Standing caveat. One player, one set of habits. Somebody who reads terrain differently, or who arrives at a game expecting to be told what to do, would produce different figures from the same fourteen games. What follows is a record, not a measurement of the games themselves.
What is being timed
The clock starts when the game does and stops when a goal is written in the log. A goal qualifies if it is specific, if it was not requested by the game, and if it was pursued for at least twenty minutes afterwards.
Wandering does not count. Learning the controls does not count. See what's over there does not count. Get water to the flat ground before the settlers arrive counts, and that one — from Plateau Holding — is timestamped at forty minutes.
| Notebook | First goal | The goal | Hours logged |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarry Gap | 0:12 | Get a block across the pit | 52 |
| Chalk Flats | 0:15 | Build a tower that stands | 4 |
| Cog And Beam | 0:20 | Lift a weight with one rope | 23 |
| Plateau Holding | 0:40 | Water to the flat ground | 96 |
| Terrace Works | 0:50 | Level the second bench | 34 |
| Spiral Station | 0:55 | House four crew before nightfall | 38 |
| Lowfield | 1:05 | Plant the middle terrace | 44 |
| Drift Habitat | 1:10 | Get power to the far module | 16 |
| Orchard Row | 1:30 | Graft the old tree | 19 |
| Ridge Claim | 2:20 | Find a defensible shelf | 8 |
| Birch Lake | 2:40 | Cabin on the north shore | 29 |
| Moor Tower | 3:15 | Survive the first winter | 71 |
| Pine Hollow | 3:35 | Reach the upper valley | 11 |
| Salt Marsh | 4:00 | Dry enough peat to last | 27 |
The first finding: speed is a property of legibility
The four fastest games are all physics or construction sandboxes, and all four present a physical problem in the first shot you see. A gap. A pit. A weight on the floor next to a rope. The goal is not invented so much as read off the environment.
The three slowest are all wilderness or survival games where the environment presents conditions rather than problems. A moor is not a question. A birch forest is not a question. It took two hours forty in Birch Lake to arrive at a goal because there was nothing in the terrain arguing for one thing over another.
A fast first goal means the game's materials are easy to read. It does not mean the game has anything to do after you have read them.
The second finding: speed does not predict duration
This is what makes the ledger worth keeping. Sort the table by first goal and by hours logged and the two orders barely resemble each other.
Chalk Flats produced a goal in fifteen minutes and ran out in four hours. Moor Tower took three and a quarter hours and ran to seventy-one. The single fastest game in the file, Quarry Gap, finished at fifty-two hours while the fourth-fastest ran to ninety-six.
| First goal group | Games | Median hours logged |
|---|---|---|
| Under 30 minutes | 3 | 23 |
| 30 minutes to 1 hour | 3 | 38 |
| 1 to 2 hours | 3 | 19 |
| Over 2 hours | 5 | 27 |
There is no gradient there worth reporting. If anything the middle band does worst, which with three games per band is noise rather than a finding.
What speed does predict
One thing, consistently: how quickly the game will be understood. All four games with a sub-thirty-minute first goal closed for the same reason — exhaustion of the system rather than boredom or frustration. All three slow starters closed for different reasons entirely.
A quickly-legible sandbox is quickly legible all the way down. The gap in Quarry Gap teaches you the physics; once the physics is known, so is the game. Whereas the moor's illegibility at hour three was the same illegibility that was still producing new structural surprises at hour sixty.
The uncomfortable possibility
That this ledger is measuring me. A player who habitually looks for a problem to solve will find one fast in a physics sandbox and slowly in a wilderness, and every figure in the table above is consistent with that being a description of my temperament rather than of these games.
The test would be a second player keeping the same log across the same fourteen games. If the ordering held, the ledger is about design. If it shuffled, it is about me. That test has not been run and there is currently no plan to run it, so every figure above should be read with that attached.
What would change this ledger
A game that starts slowly and then keeps producing new goals for two hundred hours would strengthen the second finding considerably; the file has nothing above ninety-six. A game that starts in twelve minutes and holds for a hundred hours would weaken the third section badly, and I would like to find one.
Current state of the ledger
Median first goal at one hour eight minutes, range twelve minutes to four hours. Fast starts belong to games with legible physical problems and predict how soon the system will be understood, not how long it will be played. No usable correlation between time-to-goal and hours logged across fourteen notebooks. Open, and vulnerable to the objection that it describes one player's habits.