Video games are the only medium in which longer length became an inherent selling point. Is it any wonder that even their best narratives are generally bloated, flaccid, and poorly paced? And then combined with bland, repetitive grinding gameplay activities?
You can see a similar pattern in the serialized novels of the 19th century: When authors are paid by the word, they have an incentive to produce more words. But this impulse, at least, was counteracted by the fact that their readers still wanted a good story and weren’t particularly concerned with length.
Only in video games do you see media consumers focusing on length-of-play as an important feature in and of itself.
A couple years ago I thought this trend might actually be reversing itself as Final Fantasy XIII came under criticism for being too long. But it doesn’t seem to be sticking yet.
For me, as long as I get at least an hour of game for every two dollars that I’ve spent them I’m happy. That was my biggest problem with Fable 2, it was too short.
I can rather sympathize with this, given that it’s pretty simple to take the cost of the game, divide that by the number of hours you spent playing it, and compare the rate to other things they spend money on. If you pay $60 for a game and finish it after 3 hours with no desire to play through again, you just spent $20/hour for your entertainment, which is worse even than movie theaters.
I suspect part of the meme’s source was in games like the Civ series or Starcraft, where people would praise it by pointing out that they were able to play the game again and again and again and have it remain genuinely fun. People unable to generate “replay value” in their own games — by telling a story that could only be told in one way, once, or by making a game that just wasn’t interesting enough mechanically to explore different play strategies — would try to spoof this point of value by simply making the game take a long time to play.
Or, in the case of the FF-type games, there was the sense that you were exploring a large and interesting world with secrets tucked away in the corners. A small world would be trivial (less satisfying) to explore, a large world takes time, so you again get the idea that a longer game is better. The problem is when people keep the world size and the nibbly things tucked away in corners without bothering to make any of it interesting; that’s when it devolves into busywork.
Here’s a nice counter-example, though: Portal!
Things aren’t entirely in the toilet, at least.
You read my mind. I wrote this post almost immediately after finishing my third replay of Portal!
Which is another thing: Those 60-80 hour epics? I’m never replaying them. Although, I don’t even think that’s true. If you actually had 60-80 hours of game that was as tightly designed as Portal (and with the same quality), I don’t think I’d hesitate to play it again. I can’t even justify playing 30 hours if all I’m getting out of it is 5-10 hours of actual narrative.
I know this is an old post but I agree. One thing, however, is that when I shelled out to get The Stanley Parable:Ultra Deluxe(I normally get 5-15 dollar games, this costed 25) and got like 10 hours from it, I felt a bit ripped off, even though it’s a great game.
As tools improve and game devs become more productive, they seem to just add more of what they were going to add anyway.
Honestly I just wish they’d innovate. But I get why that doesn’t sell. People like safe bets.