Can You Play EVERY Good Videogame?

is it just me or are there literally too many good video games out right now over the past two months I've been playing three games Animal Crossing new horizons half-life Alex and Final Fantasy 7 remake all three of them are incredible giving me adorable relaxation immersive adventure and one of my favorite JRPG combat systems I've ever tried and despite playing these absolute bangers the whole time all I can think about is all these other amazing games that keep releasing while I'm still trying to beat the ones that I'm committed to and I still somehow got a leave room on the plate for other stuff that's slated for later this year that I'm excited about it got me thinking assuming your life man and enjoy almost every genre video game and ignoring the actual cost of the games themselves is it possible to play every good video game today we dug deep for this one unearthing data and reviews for thousands of games and even government research to help come to a conclusion let's talk about 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at join honeycomb slash the J whiffs this right here is all you have to do to install once again that's join honeycomb / the J wits thanks to honey for sponsoring today's video and helping support our content so back to our main topic can you play every good video game to answer this question ahead to break things down into three topics one what qualifies as a good video game - how long would it take to beat or reasonably experience every good video game and finally three how much free time is the average human realistically have to play video games let's start with by far the most subjective of the three playing every single one of the hundreds of thousands of games that have been released over the last 50 or so years is obviously impossible so we've got to find a reasonable way to narrow the scope in general I think it's fair to assume that the average gamer seeks games that are at least satisfactory we pursue experiences that are somewhat interesting engaging addicting or the classic fun if it's not fun why bother I decided to start by building out a base of games that are universally considered the best from the literal Wikipedia article list of video games considered the best this list compiles over 50 different best games of all time lists from the press and then grabs any game that received at least six mentions as they describe while any single publications list reflects the personal opinions of its writers when the lists are taken in aggregate a handful of notable games have achieved something approaching critical consensus by multiple appearances in such lists the logic is sound although I am a little curious how they decided that six was the magic number for how many times a game needs to be included in multiple places all that said the final list gives us a base of 190 games to our collection spanning nearly 45 years there are definitely some problems here for one these are the best games of all time not just the merely good ones there's also plenty of big holes in this list like multiple missing genres and only 5 games from the last 5 years personally I feel like some of the best games I've ever played have been from the last 5 years of gaming so we still need to dig deeper unfortunately there is no such thing as an empirical way to measure goodness in games at first I was considering sales because people usually want to buy games that they think are good but just because a game sells well does not mean that it's good imagine babies sold over 2 million copies I mean even Atari ZT cited by many to be one of the worst video games of all time still managed to sell 1.5 million copies another metric I eventually rejected was user scores people give tens to games that they like zeros to games that they dislike band together to bomb scores reasons outside of the game itself and anybody can leave a user score even if they've never played the game so in the end I was left with no choice which meant I had to go to Metacritic [Music] okay so there are a lot of problems with Metacritic I could probably make a whole video about that alone but just to rattle off some bullet points Metacritic is an arbitrary selection process for which reviewers they take scores from they have a special secret sauce weighted formula that makes some reviews worth more than the others can we know what that formula is absolutely not they sign numbers to reviews that don't have a numerical score in them they only take the first review scores submitted for games and then they never updated even when the press outlet changes their score with a future patch or update and a majority of their game review data only comes from around the time that they started which was in the late 90s all that said Metacritic is still by far the largest collection of data about video game review scores in the world the only thing that even came close to them was the old game rankings which to my surprise shut down at the end of last year and is being slowly absorbed into Metacritic as we speak the way things currently stand if you're just going by game review scores I prefer open critic they have no weighted averages and they also consider the general recommendation percentages but they only have review data going back to 2015 to be honest I wish more people ignored review scores altogether and just read the reviews you know actually see information on what the person who played the game liked and disliked that to me is always going to be more valuable for making a purchase decision than some aggregated number on a 100 point scale even Metacritic themselves recommends that you actually read the reviews but ultimately with only so much time in the world it is really easy to look at those big green numbers so what's a good cutoff board goodness when using Metacritic scores I told you guys on Twitter and it seemed like the majority of you believed that 70 or higher is the bare minimum for what you would consider to be quote unquote a good sport Metacritic themselves notes that for video game reviewers it usually takes a score in the upper 70s or higher to indicate that the game is unequivocally good I decided to go a little stricter than that and collected every game with the score of 80 or higher there are about 4,300 games with seven or more reviews that fit this category which would put them in just the top 25% this just seems like a nice clean number to me the top corner of popularly reviewed games in the modern age another reason I cut myself off here instead of that 70 is because oh my god it took so long to log all these games so so so long it took days at first it was really exciting there's lots of new games the old Wikipedia list didn't have brand new stuff like persona 5 the new God of War Mario Odyssey you I love these games and then we start getting some real indie games and then I started seeing rhythm games and we even got visual novels then we've got duplicate games oh no oh no metacritic separates every single game my platform please help me for Arkham City's v grand theft auto v' vibes infinity Maddon's i got to keep double-checking to make sure i'm not counting the same game twice i have so many good games logged now literally thousands of games oh yeah and another thing that made this list so hard to assemble was that I was also working on question 2 at the same time so how long would it take to beat all these games if only there were some place I could go to see how long to be ha that was easy well maybe it's not that easy but it is a good start how long do b.com is a community contributed website where players list how long it took them to play various games in their collection well there are a ton of different ways to label your time on this site the main popular statistic is of course how long it takes to beat a game unlike user-submitted game reviews where people have an incentive to shift scores and lie the how long to beat submissions seem pretty reliable it turns out that humans just aren't as interested in lying about how long they've played a video game and even if they did there's actual moderation to deal with ridiculous submissions so my goal was to take every single good game I grabbed from Wikipedia and Metacritic lists and log every single one of them by the main average on each games how long to beat it's actually pretty interesting looking at games based on raw time commitment your animal Crossing's and monster hunter and Europa Universalis is is run over 100 hours each just for regular completion but then you've got the short burst experiences like what remains of Edith Finch Cora Cola and journey that can be completed in a single session 30 flights of loving only took 23 minutes and just like everything else on today's video there were immediately some less than desirable outliers dozens of games of my list did not have any how long to beat data at all so I ended up cutting them from my little thought experiment how long to beat also has this color-coded reliability system the deep red scores typically designate games that have a small and unreliable sample size I filled them probably slipped through the cracks but I tried to limit low reliability submission games to my list as much as possible as well those of you that think it's dumb that there are so many yearly sports titles that continue to get good review scores will probably be happy to know that this is where a whole lot of redundant underreported Madden's and FIFA's ended up on the chopping block I also saw this as a way to further tune the list after all if an old game is truly good and stood the test of time then players should still be playing it and talking about it and submitting times for it today and that's when something kind of sad dawned on me technically no you can't play every single good game in history because some of them are straight-up gone from history some of these games especially old mmo's simply don't have servers anymore big ones from my childhood are games like Phantasy Star Online and City of Heroes and sure maybe you can jump through some hoops and revive these games and play on a private server but even then it would be impossible to go back and experience the same game and community and developments that came with these games launches and got them good review scores in the first place and speaking of multiplayer I'm sure something has been bothering a lot of you guys how long to beat not every game is beautiful for multiplayer games they still have the player's average times played but it just isn't a perfect situation this ended up giving us super inflated numbers for games like overwatch and especially active mmo's like world of warcraft and on the flip side there are like fighting games which have short beatable single-player story modes that can be bum-rushed in an hour or less that is of course not going to be a good representation for the way the average person plays a fighting game but hey it's a humongous sample size and I'm just hoping to get some kind of tangible quantifiable number for how long it would take to play every good game so I tried my best with the data that I had and finally we have our total 2064 eligible good games which also includes theoretically good dlc or expansions it's a weird mangled list based on the average review scores written by humans and the reported completion times logged by different humans and just like humans the end result is incredibly interesting and deeply flawed I know cost isn't a factor here but I actually feel like you could afford 2,000 video games in your lifetime especially you started with the oldest games first and always bought use I don't think it's outlandish to say that you could afford all of these games over your lifetime throw in trading renting or digital game sales and I think you could easily play every single one of these games without ever once sailing the seven seas cool but most importantly we have a time the time that it would theoretically take to reasonably player beat mostly every good game in existence but before actually you guys that number we need to figure out how much free time does the average person have before they died everyone leaves such a different lifestyle is there any way to possibly discover the average amount of time yes the answer is yes at the very least I was able to find a whole lot of data out there for good old America I am kind of disgusted to say that this was the most fun I had researching for today's video it all came from this thickness the US Bureau of Statistics American time use survey they released this survey and its results every year and they have a giant sample size of almost 10,000 participants these pages contain a wide variety of data and statistics and charts that break down everything you'd want to know about how people spend their time maybe it's just me but I found this and a thing absolutely fascinating we don't often sit and think about how we spend our time or where we're spending it or the ways that our time spent changes at different points in our lives I realized that over 20 pages of graphs isn't exactly the sexiest way to explain the average humans game time so I'm going to do my best to show my findings from this jar the jar is your average day and therefore your average life time spent with the average adult American from the age 15 all the way to the age 75 plus at first I thought no that's not quite right most of us have played video games before the age of 15 but I don't know my five-year-old ki brain was able to handle the three buttons Sega Genesis controller but there is no way you could give this kid something like divinity or EVE Online and expect him to do anything also a majority of the games of my list were rated either T 14 or M for Mature surely no child has ever played 18 rated or heaven forbid an M rated game before the appropriate age because they would immediately be locked up in prison for life so yeah we're gonna look at all the time you have from the age of 15 to the average American life expectancy which right now is 78 and a half giving you almost 65 years to beat all the good games so back to the jar here's your average day average life on Earth each die in this jar represents about one hour of your 24-hour day and each color of die represents one of the major categories used in the American time use survey there are technically 25 dice in here because I rounded some numbers up and down but you get the picture it's a visual aid for crying out loud here's your life here's all the time you're gonna spend sleeping trying to sleep or taking care of yourself by grooming and bathing here's the average time spent working or doing something work-related here is household activities like cooking cleaning and long work here's eating and drinking purchasing goods and services caring for other people both inside and outside of your home and this guy is a mix of a bunch of activities that were smaller than one hour per day including school and homework attending civic and religious activities phone calls and emails and other miscellaneous things that were on the major categories I was pretty shocked at how little we spend in school in a lifetime the school year is only about half the year the average person is out of school by their early 20s and then they continue to live for another 60 years without ever attending formal education again the final number is the big one that we've been searching for to answer today's question free time leisure and sports for the average person that number is five point two seven hours of free time a day now you might look at that number and think that is preposterous mine's way higher mine's way lower but that's why it's an average for example that number is only four point seven two on weekdays and unsurprisingly higher on weekends if you're employed you're gonna have an hour less than the average but if you're unemployed that number goes up to over seven one of the biggest boosts I saw was with age participants over 75 years old had by far the most free time per day and then the biggest hindrance was having kids participants with a child that was 6 years old or younger saw just 3.7 hours of leisure a day but all that aside I don't know you I don't know your life so I'm gonna roll with the averages 5 hours per day to play video games for 63 and a half years right well yes but actually no see the leisure category gets its own subcategories the average American spends over half of their free time watching TV alone and then their sports and exercise socializing communicating reading straight up relaxing and travel and in the end the average time an adult American spends on computer for leisure is just point four seven hours a day that seems so impossibly low to me like I get it TV is so much easier to consume I could say to Netflix and chill all day but are there really that many non gamers in the world are we being dragged down by the boomers that didn't even have pong until they were adults maybe the data does show that younger age groups are definitely more avid gamers participants aged 15 to 24 years old averaged closer to an hour per day of gaming or playing on the computer but even then I don't know just one hour I realized that I have a very limited and skewed perspective but it still just seems low I for additional information and I found another study limelight state of gaming 2019 this was a global survey that looked at 4,500 participants who said that they played games at least once a week and amongst the real true gamers the average time spent playing games was 7 hours and 7 minutes a week which is almost exactly an hour good day wait what all right that's it I'm pointing it me to the test I played four games over the last two months and I've got the data for all of them Animal Crossing 50 hours Final Fantasy 7 remake 45 point to half-life Alex 14 point 3 hours and tabletop simulator for another 10 Adam all up over 60 days and that's a total of just under 2 hours of gaming per day huh Wow yeah I guess one hour a day for the average gamer probably isn't crazy talk I'm sure there was a point in my life where I gamed a disgusting amount more than this but the older you get the more responsibilities pile up like right now I've been pretty busy working on this video writing and researching ironically giving me not a lot of time to play video games I got a cookie I got a clean and gonna take care of the dogs I'm spending more time reading and gardening and I got a workout so I don't get obese during the pandemic and if I ever have a kid or make a major career change or any number of other things I feel like my gaming trajectory will likely continue to fall closer to that average of just one hour a day but who knows for sure as always let's work with the info that we've got and see where it takes us player 1 is the average American and their 0.47 hours of gaming a day player 2 is the average gamer with one hour per day and then finally we'll use my current numbers for 2 hours a day we're gonna multiply each participant's daily gaming hours by the amount of days in a year roughly 365.25 to account for leap years then we'll multiply that by the amount of years you'll have of game in your life which and our experiment was sixty three point five our lifetime gaming totals are player one with almost 11,000 player two with over 23,000 and player three with over 46,000 hours and finally it is time to put them all to the test to answer the question we've been waiting for can you play every good video game are at the very least all 2064 the ones that I was able to get data for the amount of time he would take to play all these fine games is in my opinion no I don't think that you can realistically play every good game I was hoping to get some kind of ballpark idea for how long the average game was and how much time the average person has but now that I've seen the numbers I just don't think there's any way let's even say that there's some fictional games McGee who plays 12 hours of games every day and they don't have to work a day in their life because they inherited a fortune or something theoretically that dude is rocking over 250,000 three time hours but after seeing the data for even just my little 2000 game sample size I don't think even games McGee can do it one I'm sure we're missing lots of great video games from the 80s and 90s that weren't on Metacritic or my Wikipedia list - I had to cut a ton of games because they weren't on how long to beat so who knows how long my original list would have taken three there are a lot of awesome games that never saw a Metacritic score of 80 explorers of sky fans godhand bans ICU for I don't think I know anybody who plays every single game right up to completion and then just stops everyone's got a favorite or an addiction or something you just can't put down I don't think I can count the amount of time I put into games like spelunky mario 64 smash bros melee the original Star Wars Battlefront - I mean the list goes on and on even if you do a variety and playing as many new genres as you can like I do those old favorites are always a comfort food that you can dive right back into whenever you want five it probably is not healthy to game as much as games McGee if you play that much you're probably cutting into other activities that are what contributes to our average age life expectancy of seventy eight point five years in the first place if you're cutting stuff like exercise socializing sleep self-care you're gonna damage your physical and mental health potentially die earlier and cut your total amount of free hours down in the process and finally six because I learned from the Wikipedia article at the beginning of this video that the number six is apparently very important today's list is made with only the games that came out until mid 2020 let's say games McGee is 15 years old today and he starts gaming right now it's gonna take him over 13 years alone to get through today's list but he's still theoretically going to want to play every good video game that comes out for the rest of his life - and who on earth knows how many good games are gonna come out by the time this dude kicks the bucket even being generous and saying he lives 220 80 I guess if you think about it this whole question my whole video premise is stupid can you play every good video game no of course not because unless the earth goes down in some kind of cataclysmic event okay let's ignore that for today most likely awesome video games are going to keep coming out long after we all pass from the earth but even though we're not here forever our gaming experiences will outlast us every time we play a great game that we love we can tell our kids our friends our fellow gamers on the internet across the world about all those games that were the most important to us because even though video games likely aren't the most important thing we'll do in our lives everybody needs to take a break and have some fun during those few precious hours of free time that come our way and if I've learned anything in this lifetime or making this list it's that playing video games is pretty damn fun there are literally too many good games to play in this lifetime so those are pretty good odds of finding one that you really love that one's one downs and it's here it's here run run run charlie we did it we [Music] you

Channel: TheJWittz

Views: 152,744

Rating: 4.9386811 out of 5

Keywords: Best game, Best game of all time, Top 100, Metacritic, Ocarina of time, half life, half-life alyx, final fantasy 7, ff7 remake, ff7, animal crossing, new horizons, ACNH, animal crossing switch, super mario 64, spelunky, World of warcraft, Top 10, howlongtobeat, longest game

Id: Yag5sA8vkqc

Length: 25min 5sec (1505 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2020