Developers Should Shorten Games

As with anything, when it comes to the gaming industry, there’s tons to complain about. Casual games, for instance. Or monstrous price tags. Just choose your poison.

But the biggest problem, by far, is that they’re too damn long. In this fast-paced culture, who has time for 20 hours (and upwards) of gameplay? We can’t even find time to cook our own food anymore, let alone churning through whole days playing video games.

So developers need to slim their games up. Getting through shorter but still high quality games would be more satisfying than wasting away on Thanksgiving-sized titles at every corner. Epic length gets tiresome after a while (if you’ve seen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, you know what I mean).

Whether conscious of this problem or not, some developers are thankfully trimming their robust games down a little.

Portal was a concise experience, lasting only a few hours, and most people didn't mind.

The folks at Valve, responsible for Portal, have a similar reaction to the length issue (scroll towards the bottom of the interview). Sure, they’d love to finish longer games, but like many working adults, they don’t have the time. In contrast, Portal clocked at only a few hours, and it seems as though the majority of people who played the game either don’t mind or appreciate the short length.

Over at Remedy, the company behind Alan Wake, developers are tackling length problems with a different approach. By dividing their game into episodes, much like a TV show, they plan to dole out gameplay in digestible chunks, a kind nod towards gamers who have less time than they’d like to play AAA titles.

In all fairness, story modes in games have been getting shorter. With the average gamer being 35 years old, maybe this is the best way to go. As Susan O’Connor, writer for Far Cry 2 says, by the time gamers reach this point in their lives, they’ll hopefully have a job, a significant other, friends, and other obligations — unfortunately enough, a life — that cuts into gaming time.

This isn’t simply a matter of shortening long games, though.

To make great and short titles would require a new vision of what games are all about — how to provide a fulfilling, meaningful, fun experience in the space of a few hours.

By being divided into episodes, Alan Wake could be more digestible.

Episodic games in the style of Alan Wake could be the answer. After cooking dinner, putting children to bed, etc., curling up with a video game that provides a concise experience that lasts about an hour could be a blessing. And if it’s good enough, it’ll keep you coming back for more.

That said, there will always be a market for epic games where fun, repetitive mechanics are the point. In these titles, no amount of playing ever satisfies the gamer because it’s so damn fun, and of course you’ll want to play it as much as humanly possible. You’ll want to play the 12 hour story mode, then go online and play for countless more hours.

As for myself, I often feel guilty playing a game endlessly even though it’s fun. I want to reach a conclusion. And a lot of times, that conclusion is seemingly unattainable in any reasonable amount of time.

With the industry maturing, maybe gamers — short of the hardcore — will start begging for titles that aren’t so long. Maybe developers will fill that need. But I can’t be the only one who plays lots of games and never manages to finish them.