection of songs, with a car-list featuring vehicles I've not seen in a racing game before or since, and a nail-biting career mode that had me fist-pumping the air like a child upon getting that platinum medal…

If you're a racing game fan, and you haven't delved into the Project Gotham Racing series, I'd highly recommend it. One of those franchises I didn't appreciate nearly enough in my childhood.

However, despite having every intention of finishing it, I had most of its 20+ hour career mode all-wrapped up in a matter of days…

I haven't yet.

And this is why.

Despite by this point having done almost every configuration of city, route, event, competition, goal, and type of vehicle characteristics…

It's still…

Going…

Now, yes, I do want to do everything I just listed in the game's most powerful machines… I just don't want to do 32+ events compared to the 12+ I had to do when this game's career mode started.

That's when I remembered…

I had the exact same issue with Amid Evil…

and about a dozen other games.

There's this trope that video-games have had essentially ever since they've started, that the further into it you are, the harder and longer it gets.

-insert penis joke here-

And it's one that ever since becoming consciously aware of it… don't get.

Like, I understand its origins in the Arcades, when a games profit was based upon Quarters consumption. By making a game's level longer at the same time it's getting more difficult, you're not just demanding more skill from the player to avoid payment, you're asking them to do it for a longer duration, with the added benefit of the more time they've invested personally, the more likely they are to invest financially.

But game-design has since moved far away from design tropes that originated in the arcades. Most games these days aren't based upon lives, continues, level-codes, time-limits, sub-30 second cutscenes, etc.

So it's strange that this phenomena remains.

Granted, the idea of demanding more skill from the player for a longer period of time, doesn't require a coin-operated structure. It could seemingly appeal just in the sense of player attachment, or (what I think is the biggest possibility) a value proposition.

In the case of Project Gotham Racing 2, it's got a Ferrari Enzo on the front-cover, meant to represent the fastest, most expensive, and most desirable supercar of its time. Spend a 20+ hour career mode only to complete ten races in that Ferrari Enzo before the credits roll…

Would piss you off.

Trouble is, by notably increasing the duration of every other chapter in a game, you're making the player spend more time not just in the things they want to do more of. Because of PGR2's commitment to this trope, I had to spend a good portion of that twenty hour playtime lumbering around in SUV's…

It can sometimes even lead to changes in the player's treatment of the game itself.

In Children of the Sun, I went from replaying levels over and over and over trying to get a better and better score, to just being happy to take my C- grade and move on to the next, having been ready for the game to see its conclusion eight stages earlier.

The incredible visuals of Amid Evil, taking my breath away with its imagination, and variety, stops doing that when levels go from being twelve to thirty minutes…

All the terror, and all the fear I felt while hiding away in Alien: Isolation's lockers evolved into treating the Xenomorph like an overly excited puppy, tossing out distractions while sprinting full speed across hallways with fewer options than a Car Combat fan in 2024.

Actually, I think that's the main reason I find this trope so infuriating.

It's not that it ruins the pacing… it's that it doesn't need to.

I don't recall the final boss in Dark Souls III being that much longer than everything else I'd done. I could be misremembering this (you're reading an internal monologue rather than a research paper), but I've definitely played games where the conclusion was more difficult, but the levels and stages weren't longer, so long as you were a skilled enough player, and if you weren't, it'd take longer to do, but not unavoidably.

I spent over an hour sometimes on a single stage in PGR2, because it demanded such precision, that the likelihood of me completing it without a single error that'd send me straight back to the beginning felt like 1 in 100… but because of that, I always knew what the error was, that victory was just a few corrections away, and when they culminate in that perfect run, that's why I'd jump out of the chair with a fist pump.

It didn't feel like a grind, because had I been a better player, that stage could've been completed in two minutes.

Meanwhile, unlike the events themselves, these final chapters in PGR2 take longer, no matter how good you are at the game. They're set in stone. Whether you platinum everything on a first attempt or not, you're spending more time doing more of the same thing than you did when you started, and as a result…

I don't care about that Ferrari Enzo.

After all, it's not like I'm going to do anything new with it.

P.S. I couldn't fit this in, but, a curiosity I have is how much of this is consciously done by Developers, because if it goes back all the way to gaming's very foundations… it'd be the easiest thing in the world for this to just be a habit.