 In the before time, games only came on cartridges, either purchased from the local toys or us or rented from the video store. While the industry as a whole produced a good number of titles per year, perhaps even as many as it does today, few contained nearly as much content as today's typical game. Super Mario Bros. 3, for example, while an epic length by the standards of the NES era contains significantly less art and sound content than many of today's cheap downloadable titles. If Super Mario and other old games took longer to complete, that was usually due to their difficulty. You got replayability out of ghosts and goblins because you had to replay the first three levels 20 times before you ever reached the fourth. One of the more depressing experiences of my life was using an emulator to revisit some games of my youth. With snapshot saving, I breezed through in less than an hour several games which I remember taking whole weekends to complete. Games that felt like real accomplishments to finish as a kid now seemed paper thin. Revisiting the PC games I played in the 90s and early 2000s, I'm struck by a different problem. PC games never forced the player to start over from the beginning upon failure, but their depth relative to the console games of the day often came at the cost of a running time that felt prolonged by clunky interfaces and filler content. Even a polished and well-honed game like Diablo gets much of its running time from players dealing with its clutter of junk items. Sure, Diablo players may genuinely enjoy min-maxing their gear, but the game burdens the player with a lot of clearly undesirable junk to sift through. Diablo also wasn't always great at differentiating between say dungeon level 4 and dungeon level 5, or this random maze of corridors and that other random maze of corridors, and so the experience of the game often felt too samey over much of its running time. It was in this period in the late 90s that gamers began to frequently judge games by their total playtime. Anything less than a 20-hour single-player experience was viewed with great skepticism or even derided as a jib. Even the original Half-Life's sub-15-hour playtime was met with many grumbles. It was also in this period that gamers began to harp a lot on replayability. It wasn't enough that story campaigns should last at least 20 hours, they should also be good for multiple playthroughs. Underlying these sentiments I think were two desires. First, a desire for more immersive experiences, experiences driven by immersion gameplay. And second, gamers simply desired more value, or bang per buck. Immersion and emergent gameplay are topics unto themselves which I'll address in a later video. Briefly here I'll just say that, of course they're good things, if elusive, and worthy justifications for making games longer. When it comes to game value however, I feel the equation has radically changed in the last decade. Partly this is just personal, not that I'm older, I have more demands on my time, but things have changed in the market too. First, players have many more home media options vying for their attention. Second, the industry produces significantly more long, high-quality games. Third, many individual games, especially multiplayer games, can sap countless hours. And fourth, games now frequently get steeply discounted within a year of release, at least on PC. In my case, I'm currently sitting on a long to-do list of AAA games acquired months ago in Steam sales, but every time I think of starting something new, it's easier for me to just play another game of Dota rather than launch another 15 plus hour commitment. It's the ultimate first world problem, my Steam queue is competing with my Netflix queue. Now of course, great games are still pretty rare, so it's natural for players to want the best games to last a long time, lest the next great game be a long time coming. But in a world with numerous cheap downloadable good to very good games, shorter games do the courtesy of letting me get around to playing other games. Moreover, and here's the really important point, the game's quality often hinges on being shorter rather than longer. The obvious examples here are Portal and Brave. As puzzle platformers, these games have only so many tricks to deploy over their 5 hour running times, and so were their gameplay dragged out over more puzzles, the same mechanics that seem engaging in small samples might easily wear thin when presented in too many permutations. In Portal, for example, shielding yourself from turrets with a cube remains fun from the 4 or 5 times the game requires you to do so, but would likely get tiresome at the game required you to use the same trick dozens more times. Which brings me back to filler gameplay. What constitutes filler isn't necessarily something that's never fun the first time, but possibly something that's prolonged past its welcome. Perhaps the most important core competency in game design is a sense of judgment, a sense of not just is this fun, but also a sense of fun for how long. It's the lack of this judgment which I feel still tarnishes many recent games, especially longer ones. In earlier videos I complained about things like loot management in Mortal Lands 2, junk collection in Bioshock Infinite, and buying shops in Assassin's Creed, because the otherwise good to great experiences provided by those games partly get obscured by the amount of shit work they impose on the player. Getting rid of this shit work would make those games shorter and much better for it. One more virtue of shorter running times is that they often better fit a game's story. Not all stories endure long tillings, so better that the end of gameplay coincide with the story's natural conclusion. Very commonly though, games stretch movie style plots over TV season length run times. Not that games necessarily should have the same ratio of story to running time as either TV or movies. Gameplay does naturally pat out the time between story beats and even in games with perfect melding of story and game mechanics, gameplay is just a naturally slower paced medium in which to tell stories. Still, many games, especially those that are modeled after action movies, drag out their stories with transparently artificial plot obstacles, often in the form of literal obstacles. Does the hero need to get to that power station? Well, the bridge is going to collapse just as the hero shows up, so that we can add a whole level where he must detour through the sewers. The other common trick is to simply put too many enemies between the hero and the next objective. I just finished Max Payne 3, which does this in spades. The result was that not only did I get a bit bored with the combat, the ridiculous body count I was racking up increasingly undercut the story's plausibility and tone. By the 4 hour mark I was well ready for the game to end, but it dragged on for another 4 hours. Now, of course, a 4 hour game would be a tough sell for a AAA full price title. The reason we don't get a Max Payne 3 that sensibly compacts its story into a more movie-like running time is mostly economics. Not only do gamers expect at least 8 hour campaigns for their $60, making a 4 hour AAA story campaign doesn't really cost that much less than an 8 hour campaign. Sure, building twice as many environments is non-trivial, but all the work put into programming, design and building core art assets, like character models, generally carries across the whole game. This is in fact thinking behind much DLC, because making a few more environments and assets for an existing game is generally cheaper than making a whole new game. Game makers see DLC as an opportunity for higher profit margins. Gamers often complain that they don't get the same bang per buck out of DLC which they expect out of full products, but that's largely the point. Gamers always want more game for less money, but game makers generally want to sell less game for more money. Unfortunately, this dynamic seems to make developers very reluctant to cut or expedite content that just isn't very good. If, say, 6 months from release, a game's designers realize that their 10 hour campaign would be better axed down the 4 hours, the sensible thing to do, for the sake of quality at least, would be to make those cuts and simply sell the game at a lower price. But of course, the game was budgeted to sell at full price and 4 hour games can't be sold for $60, at least not without getting that press. Hence, we end up with a lot of games that might have been much better if they're not so great stuff were simply cut. So, while I'm hardly the first person to argue the merits of smaller shorter games in recent years, I think it's an argument worth repeating, as those merits evidently don't hold as much sway in the industry as they should. I'll end by mentioning three games that exemplify the virtues of small and short, three games which you quite likely missed. The first is a game from 2011 called Cap-Sized, a 2D side scrolling platform shooter in which you play a marooned astronaut who shoots grapples and jetpacks through 12 story missions on a hostile alien world. The atmospherics, music, and alien designs are all great, but the best part of the game is its action and exploration, which combines movement, shooting, and physics in a way that's challenging but very rewarding. The second game is Botanikula, which was released last year, but doesn't seem to have garnered the same attention as Ammonaut's previous adventure game Machinarian, which is a shame as I think Botanikula is even better. It's a dark children's picture book with a simple but surprisingly effective story, adorable yet gross character designs, and may be the very best game soundtrack since Monkey Island. You play as a group of three dwelling creatures who must save their home from an evil black spot spider thing. To give you an idea of the tone, here's my favorite scene where, in a side passage of a cave, our heroes watch a puppet show depicting their own adventure, complete with a happy ending. In contrast to traditional adventures, Botanikula is not really about solving puzzles. Instead, the player mostly pokes around the world, clicking on objects to see their amusing reactions, and by the time you've clicked on everything, the solution to progress is usually obvious, allowing you to quickly move on to the next location. The only two times I got stuck were when I encountered an unfortunate bug, and when I failed to notice an object to click on. Challenging it's not, but to its benefit, and I think its shallow interactions are actually very necessary. By making the player responsible for advancing the plot, Botanikula can tell a story that's mostly about hanging around in its world, something that wouldn't work in other mediums. Botanikula is appropriately short, less than three hours long, but if its story were told as a cartoon, it would barely run 20 minutes, which just wouldn't be enough time for the viewer to take in the world, nor enough time to give the story the same weight. Lastly, Flyin, I assume that's how it's pronounced, is a puzzle platformer released at the end of 2012 which tragically few people seem to have noticed. In the game you swap between four bird bug creatures, each with a unique special ability. Blue bird bug sings to flip switches, green bird bug crawls along walls, orange bird bug shoots through the air, and the black bird bug can transform into an invulnerable ball. On top of these abilities, with any character, you can use left trigger to alternate between two versions of reality and hold right trigger to glide. Many of the platforming challenges require tricky combinations of gliding, reality swapping, double jumping, and the four special abilities. So, unlike most puzzle platformers of recent years, Flyin puts greater emphasis on platforming rather than the puzzles, demanding non-trivial dexterity on the player's part. Like Super Meat Boy, death can come very quickly, but the game puts you back in position to try again immediately. The game's challenge of execution never gets as maddenly unforgiving as the last several levels of Super Meat Boy, but it does certainly expect you to climb a real mastery curve. Once you complete the game, the earlier levels that originally gave you trouble should seem much easier because the game will have actually taught you how to play it well. What makes Flyin great is its synthesis of appealing art and music, responsive controls, clever but simple mechanics, and inventive levels. Most impressively, the levels start out good and only get more interesting as the game goes on, particularly the side levels, all of which feature one-off puzzle mechanics. For example, in one side level, you navigate a maze with invisible walls, and in another side level, you dodge and climb fallen blocks in a very particular pattern. In truth though, Flyin is really not all that short. The main series of levels took me a good seven hours, and the side levels took another five. However, the game is very natural to play in short sessions because there's virtually no story to speak of, and the gameplay is divided into many short levels. I played it over a few weeks without ever feeling anxious for it to end. Speaking of which...