These days, the game industry at large seems to be focused on games that can keep players playing, and paying, indefinitely. This overarching genre of “forever” games encompasses esports like Hearthstone and Overwatch, social hangouts like World of Warcraft and Fortnite, and endlessly repetitive grinds like Destiny 2 and even Candy Crush Saga. The idea in each case is to create an experience that can engage a critical mass of players for hundreds or even thousands of hours over a span of years.

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There’s something to be said for these kinds of endless experiences. These days, though, I’m frequently more fascinated by games at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. This class of “lunch break” games—single-serving, single-player narrative experiences designed to be played once, in about an hour or less—will never be as big or as popular as games that can demand thousands of hours of player attention. But there’s also something to be said for a game that makes its impact quickly and lingers with the player for much, much longer.

The latest fine example of the form is Kids, a “game of crowds” that “allows you to move with and against crowds until everyone is gone,” as its Steam page puts it. I don’t really want to spoil the entirely unique experience by saying any more than that, but this 30-second trailer gives a good feeling for how the game’s smooth animation and striking, minimalist, black-and-white characters create a creepy, claustrophobic aesthetic that’s hard to shake.

I started Kids at about 1:30pm yesterday after grabbing a quick lunch. I finished the game by 2 pm. But I ended up thinking about that half hour for the rest of the day and into the morning.

If an experience like Kids came out as a diskette for early '90s PCs and Macs, I think it would be a minor cultural touchstone on the order of Flying Toasters. Instead, today the game seems more likely to be buried in Steam’s absolute flood of indie copycats and those “forever” games taking up more and more of our gaming attention.

There are important economic, technical, and social reasons that games historically weren’t designed to be finished in a single sitting. In gaming’s early arcade days, encouraging players to keep dropping quarters was an economic necessity to pay for expensive cabinets and computer chips. Thus, “quarter munchers” that kept players paying through addictive loops and/or punishing difficulty tended to be the cabinets that survived.

As gaming transitioned to cartridge-based home consoles, there was still market pressure for developers to justify the relatively high price (historically speaking) of all that shipped plastic and silicon. So games of the era got padded with extreme difficulty spikes or gameplay tweaks that extended the “value proposition” of the limited ROM storage space. (Think you beat Ghosts and Goblins just because you got through the last level? Think again.)