It seems like there’s been a lot of gamer angst lately directed at games that are considered too short. “8-12 hours is just not long enough to justify the $60 price tag,” says the collective internet. “We want value for our money, and if we can beat a game in less than a week then it’s worthless.”

Some have defended (apologized for?) these length games, saying that a modern AAA-title requires more people working longer to produce the level of depth and quality that gamers demand, therefore the length of the game is going to suffer. Still, conventional wisdom seems to be that 60-hour epics are somehow “better” than a game that can be beaten in two or three gaming sessions.

I’ve got a confession to make: I love short games.

Not just tolerate them, or put up with them; I love them. Most modern AAA action/adventure/shooters that fall in that magic 8-12 hour range? That’s great. A game like Portal, one that I can actually beat in a single sitting? Even better.

So why? There are a couple of reasons.

1. Short games are easier to get your head around.

Maybe this is just me, but I like knowing pretty much all there is to know about a certain game. If me and my friends are having a conversation about Ghostbusters and I’ve put in the requisite 6 or so hours to finish the storyline, I’ve seen all the same stuff they did. We can talk about specific parts and compare experiences, because we’ve both been through the same places and events.

Now, put that up against something like Fallout 3. You could put hundreds of hours into this game and still have whole giant sections of the map you’ve never stepped foot in. Having a conversation about this kind of game often requires you to describe stuff the other guy hasn’t seen yet. While this is a different kind of fun, I enjoy being able to compare notes more directly.



And it’s not just when you’re talking games with your buds. Every time I sit down to watch a movie I don’t fire up Return of the King Extended Edition, even though it’s great. Why not? Because sometimes you don’t want to commit the time and mental energy to something that huge. It’s the same with a game like Fallout: these games take a huge mental commitment, and sometimes that’s not what I’m in the mood for.

2. I can run through them again and again.

I’m the kind of guy who likes to revisit works of entertainment that I enjoy over and over again. Just like some people have favorite books they’ve read a hundred times, or movies they’ve watched until they know every line, I’ve got games I play over and over, sometimes multiple times a year, through to completion.

A lot of long games take a while to get going though, and even after that it can take forever to get to the good parts. Am I gonna start a new game of FF7 from scratch every time I want to see the Midgar motorcycle escape cinematic? Of course not. (That’s why I still have a save file somewhere that puts you right there. But I digress.) If I get an itch to show GLaDOS exactly what I think of her test program, I can start fresh, get the full experience, and not blow more than a few hours doing it.

3. Quality over quantity.

I’d much rather spend 3 hours to finish a game like Wanted: Weapons of Fate, one that presents interesting and unique areas to explore and scenarios to take part in, than 50 or more hours of the same old thing, over and over.

Let’s not kid ourselves: most gigantic games are full of filler content and repetition, both in terms of visuals (the same corridor copy-and-pasted to make a level, or a “crowd of people” made up of the same three character models over and over) and goals and objectives (anybody who played Spiderman 2, how many times did you save that kid’s balloon?). All games only have so many fresh ideas, and I’d rather the game end when its designers have run out of ideas, rather than them recycle ad nauseum what they’ve already done.

Look at it this way: would Braid have been just as great if he’d used every puzzle idea, slightly changed, a couple more times? Conversely, take a bloated longer game – something that wasn’t bad, but just kind of started to lose steam when you realized you were doing the same thing over and over – like, say, Assassin’s Creed. Wouldn’t it be a tighter, better paced experience if it showed you all the cool stuff it had to offer, let you play around with its systems for a while, then ended? Don’t you think more people would have at least played it to the end, instead of abandoning it when they got bored, as so many did?

4. While price does matter, it shouldn’t affect review scores.

I can hear a lot of you saying right now, “It’s a money thing! Short games cost the same as long ones, but don’t give you the same amount of entertainment for the money.” Which is certainly true. I know as well as anybody that there’s nothing worse than dropping sixty hard-earned dollars on something you’re done with later on that afternoon.

But that doesn’t affect the quality of the game itself. If a DVD of The Dark Knight cost 50 bucks, would that mean that the movie wasn’t worth watching? Of course not. Fewer copies might be sold, but the quality of the movie itself is the same whether it costs nothing or a lot. The same is true of games.

Besides, everybody knows there are plenty of ways to get games without paying full, day-one price for them. You can rent it. You can borrow it from a buddy. You can wait a few months until it gets cheap. You can trade some stuff on Goozex for it. And while I certainly don’t condone or endorse it, there’s no denying that plenty of gamers are willing to pirate games. So the “getting your money’s worth” argument doesn’t really hold water.

The idea that price is somehow relevant to a game’s review score comes from the fact that when gaming was in its infancy games were viewed more like toys than anything else, and reviews were approached from a “Consumer Report” standpoint – is this product worth the money? Since then, it’s become apparent that games have more in common with books, movies, and music than they do with toys. Like reviews for these types of entertainment, game reviews should focus on the, for lack of a better term, artistic merits of the work – the visuals, music, story, gameplay, and how these factors combine to create something that’s entertaining and aesthetically pleasing. So while the length of a game should absolutely affect your decision to purchase a game, it in no way affects the game’s quality, and that’s what a review should be measuring.

5. When real life starts, games take the hit.

Now we’re getting to the biggest reason for me personally. I’m a gamer through and through, but sometimes real life gets in the way of playing as much as you’d like. Spouse. Job. Pets. Kids. Housework. Yard work. Social life. All of these things take huge chunks of your time and sometimes that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for gaming.

On average, I’d say I have about an hour and a half, daily, that I can dedicate to gaming. For handheld stuff I can swing a little more (through cleverly using smoke, lunch, and bathroom breaks to put another few minutes into the game de jour), but usually I can guarantee no more than 15 hours playing games in any given week.

I’m a game collector and I’m constantly buying new stuff. With my gaming time so tightly allocated, though, I’m always being forced to choose which of a dozen or more games deserves my attention. Right now I’ve probably got at least 20 games on my shelf that haven’t even been put inside a console yet, and each and every one of them makes me feel guilty.

“Someday,” I think. “Someday, I’ll have more free time, and I’ll go back and finish Shadow of the Colossus.” Or Final Fantasy XII. Or Mass Effect. Or Persona 3. Even relatively short stuff like Fable II or Prince of Persia gets left behind after a couple of gaming sessions, because there’s always something new and interesting to get to.



But short games…short games I can feel satisfied about. I know that I’ve finished it, and when I see it sitting on my shelf it doesn’t feel like a missed opportunity.

Now, the obvious disclaimer: I’m not saying long games suck, or aren’t worthwhile, and I’m certainly not trying to impugn any of the longer games I’ve mentioned here – these and a dozen more epics are some of my favorite games of all time. It’s the very fact that they are so good that makes it so painful when I don’t have time to really play them as much as they deserve. I’m also not saying that all short games are perfect, or even good for that matter – there are plenty of games that aren’t worth spending even a few hours on.

So the next time you finish a game within hours of putting the disc in the tray, don’t rush off to the message boards to trash it. Instead remember that there’s room for both, the hundred-hour epics and the more compact experiences. Because, as Goldilocks taught us, sometime one person’s “not enough” is someone else’s “just right”.


PS. If you’d like to read more on the subject, take a look at Clive Thompson’s defense of The Maw’s 3-hour completion time, Dana Jongewaard’s opinion on the subject, or the always-entertaining TV Tropes’ entry on game length as it relates to quality.