Are videogames trying to make me contemplate my mortality? Fine. I shall.

No one can account for their time on Earth quite like a player of videogames. It's hard not to, as software and hardware conspire together to tally up your time gaming and taunt you with it at every turn. Steam helpfully logs how many hours you've spent on a game right below the Play button, Nintendo Switch users can see their hour counts in their player profiles, and just about every platform will send you a year-end email tabulating how many days your combined hours of gaming add up to. No one — not my partner, not my employer, not my very anxious dog — keeps tabs on my time quite like the videogames I play. 

Decades of this quantification has cultivated an unusual relationship between the player and time. Countless souls, intrigued by a game, will habitually check HowLongToBeat.com to see what a new game they're interested in might ask of them. It does not matter that, statistically, almost no players finish games. The ritual persists: a given videogame's estimated completion time is weighed against the player's feather of Anubis, and depending on some arcane calculus based on genre, cost, prestige, marketing, and prior commitments (both to other games as well as people), a game is deemed worthy in its demands or preposterous. 

I find this behaviour absurd. Bonkers. Strange. A terrible relationship to have with an art form or leisure pursuit. I object because I have identified it in myself, and recoil in horror. How unfortunate that there are some games for which the first thing you hear about them is how long they are! Dragon Quest VII, for example, is "the one that's a hundred hours long," necessitating an abridged remake. Assassin's Creed games have a similar reputation, as if those not in the habit of playing them ought not to start unless they have some sort of lengthy medical leave planned. And then there are the truly outrageous feats like this month's Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, a remake of the second game in Falcom's 13-parts-and-counting soap opera, one of the most staggering time-sinks in the medium.