I have been a proponent of abandoning stuff that isn’t bring you joy for a while now. It’s not always easy for me. I am good about abandoning games in particular.
I wonder if part of the way you abandon games is because the medium intrinsically has no page length.
I almost never abandon a movie. I can see how much is left when I hit pause.
- We always check how long a movie’s run time is before we start it
- Lets make sure we have enough time to finish this before bed time
- Is there 30 minutes left, I’ll hold strong and skip the bathroom break
Total page count and page number is a constant part of my experience with reading.
- I’ll abandon a book depending on how far I am in. I might keep going if I think it has a chance to grab me back still.
- The lack of good page count and current page information on Kindle is one of the big reasons I hate that format.
- I want to know how far I am in the book. I want to know how many pages are left in this chapter. Should I start the next chapter or go to sleep? Maybe the chapter’s too long, but there’s a nice dingle I can get to?
Television is weirder with time relation.
- You know exactly how long an episode will last.
- You probably have a lot of expectations about episode and season length by genre.
- You have many fewer assurances about subsequent seasons and whether there will be any.
- Shows that are no longer ongoing you know everything.
Concerts. Live shows in general. Live performances. These are mushier. A concerts’ specific run time isn’t know. They generally follow patterns once you visit enough. Doors, opener, main act, encore. You can probably make some assumptions about the duration. You can see lengths of previous performances online. You can probably safely assume it WILL end that night at some point. And then even Burning Man still ends.
You can see the run time on albums and songs.
Physical installations or interactive art pieces or amusement parks are different. Those can hold you for infinite time… But at some point they close for the day. You leave and you have to go home. You have to choose your duration with that thing. You probably know it going in.
It is common to use How Long to Beat for games. This gives you a range and can help you sort of ballpark guess where in a game you are. This feels better than nothing, but it isn’t a great solution.
New media doesn’t have an intrinsic duration or length. Software has no properties except those that we create for it. Should we be creating and standardizing features around game length?
Things like Achievements can sometimes help give a sense of game length. These have a host of other effects that I’m not really a fan of though.
Tutorial and presentation design have examples here:
- Present an abstract and outline of the talk
- Tell them what you’ll tell them
- Show them slide number X/Y