When four hours of one game is like one hour of another

One thing I haven't stuck to very well since I revised my schedule in April is the idea of doing 2 hours of a game each day. I've put up a post every two days, as planned, and most of those were written after 4 hours of play, as planned.*

My actual daily /played time though varies quite a lot, and I find that aside from external factors like what else I'm doing that day or my overall mood, which game it is that I'm currently on has a big influence on how long a typical session is.

It's mostly to do with how the game is structured, and how involved the minute to minute gameplay is. To illustrate what I mean by structure, Lord of the Rings Online is an almost entirely open world game, with quests that run concurrently and are completed incrementally, and that lets me log out just about anywhere and at any time. I've found that this freedom to pick up or put down the game at any point actually lends itself to longer sessions – I can just let the questlines lead me along until I've had enough, then resume exactly where I left off next time.

Conversely there's City of Heroes, which is more akin to Dungeons & Dragons Online in that it's heavily instanced, and once I'm into an instance I can't log until it's over without losing my progress and having to do it all over again when I next log in. Also like DDO, the length of any particular instance in CoH can be hard to predict, so if I've just finished one I might think twice about starting another straight after it. In episodic MMOs like these two it's much more likely that those 2 or 4 hours of play will be made up of multiple short sessions rather than one or two long ones.

The second factor – the minute to minute gameplay – I can illustrate with the same games. LOTRO isn't a hard game – indeed at times it's way too easy – and while that is something I've got some issues with it does mean that it's also very relaxing. I can go with the questflow almost idly, without having to put too much effort or energy into any individual encounter.

(The downside of that is that it can get boring, as it started to during my recent run of Evendim.)

In City of Heroes, on the other hand, I'm usually running close to the limit of what I can handle thanks to the flexibility of the notoriety settings. The combat in CoH is far more involving than that of LOTRO, but it's also more demanding, and that too leads to shorter sessions. It's the same reason I can play a turn based game like Civilization for hours at a time, but I'm unlikely to do more than an hour of Doom or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In a single sitting.

Of course not every game falls into these exact categories. Neverwinter has LOTRO's broadly open world structure but far more intensive combat. However the sheer speed of the very intuitive combat gives the game a lot of momentum as it's easy to get swept along by it.

Likewise games with strong stories – like Secret World Legends and to some extent Star Trek Online – can pull me along with that story but at the same time have natural break points at the end of each stage of those stories. If it's been a particularly satisfying sequence I'll often want to end the session when it's over to let what I've just experienced sink in, rather than rushing straight into the next part of the game. To draw a parallel, I can binge-watch multiple episodes of a good-but-not-great show on the CW, but when I watch somethng like Hannibal I'll stretch it out over days or even weeks because each individual episode is something to be savoured.

Add into all this the fact that I only occasionally do more than one session of a game in a day and that's why I'm usually ahead of schedule on some MMOs, like LOTRO, and behind on others, like City of Heroes.

*A few posts have been written when I've fallen behind on my actual gaming schedule, because I'd sooner play catch up on played hours than miss a post. Several of my more general think-pieces that don't talk much about what I've specifically been doing in-game fall into this category. Like this one.