The mediums of film and television have benefitted tremendously from having a relatively formalized length -- a feature film is usually around 2 hours, a tv episode is usually around 44-60 mins. This offers huge advantages around pacing, planning, budgeting, etc., not to mention

...how people experience these things. You have an ingrained sense of what to expect in a movie when, for example, you know there's only 15 minutes left. Games don't have this. There is no standard length or format per se. This is a positive in some ways but not in all ways.

Relative to film and television, games are an amazingly high-volume entertainment medium. By high-volume, I mean, there is a huge amount of content per production dollar. This means a huge amount of play time per production dollar spent.

This has led to games, for the large part, being valued in how much entertainment hours they can offer per dollar, over the quality of each entertainment hour. Embracing a stricter format for certain types of games could help shift the value proposition.

(To dig into the entertainment value per production dollar concept a bit more -- compare 100 hours of RDR2 vs. 100 hours of high-end television production. 100 eps would be 5+ seasons which for a show like, say, Westworld or The Crown, would be $500M+ of production expense.)

I think vast open-world games that offer 100s of hours of playtime are fantastic and should probably cost $300-400 to play, if they were priced sustainably. But, putting that aside, it'd be interesting to see what could be done with a stricter format around a particular type...

...of game. Let's call it a "short game", around 3-4 hours in length. It can't be 2 hours b/c there are too many existing business dynamics that work against that play time (ex. Steam refund policy).

The short game can be narrative-driven and paced accordingly. We can begin to learn how much story we can typically cover well in that play time, and we can learn how to pace it well. We can learn to develop mechanics that are effective at sustaining a 3-4 play experience...

...vs. heavy grind-focused progression systems that are largely designed to help sustain a 100+ hour game or to help drive monetization and recoupment on a game that costs $60 to buy when it should probably cost $300-400 to buy.

These 3-4 hour "short games" could have a standardized price -- $19.99. This is a reasonable price considering the amount of play time. It's not a throw-away price but it's not more than it costs to see a movie or buy a book.

As a player, you could start them and know that you would be able to finish them in an evening or half an afternoon. You would actually anticipate finishing every one that you started, vs. expecting to have to abandon it part way through.

With a relatively fixed play time and a relatively fixed price point, the differentiators would become content, mechanics approach, and quality.

I wonder whether any interesting innovations would come from taking such an approach.

(I actually proposed something like this about 10 yrs ago at a talk I gave at MIGs, though it was positioned as an approach to what people were calling games for a "mid-core" audience. That audience didn't really coalesce in a way people were thinking back then...or did it?)

I personally think there's room for an approach like this and in many ways it could also help address crunch (it's easier to properly plan a finite 3-4 hour experience that needs to be tightly paced in order to resonate with an audience).

This wouldn't replace other existing game types, it'd just be additive to the other genres and game types that are already available. The main difference would be that as a player, you have a better idea of what you are getting yourself into in terms of time commitment.

And really, I suspect people would happily spend $19.99 for a compelling experience they know they can finish, vs. yet another $60 for a bloated game they know they will never be able to complete.

That said, this approach would fly in the face of the "neverending game" and "metaverse" concepts that everyone is talking about being the future and therefore it's unlikely to get much credence in mainstream business circles. It's not sexy.

Unless someone turned this idea into a platform.

One final thought about pacing and why this idea of a 3-4 hour "short game" is compelling (to me, at least). It's very easy to underestimate how much of a film or tv episode (or series) "feeling right" comes down to how it is paced.

That comes down to being able to, in the example of a feature film screenplay for example, knowing that by page X, narrative event Y should have probably happened. People who have seen 100s of movies inherently understand this and expect this when they watch movies.

It's part of the unspoken, subconscious experience of watching a film. A good example of this is, IMO, watching something like the extended edition of the LOTR films. They feel tremendously bloated and LONG and it's actually kind of tiring to watch them...

...because the narrative anchors, the pacing you have come to expect from a 2 hour film, are no longer there. (I mean I love the LOTR films and the extended editions are awesome so I'm just talking about pacing here, not about the quality or what they add to the films.)

I think part of the reason why narrative and gameplay can often feel so decoupled from each other, is that we don't have a similar ingrained sense of when things typically should happen in a game store, because some are 2 hours long and some are 200 hours long.

(game story, not game store)

This especially problematic in vast open-world games where the player determines the pace. It's why we have so many "OMG the world is ending please get on this urgent quest ONLY YOU CAN DO IT!" followed by players going off and collecting 100 flowers or flags or orbs.

You can look at the episodes of WINTERMUTE, our story mode in The Long Dark, as compared to our open-ended Survival mode, as an example in this contrast. The episodes are much more constrained (although they are still too long to nail strong narrative pacing -- 5-10 hours each).

I'm not saying this is better than the traditional open-world structure where the player can opt in to story when they want and then opt out when they want, and they control the pace and focus on activities -- this is clearly a major strength of our medium.

But, it comes at a cost. Maybe there's a better way.

Just to add to this, because a lot of people seem to feel that limiting yourself to a 3-4 hour game means you are mostly going to be making "light" narrative experiences without any real gameplay depth.

Just to rebut that thought, here's a fairly random selection of titles that are identified on http://howlongtobeat.com  as being completable (main game) within 3-4 hours. This should give you a sense of the possible variety. This is a small sample of 1000+ games that are filtered.

Filter:

...I could go on. That's just a smattering of games I chose from the first 10 pages of 51 pages of filtered 3-4 hour playtime games. I won't waste more of my time or yours, but I think this proves 3-4 hour games can support a wide range of gameplay mechanics & depth just fine.

(Keep in mind I'm not arguing for the commercial viability of any of these titles, though I think most did decently if not well.)