FDQ: Quality or Quantity?

Okay, so the dichotomy isn't perfect: there are great games that are short, and there are not-so-great games that last forever. But this week's FDQ deals with your game night preference: would you rather play more shorter games or one long game? Answer in the comments!

(This FDQ inspired by a question @ianoble asked on Twitter. Also, sorry about the lack of FDQ last week. Technical and other difficulties prevented it from getting posted.)


@FarmerLenny answers:
Like my answer to most other iterations of this question, I'm a quantity player. Part of this is because I like variety, but part is also that I have a hard time staying interested in a really long game (at least one that lasts longer than two hours). Of course, I haven't yet played a game that lasted longer than two hours that I thought should have kept going (see: Android). Most of the games I play over and over fit within an hour, and many of the ones that I love can easily hit the two-hour mark with experienced players.

There are some exceptions to this. I play most of my games over lunch hours, so at game nights recently I've wanted to play longer games just because they don't hit the table as often. In general, though, I'm a quantity guy through and through. (I did say I'd play in one of @Futurewolfie's soon-to-take-place epic games of Twilight Imperium...but I'm in it for the snacks.)

@Futurewolfie answers:
I generally prefer games to last around an hour, although a lot of that has to do with lunch hour being the most common time that I play.

That being said, I love games in which you build up something epic.  You start small, plot a strategy forward, and by the end have something awesome going on with a lot happening in between.  <1hr games tend to be simpler or rushed, which is okay sometimes, but I do love that epic feel.  Many games take around 1.5 hrs which is fine, and usually leaves room for a couple games on a single night.

And then you have those epic, huge games that last hours and hours.  You really have to plan ahead to even have a chance of playing.  But they leave plenty of room for snacks, hanging out with your friends, and good times.   I enjoy those... but those are once-in-a-while events, not regular gaming staples.  Even if I do like all the parts to a game and wish i could play more often, it just doesn't make much sense to.

A Two Part Post, Part I: Bloated

One of the challenges of writing a story or creating a film is coming up with enough material - juts being productive enough to complete a story.  A bigger challenge, however, is trimming down that story and making it shorter, because many scripts and stories are filled with a lot of extra lines that the writer is in love with, but the audience doesn't really care about.  One of the first things I learned in my film classes was to cut things out, to make it shorter, shorter, shorter.

So, while a 3-hour movie might be impressive if it has a truly worthy story to fill the time, usually it just means someone couldn't check themselves and cut down on their own self-serving content.  The Lord of the Rings
was really long, but it still had to cut out a lot of the content from it's source material.  King Kong was also really long... and it could have lost about an hour and a half of the film.  Which would have distinctly improved it.  Some films – I’m looking at you, Transformers 2 – are clearly just made for the flashy effects, and those should be even shorter, lacking that they are in a fulfilling storyline with real characters.