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. 

"Getting to the end of them is not the point of playing them"

Granted, it is not the worst idea to have an acute awareness of how one's time is spent, and a healthy respect for your own mortality. It is good and mature to know what sort of chicanery you might be getting into before you commit to it. But games are not commitments, and neither are books, television shows, concept albums, or Marvel movies. People make commitments to other people. Between a human being and an inanimate object, there is no such bond. You can always stop. It won't even hurt anyone's feelings.

So what does all this fretting over the time a game demands accomplish? We have already, presumably, decided that videogames are a worthwhile way to spend at least some of our time, yes? One of the terrible paradoxes about the human relationship to time is that, the more precise a culture is in its measurement of time, the more tyrannical its relationship with it is. Capitalism, for example, demands a constant accounting of hours. It is interesting then, that games start here, with this sort of relationship. 

Consider Trails in the Sky. Should I think too much about those hours — not just the 60-odd hours I will likely spend in 2nd Chapter, but how many I might spend on the next dozen games, up through this year's Trails Beyond the Horizon — the decision to bother with this series as a busy adult who writes about games and other media is downright foolish. They're not even all that respectful of your time on a craft level: you could probably trim the whole saga by a dozen hours if you just cut all the footage of characters walking into, or leaving, a room. (Newer entries, hilariously, add a fast-forward button.) The entire first game is an almost unbearably slow prologue that fans insist is essential. I disagree and think it's fine to just skim the game either by sampling it yourself or watching someone else play so you can get to the second game where the plot actually starts. 

I'm not normally this gracious. For a long time, I spurned these games, specifically. Yet I have all these questions I want to ask of them. I'm intrigued by their persistent interest in journalism as a vital organ of society. (Yes, every journalist is a narcissist seduced by their own reflection and, in only this way, I am not special.) I am delighted by their hyper-compressed depiction of a modernising world that goes from steampunk airships to cell phones and the internet in seven years' time. I like that they're a bit abrasive, indulging in anime tropes that toe the line of good taste, daring you to abandon it before you see even half of what's in store. 

It isn't terribly likely that I will make it to the end of these Trails games, but getting to the end of them is not the point of playing them for me. I am curious, and I find indulging my curiosity rewarding. I think of games like places, and I enjoy whatever time I'm able to spend in them. I don't care if the hours I devote to Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter amount to a significant portion of the game, or are even that good. I wanted to know, so I went. Perhaps I will get the chance to know more, some day. I refuse to count hours I've not yet spent. 

There's a Tom Scocca essay about mortality I think about often. Scocca was 47 when he wrote it, and finds himself doing this constant string of generational math, contemplating how many 47 year-olds that were alive when he was born are still with us, and how every 47 year-old that was alive when his father was born is now dead. In doing this math, he notes that we're not as far from the previous century as we feel, that we are all not so much running out of time but spilling out of it, rushing in with our brief lives and ushering others out. "I keep sliding the numbers around, and as I do, they shove each other out of the way," Scocca writes. "The people don’t all fit."

I read those words and I feel foolish about the practice of counting all these hours, as if I know how many I have to draw from, or that I'm even wise enough to know how best to spend them. If I find that I've racked up 300 hours this year swearing at roguelikes and clicking through RPGs, what am I meant to do with that knowledge? I'm not telling anyone, for one. And one can't consider their hours too closely without wondering if they could've spent them better. Here is the truth: you can always spend them better. 

There's no need to place the hobby on a hierarchy here, to pontificate on how time spent gaming could've been used to call a friend or help someone move or learn guitar. We can leave those judgments out of it, as hindsight is harsh enough even on frivolity. You could have spent the hours poured into an adequate game on finding your new favourite. Your life could be marginally nicer, had you made choices slightly different from the ones you made when you drank one and a half light beers and booted up Steam. 

This is the heart of my ire for hour counts in videogames and the platforms that host them. I find their crude sums a measure of insecurity; another side of the coin that promises players a list of features justifying their purchase, as if there was a way to arrange the numbers and have them add up to some sort of fulfilment. I return to Scocca's essay: we can't balance the equation of our lives. There's no room for it. We are all caught up in the relentless rush of life, indistinguishable from one another in a roaring river of humanity. Wasting time, using it wisely, or staring off into the middle distance. I am lucky in that I can consider spending some of that time playing a ridiculous JRPG or six. Tomorrow I may decide to never play one again. 

Perhaps you'd like to see some final judgment here, or find my zen approach performative or annoying. I suppose that's fair. It's tempting to hedge in a piece like this one, to not overextend in a way that might embarrass you down the road. So I will leave you with what I currently believe, having thought about this enough to produce all these words: the best ways to spend your time don't involve accounting for that time. But also: if your videogame takes six or fewer hours to finish, you should consider putting that in the title.