I Started Playing Around Noon

 I'm sure Dead Space would be lots of fun...right up until I finished it.

If you use the duration spent playing a game as a metric for its quality, the best game I ever played was Neverwinter Nights, the play time for which I cannot track in hours because I spent the better part of four years often playing little else. I like to think that was a good return on my investment, and I often find myself looking for the same quality of investment in other games I might buy. Something that I can see myself playing not just from start to finish, but for years to come.

The aspect of NWN that allowed me to keep playing for so long was the user-generated content, made not only possible but frankly easy by the inclusion of the Aurora Toolset. When I was not attempting to assemble adventures of my own, I could be found playing the ones produced by any of the countless other members of the community. I've tried my hand at a small sample of other such toolsets, and while typically they aren't anywhere near as easy to operate as Aurora, their very existence means that whenever I run out of content for those games, I can simply and freely go download more.

Although I never bothered much with it at the time, NWN also had the other major means of extending a game's longevity: goddamn multiplayer. Goddamn multiplayer extends a game's lifespan in many ways - firstly because the added randomness of other human minds in the game make even repetitive scenarios slightly different each time, and because social interaction is fun on its own. As long as you enjoy the company, the game becomes little more than a framework for hanging out.

Unfortunately, I don't have a good relationship with most goddamn multiplayer formats because a lot of them are competitive, and I suck. Deathmatches are only great fun as long as you aren't the one dying all the time. Competitive games can still be friendly, but they do mean someone is winning and someone else is losing, which takes the steam out of things once a clear player hierarchy is established. Cooperative survival modes resolve this issue, but they tend inevitably to lead me to realize that I'm playing a game I can't win - staving off failure just doesn't seem as fulfilling as, say, completing an objective.

Now logically, the MgoddamnMO format might be just the thing for me - long-lived, cooperative and objective oriented - but the demands of solo questing and grinding counteract the fun of the occasional instanced dungeon, to say nothing of the forced interaction with a broad community of potential assholes. No, it's titles like Borderlands and the Left 4 Deads that keep me coming back, where I can grab a couple of pals and run a challenging, cooperative, and relatively short mission at the drop of a hat.