I just added Moondrop Isle to the 15 point section and updated the leaderboard.
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Two more games completed, with very different amounts of time investment needed to get my points:
Plundered Hearts (20 points, 2.25 hours)
Curses (20 points, 11.75 hours)
Plundered Hearts was pretty fun but I think it may be overvalued ā¦
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Wow! Thatās a really fast completion of plundered hearts! Maybe Iāll knock it down one category. Should I do that before or after totaling your points?
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I think anyone else who plays it this year should get the same number of points as I did, so if that means you only want to give me 10 or 15 points for it instead of 20, do it.
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To be fair, IMO I think a lot of Infocom on the list are rated too high. Games like Hitchhikerās Guide may be big, but are smaller than some of the games on the 15 point scale.
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Thatās very true, but HHGTTG is famously so hard that many people never even made it to the ship. Perhaps there should be a little poll or ranking of the infocom games in terms of ātime to completionā!
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Well, IFDB now has a playtime feature, but no-one has entered anything for a lot of older games, especially long ones (Iām the only person who has put in a time for Curses, for example). It would be great to have some sort of community effort to fill those in, but Iām not sure how (most people who played the Infocom games years or decades ago probably donāt remember clearly how long they spent on them).
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I finished a bunch of the games listed: Anchorhead (around ten hours) and Counteefeit Monkey (12 hours only the first easy round)
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May I be added to the leaderboard? Numbers going up motivate me also 
This year I have finished:
A Mind Forever Voyaging (10 points, 7.5hrs)
Excalibur (5 points, 2.5hrs)
Iāve also played two that arenāt currently on the list: Type Help by William Rous which imo should go in the 10 point category (I played for 7ish hours), and The Trials and Tribulation of Edward Harcourt by MelS and manonamora which took me 3ish hours. I saw that you reviewed it when only the first 2 chapters were out, the final chapters were released recently and Iād say itās very worth replaying to the end.
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This is next on my list. Iām very curious.
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Added to the list! Type Help definitely seems like a 10 point game.
And Iāll add Edward Harcourt to my to-play list, I liked the first few chapters!
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If Type Help counts now, then Iām on the board with a whole entire 10 points! Maybe Iāll play more than one long game this yearā¦ maybeā¦
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Do people ever classify games by room count, or puzzle count, or word count in the source as reported during compile? Some games have 1 room and could still take a while, but I suspect there is some correlation to size of universe and timeā¦
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I gather room count was used as a proxy for game length in the days of commercial IF, which worked about as well as youād expect it to once it became a marketing point (adding huge, sparsely-implemented mazes to pad out the number, for example). A search for single-room games on IFDB shows just what a range of sizes you can have even within a single room (some of them can be finished with a single command, others are IFComp-sized).
Source word count is a metric thatās specific to Inform 7, and in any case only available if the author chooses to share it. Itās also just as much a function of depth of implementation than length of the play experience; a game like Eat Me that heavily customises the parser responses would weigh in as much longer by this metric even if it took the same amount of time to finish it.
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Choice of Games works advertise themselves by word count and Iāve seen non-CoG choice-based games in a similar style do that too, but for parser games Iāve never seen word count given a prominent place in the gameās materials. (Though that doesnāt necessarily mean itās never happened!)
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I think word count in an Inform game might say something about effort or quantity of content, but quantity of content and completion time are not the same (I suppose someone could put this on my tombstone).
This is as good a time as any to plug the ātime to beatā feature at IFDB. Adding your playtimes for games will help the community find games that are right for them. And provide scoring data for events like the Accelerated IF Readerās Program, too!
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I added you!
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Thatās an excellent question, and other people have good answers.
For me, I made this list pretty much entirely subjectively; I did narrow things down a bit with my play times from my reviews, but I donāt presume to think itās universal.
For puzzly games, I think āpuzzle countā is the biggest thing, and for story-based games, Iād say āscene countā is the biggest.
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This is really hard to define, though. For example, say typing SEARCH GRASS in the garden finds a rubber ball. Was that a puzzle? What if thereās a photograph inside the house of a dog playing with a rubber ball in the front garden; does that turn it into a puzzle?
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I think āword count of the unique text seen in a complete playthroughā would probably be a reasonably good metric, but itās extremely hard to determine. And even then, you have to ask whether (for example) if the author adds a unique failure message for every unlikely action, that should add to the gameās word count or not.
(Iām still a big fan of community-sourced play times as a practical measure of length, but getting people to add those for longer games on IFDB is still slow in gaining traction.)
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