There is a certain discomfort that you see when you have mechanics or games that are specifically designed to extract, you know, four-hundred hours worth of game play, which is, you know, with an online role-playing game is a good metric. That feels a little queasy to me. And a friend of mine, Jonathan Blow, raised the subject in a talk a couple years ago that he worried about unethical game design choices like that, which is if, if there is such a thing as a compulsion with a game, how ethical is it to push it that far, to say, four-hundred hours. Four hundred hours is a lot. That's a large amount of time. I've booted up a game I've been playing for the past few months, and I've played it for five days- that's five twenty-four hour periods that I've spent playing it. And I love the game and I have a great time with it and it makes me very happy and there's nothing wrong with entertaining people. But you do have this thinking of, "That's a lot of time." That's more time than I spend going, probably more time than I spend with my kids. That's a lot of time. So I think that there is a certain...level of responsibility that game designers have to take when they look at...mechanics and how they're designing it. I think that...it's a dangerous area, because it can come across as very...you know, we know what's better than the audience, and the audience says, "Its okay, put as much game play in as you'd like. I'll stop at anytime I want." And I think that's a valid argument, but I would just say that it would be nicer if you could almost have a sustained level of interest, as opposed to repetition.
