Longplay (video games)

For the album by Plavi orkestar, see Longplay (album). For long playing records, see LP record and Album.

A longplay is a play-through of a video game, created with the intent of completing it as fully as possible, mainly for the purposes of nostalgia, preservation, and possibly as a walkthrough. Also, for people who are unable or unwilling to play a certain game, yet wish to know and experience its story, a longplay can be viewed simply as a long digitally animated movie. Unlike speedruns, there is no time constraint aside from those imposed by bandwidth/filesize concerns.[1]

The defining characteristic of a longplay is that few shortcuts, if any, are taken to finish the game. Dull moments may be ultimately edited out of the final video, and sidequests may be ignored, but in general every task necessary to reach the end is to be recorded, including cutscenes.[2]

Creation

Games may be recorded in several ways: using screencast software, a feature built into an emulator, or via a video capture device connected to a console or another computer. Some games (for example, Doom) have a demo recording feature built into the game.

Neologism status

"Speedrun" and "game replay" emerged in recent years as a subset of "play-through" and gained popularity by being entertaining and competitive while needing only minutes of video. Video sharing websites accelerated their acceptance. Advances in consumer recording equipment, codecs, hard drive space, and internet services were necessary before complete games could reasonably be saved and shared.

Outside of the communities specializing in the practice, "longplay" is relatively unknown, though understood from context. The ambiguous umbrella term "play-through" is widely used instead.[3]

References

  1. ↑ "RAG-Longplay Announcement". Recorded Amiga Games. Retrieved March 3, 2008.
  2. ↑ "C64-Longplays Guide". C64-Longplays. Retrieved February 13, 2008.
  3. ↑ "Google Video-Play-throughs". Google. Retrieved March 3, 2008.

External links

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