I’m curious to hear people’s ideas for how to set up something like this.
Should there be set options for game length?
If so, any suggestions for what those options should be? (Are there length options in place for IFComp or Spring Thing? Do we like those options?)
How do we handle it when there is disagreement on the length of a game–for example, one person thinks this is a 1-hour game and another person thinks this is a 2-hour game? Do people vote on the different options and we display the most popular one? Do all of the voted-for options get displayed (in the example, both “1 hour” and “2 hours”?) Do the lowest and highest voted-for options get displayed as a range (“1-2 hours”)? Do people enter their own individual estimates, and the average gets displayed (“1.5 hours”)?
I’m not promising to be able to implement whatever people suggest here. My skills are limited. But I think it’s worth discussing.
Also, if we come up with options that we like, we could consider using those options as tags in the meantime.
Ah my bad, I didn’t realise there was already an open issue for this.
Yes, it would help finding games of certain lengths when wanting to play something.
Like the short tag help, but there’s still a big difference between 5min and 30min, even though both are considered short.
A Numberbox where you can enter a number of minutes (or the fancy ones where you can have both hour:minutes), then an aggregate/average of all the values.
(OBV it should be for completed playthrough only)
SpringThing has micro/short/full, for less than 15?, 30min-1h, more than 1h (iirc from the submission form).
IFComp has the “time fork” options: below 15min, 15-30min, 30min-1h, 1h-1h30, etc…
In both cases, only the author can indicate the time needed to complete the game. It’s not often accurate (especially for the very long games).
Average of all indicated times. Only counts when a certain amount of times are entered (similar to rating averages and numbers of stars).
Do you mean that extreme outliers would not be included in the average? Like if most people entered 1 or 2 hours, and one person entered 20 hours, the 20 wouldn’t be factored into the average because only one person entered it and it’s so far off from the others?
I like the idea of HowLongToBeat-style averages, although I don’t know how difficult that would be to implement.
Alternatively, I’ve thought it might be nice to have a “how long did this take you to complete?” field for reviews (rather than having a length field as part of the main entry for the game), which would make it easier to skim reviews and get a sense of the range of play times.
Just using the median would probably work as well anything more complicated with discarding outliers.
If you want to give a range then you can report the upper and lower quartiles, e.g “25-40 minutes” where the 25 is Q1 and the 40 is Q3. (Or some other figure, say the 10th and 90th centiles if you want to minimise the number of people who have an experience outside the advertised range. But that assumes you have a sufficiently large number of people actually inputting this data.)
Also, but I meant more, the average only becomes a tangible useful measure in the ranking after 5-6 people added their time.
EDIT: Adam has actually a better way with the median
Tying those two things together means you get less data for both, though: I sadly don’t have time to write reviews for IFDB, but I wouldn’t mind putting my playtime in while marking the game as played. And there are legit cases where people review games without finishing them (copying over IFComp reviews based on 2 hours of play, for example) so you’d have to either accept reviews without a playtime or get distorted data.
Sorry, I was envisioning it as optional but I wasn’t clear about that. I agree it’s not ideal, anyway, it was just meant to be an option that would theoretically be easier to implement.
I’ve not followed the IFDB discussions in detail, so maybe this was the inspiration in the first place, and am not into visual novels so maybe it’s very different, but have you seen that the VNDB does this? The main page has something along these lines:
Play time Long (30h from 66 votes)
And you can click through to a page with every “length vote” and explanatory notes from many users.
(Initially I picked a page at random and included links, but it turned out to be not only commercial but also disgusting, so I made the comments above more generic!)
Echoing @Jonathan about the VNDB.
Having the median visible directly, with the option of seeing the lengthy lists if wanted (with notes).
Also have the estimated time linked to your profile as being optional (like a checkbox that’s always unchecked).
This aggregate-of-multiple-players’-times idea feels like the only one that is likely to work.
As a reader, I’d ideally want to be able to see more than the cooked playtime: some sort of breakdown of the contributing times, to get some idea how much consensus there is, whether there’s a bimodal distribution, etc.
(Not necessarily identifying individual contributors.)
I don’t know if people being unwilling to make their times public is a real problem (I don’t think anyone’s spoken up to say so yet?), but perhaps providing only coarse logarithmic time bins (5min, 30min, …, 4 hours, a day, a week, etc) would avoid any sense of competing for the best time.
(The Best Tiny Game Award thread also discusses some of the difficulties of settling on a consensus playtime.)
I’m unsure how I feel about it. Some people choose not to make their wish lists and their “I’ve played this” lists publicly visible, and publicly putting a time on a game seems like saying “I’ve played this.”
But making the individual times publicly available without automatically displaying whose time it is–that’s an interesting idea.
When the estimated length of time is displayed on a game page, should it be rounded to the nearest 5 minutes (or some other number of minutes), or should it not be rounded, so that there could maybe be results like “3 hours 37 minutes”?
Also–any thoughts on a user being able to enter an exact number of minutes vs. only being able to enter in increments of 5?
I like this idea