What makes a game slow?

As the ICON campaign I’m playing in wraps up, I’m thinking about what makes games “slow.”^[1] I’ve come up with four distinct sources of slowness: pondering, friction, too-damn-much-to-do^[2], and inattentiveness. When I play a game, these all end up feeling the same (“wow, this game is dang slow”), but their causes and possible fixes are different.

• Pondering: Time spent waiting for an active player to make a decision. The more often a single player is selected to decide something (e.g. strict initiative or turn orders, or a GM-type role in lots of games), the more often this will slow down play.
• Friction: Time spent trying to get a single action done. Often this is looking up rules, debating rules, figuring out math, answering questions, etc. More complex games have more friction, but you can mitigate some of it with good book design.
• Too-damn-much-to-do: Time spent working through the game itself. Sometimes a turn in a game is two decision and a roll of a die. Other times it’s moving six characters around a board, allocating ten points of metacurrency, deciding on two actions, and then resolving twelve different status effects. In the latter case, the game ixs slower, even if we’re sailing through each individual step at maximum speed.
• Inattentiveness: Time spent waiting for an active player to re-immerse themself in a game. This is sort of the same as pondering (we’re waiting on someone to make a decision), but it’s different enough that I broke it out. Especially as games slow down, people start chatting or eating snacks or getting up to stretch. Then they have to come back and take a second to get ready to play, which further slows the game down. A vicious cycle we’re all guilty of participating in at some point or another.

For example, having played nearly 30 sessions I can say ICON does a good job at reducing friction compared to its peers^[3]. But as you gain interesting new powers, the possibility space of the game expands, and you can end up with some serious pondering. The same goes for some builds that gain lots of per-turn effects; the “too-damn-much-to-do” factor has climbed steadily through our play. My instinct when faced with a slow game is to remove friction, but that wouldn’t speed up our ICON play all that much. Sometimes there’s just too much game, maybe?