You could keep on chewing on it, but any enjoyment you got out of it long since vanished.ДЄs the gaming industry now entices 6 year olds to 50+ year olds, the real trick is to find a game concept that can keep you entertained for as long as you want. I don't think I have actually finished a game in over 5 years, like gum, I chew on it until the flavour runs out. For the most part, while I still pick up the odd RPG, after about 10 or so hours of game play, I find it boring and repetitive, so I stop playing. Now, I find that any game that requires 40 hours to play a real turn off. Bauldur's Gate came out shortly after I entered the job market, and after staying up well past 3am and having to go to work the next day, I realized I really couldn't spend that much time playing games. Or rather, couldn't invest the same amount of time playing these games because of stupid things like a career and life. Of course, RPG's are great if your the type that likes to hang back and battle baddies to improve your experince and skills, or get enough gold to buy premium equipment.ДЄfter leaving university (that protective cocoon where your life is planned out for you, you only think you have freedom) and got a job, I found that I wanted to spend less and less time playing games. This is when games actually offered an actual time limit, or rather, given ideal conditions, you would finish the game in x number of hours. I really got into RPG's in university when the genre really matured. Nintendo games never seemed long enough, and while they were fun to play, finishing a game several times in a row seldom left you wanting to play it a gain.

Every now and again you'll find a 10 hour game that seemed like it had the right amount of content, but usually people are just left wanting more.ДЄs a kid, I routinely found it annoying that a game would end after spending days and weeks play it. However, on the whole, games seem to have gotten shorter. If the next Grand Theft Auto game uses this space to its fullest we could easilly see a 300 hour epic in the making. However technology like Sony's Blu-Ray allow for a lot more content to be put in a game. Higher resulotion also takes up more space on game discs, reducing the overall amount of content a company can include in a game. Developement costs are expected to increase, meaning that more things will have to be cut to stay within the budget. I suspect that this trend will continue to increase in certain regards with the next generation consoles. Despite that fact that companies like Square started ramping up the graphics in their RPGs, they still managed to be somewhat lengthy.ДЄfter this it seems like a lot of games have chosen to focus more on improving the graphics before adding more game.

Personally, I think that consoles games peaked in terms of length around the 16-bit SNES and 32-bit PS era.

Happy game length