[Glam Grimfire]

I recently remarked that I'd bought Super Mario 3D Land on facebook, and someone chimed in that the game is pretty enjoyable, but a little on the short side.
Allensmithee pointed out this wasn't because the game was too short or anything, just that it didn't waste the players time
This kind of got me thinking about how we interact with videogames.
I know I've spent fuckin' hours with videogames, (I've also spent Fucking Hours with videogames) especially growing up in the era of 100+ hour JRPG's.

What makes a game wastes the players time, and what games are good to waste time with?
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##SKELETON PARTY (new article as of 04/26/14)Grim

[Mr. Mechanical]

It's all relative, I think. For me a game is wasting my time if I'm playing it and not getting any enjoyment out of playing it. I used to play the 100+ hour JRPGs as well in my misspent youth but these days those kinds of games do nothing for me.

I tried playing Lost Odyssey last year and got pretty far into the first disc but I wasn't really enjoying myself despite making steady progress for much of the time I spent playing it. Maybe it's just that Lost Odyssey isn't that good?

I'm always down to waste some time with a GTA game but only for GTA. I don't have nearly as much patience for open world games that aren't GTA, I hold them to a different standard. Likewise with Doom/Quake/Halo. Those games are all interesting in their own right for their own reasons like with GTA so I tend to hold other FPS games to a different standard.
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[allensmithee]

Kane & Lynch 2 is really good about it. Both in terms of starting up and being lean. Its like game meat.

Also, Outrun/ners/2/SP are perfect for being at once absolutely direct and also relaxing. A lot of games that dont have much downtime arent particularly relaxing but the Outrun games are brilliant in balancing thrill and relief.

I would say that Mario 3D Land succeeds because, even though the difficulty curve is gentle, the game is engaging through-out. Contrast to the Galaxy games which manage to be boring and frustrating, giving out fun in seldom dribbles like one of those hamster feeding things.
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[scratchmonkey]

Shiren is pretty great about this actually, I would say that what makes it not waste your time, in comparison to roguelikes like Angband (an easy point of comparison for me because that's what I have the most experience with) is that it moves along fairly quickly in terms of introducing new challenges, i.e. forcing the player to revisit their strategies -- I can't find a quick breakdown on a web search, I believe that Shiren goes through 30 floors, while in comparison Angband goes through 100, with major parts of the canonical strategy for Angband involving hanging out at a particular band of floors and grinding until you get to a certain state, at which point you dive, skipping huge swathes of levels until you get to the next "action point". Shiren is all action points and gradiated in a very clever way.

[Toptube]

Portal and The Swapper both naturally increase difficulty and complexity on a nice curve and both games end before things over stay their welcome.

[RadRad]

I think that is what the appeal of "rogue-like" games are and other "casual" kind of arcade-y games... And for the most part, all I have an attention span for these days.
Spelunky
Shiren
Dark Souls
Ridiculous Fishing.
Super Hexagon.
Luftrausers.

Boots up, you're in, and you die. Got the experience, rinse & repeat as much as you want.
Its the pick-u-and-play, get your game on in less the a couple of minutes, and you almost get the whole experience.
Keep going to discover more, or not.
But either way, no time is wasted.

I also felt the same way with Super Mario 3D Land. Which is why I think its my favorite Mario in recent years.
Its like it knew you've played Mario before, and just kind of gave it to you with no explanation. Kind of like Super Mario World.
Levels didn't drag on. The pacing was perfect.

I will also say I have been much more tolerable to JRPGS as of late when they are on the portable. Maybe they are more aware of your time-constraints. Whether its on the bus or during your lunch break.
Pokemon, Fire Emblem Awakening, Shin Megami Tensei IV...
With perfectly timed save spots, bite-sized story progression, and play as much as you want, or little, but there is no "play this much till you can rest" feeling.
After just coming off up Mother 3, I feel like this was the perfectly designed RPG for portability and super efficient with this time, while tackling the scale of a such an epic journey.
It was like a book.
Read a couple of pages, then put down and pick up whenever your in the mood to get immersed back in.
I want more of that.
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http://www.iamthefourth.com/

[another god]

Every game I've genuinely liked in the past decade or will ever like in my future.
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interdimensional

[Winona Ghost Ryder]

N/A

[1CC]

[Brooks]

The only videogaming that doesn't feel like a squandering, however good, is multiplayer stuff in a regular community, where the game is a conduit for learning about other humans

SP games can generate a fun discourse too e.g. here but it never quite gels

[Rei]

[Gironika]

I'd say that a game might be considered a waste of your time if it …

• forces you to backtrace to get to that "magic" number the dev obviously wanted to reach: e.g. over 20 hours of exciting gameplay! where you spend at least 2-4 hours getting items X,Y and Z from the locations you have been at before.
  
• forces you to collect things: Zelda TP.
  
• forces you to do things for a character. Make me want to do it by tricks, fine with me. If it's because YOU CANNOT PROGRESS WITHOUT DOING A FAVOUR FOR BOB, go and f*** yourself. Make the game harder for ignoring the bastard NPC, fine with me. I missed out on some arcanas in Persona 3, but I was loving it! Instead of being all angry game nerd, I was glad that I skipped doing shit for NPC X or Y. It was a nice experience to compensate for the missing bits and succeeding.
  
• forces you to grind excessively. I love jRPGs, so I can stand some grinding. tri-Ace levels of grinding even! But alas, a wonderful example of how not to be cool is celebrated by Gran Turismo, especially by its antique way of gaining access to cars. No game has excelled at hating you like GT does. Waste 40, maybe 100 hours to have a go in a car that you might not even like! Force players to drive 50 times on course X to grind for that 2.7372382838b $ needed to buy useless supercar X. There are faqs how to get as much money as possible in the shortest time frame. Races even get assigned a money/time ratio (use DTM-car X tuned to XXX bhp and race cup Y, this gives you 30000$/17.5 minutes). But nowadays, pay2play is the way to go - spend 70$ for instant access to all cars? yyyyyeah no.
  Forza4 would let you use most of its cars in online mode, so if you really liked model X, you could find that out before.
  ENTHUSIA gives you access to most/all(?) of its cars if you did the driving missions - except for the story-mode. There you could "win" a car you liked just by racing against it, a raffle decided on which car would end up in your garage.
  Are these games are good example? Maybe, they also had their fair share of problems. But they never felt as soul crushingly evil as GT manages to be. /rant
  

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[tiburon]

Fallout 3 is the most time-wasty game I've ever played, and at the end of the day I felt like I had gotten nothing out of it
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stream - steam - tweets

[1CC]

[BenoitRen]

Xenoblade Chronicles!

• Want to go to a far-away area you have already been to? Just skip ahead to it!
  
• Don't want to wait for a certain time of day? Just set the time!
  
• Don't want to do collect-a-thon quests? Just ignore them!
  
• In lots of cases, the game doesn't need you to go back to the NPC that gave you the quest, so it's completed as soon as the requirements are met.
  
• Sometimes, a quest is completed before it's accepted, and the game happily allows this.

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Get Xenoblade Chronicles!