Reply to Re: Epic length
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I've thought some more about it, and I think I'll agree with meta for the moment. If we're to have a classification at all such that it can be used to compare D-Mods, and it's not about quality, playtime makes the most sense to me.
I'm even willing to consider all the examples of artificially bloated D-Mods epics, if the playtime is long enough. They'd just get reviews such as
"I can't believe this ever got released. It's just a single screen of teleporters, wired up in some incomprehensible way. Played for an hour, but then I gave up. 0.1, don't play this."
or
"This is not a game, it's more a movie. There are two screens, and on one of them, two NPCs start having a discussion about the shape of clouds. For *three* hours. And I was even pressing space to skip dialogue. 0.5, not worth your time."
or
"This game is just a huge linear path, with no decorations apart from fences keeping you in, NPCs, monsters, whatsoever. I finished it just to see if there was anything good at the end. There wasn't. 0.3 for at least using every map screen, but that's being generous."
As a distraction:
There's also the literary genre of "epic", such as Homer's works, Gilgamesh, the Kalevala, or Beowulf. A common theme in there seems to be that they span a large amount of time (not to read, but rather that the events of the story span years), somehow involve the entire world (through a long journey across many places, or because it's somehow threatened), and has a huge backstory (either implicitly, by referencing other works, or explicitly, by devoting large amounts of text to exposition). This type of classification is hard to do, especially for the author. I'm also not sure what value it has to the prospective player.
As an aside observation, the literary interpretation seems to be completely separate from reading time. I finished Beowulf in two days, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey each took a week or more to get through. Feel free to either use this as an argument against counting playtime ("it's not counted in literature"), or disregard it entirely ("if we're going to use 'epic' as a genre, we should also have a 'young adult' label").
I'm even willing to consider all the examples of artificially bloated D-Mods epics, if the playtime is long enough. They'd just get reviews such as
"I can't believe this ever got released. It's just a single screen of teleporters, wired up in some incomprehensible way. Played for an hour, but then I gave up. 0.1, don't play this."
or
"This is not a game, it's more a movie. There are two screens, and on one of them, two NPCs start having a discussion about the shape of clouds. For *three* hours. And I was even pressing space to skip dialogue. 0.5, not worth your time."
or
"This game is just a huge linear path, with no decorations apart from fences keeping you in, NPCs, monsters, whatsoever. I finished it just to see if there was anything good at the end. There wasn't. 0.3 for at least using every map screen, but that's being generous."
As a distraction:
There's also the literary genre of "epic", such as Homer's works, Gilgamesh, the Kalevala, or Beowulf. A common theme in there seems to be that they span a large amount of time (not to read, but rather that the events of the story span years), somehow involve the entire world (through a long journey across many places, or because it's somehow threatened), and has a huge backstory (either implicitly, by referencing other works, or explicitly, by devoting large amounts of text to exposition). This type of classification is hard to do, especially for the author. I'm also not sure what value it has to the prospective player.
As an aside observation, the literary interpretation seems to be completely separate from reading time. I finished Beowulf in two days, while both the Iliad and the Odyssey each took a week or more to get through. Feel free to either use this as an argument against counting playtime ("it's not counted in literature"), or disregard it entirely ("if we're going to use 'epic' as a genre, we should also have a 'young adult' label").
