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