Coming to accept being a "Bite sized" gamer

Like a lot of video game players I started when I was young (back in the NES era.) Back then memory restrictions meant that most games were pretty short, but limits on lives and continues, and the sheer punishing nature of early game design, meant that they mostly took a very long time to finish. If you got a new game you knew it would be weeks or months until you saw the end, if you ever did. Games were by their nature long, and that's how I liked them. I can remember not using the warp pipes in Mario 1 or the whistles in Mario 3 because I didn't want to shorten the length of my game and get to the ending faster than necessary.

Just like we thought of "fun size" as a misnomer for candy bars, we thought of "short and sweet" as an inherently false claim about a video game.

I continued playing games through the subsequent eras, switching up my gaming habits from time to time but never stopping, and one thing remained true for my entire gaming life. Length meant value, and value was good.

Now I'm not saying that I never enjoyed a short game. I loved the original Metal Gear Solid, which is only a handful of hours, and of course a short, great, experience (like Panzer Dragoon Orta) was always preferable to a bad, long game, but all things being equal I wanted my games to last as long as they could and while I could imagine a game outstaying its welcome it was rare that a game ever did.

I wasn't the only one who thought this way. Games routinely advertised their length on the back of the case, with phrases like "Eight huge worlds to explore" or "100 hours+." Reviewers rated games on "lasting appeal" and short games were said to be "just worth a rental," which was also what was said about games that were just bad or not fun. It was widely accepted that length and amount of content were a positive in a game, just like great graphics or exciting gameplay.

Now that I'm getting older that's no longer the case. I don't have the time to play games that I used to, and my patience is a little thinner for pedestrian games in general. I've shot a million guys with AK-47s before, so unless you're doing something interesting with it I just find it kind of boring. Over time, so slowly that it was barely perceptible, my view changed, so that the 100+ hours that was once a selling point just seems like a huge commitment that I don't want to embark on. I'd love to play the Witcher 3, but with the DLC alone being 30 hours I know that I probably won't be starting it any time soon, let alone finishing.

In fact games that are just normal length, of 10-20 hours, are starting to turn me off. I started The Division a few months ago and I liked it okay, but the idea of plunging back in and going through the rest of that content just leaves me feeling exhausted. I played Uncharted 4, and I really liked it, but I couldn't help wishing it was a few hours shorter. Each new "no, it turns out the treasure's really over HERE" twist brought on mixed feelings and by the end of the game I just wanted it to be over. I have come to accept that I likely won't finish Far Cry Primal and to appreciate the time I did enjoy with that game, before it turned into a slog.

Instead I find myself more and more drawn to games that offer bite-sized experiences. Sometimes, like in Ape Escape 2 or Trackmania Turbo, this means distinct levels with clear goals where you can make progress in half an hour or 45 minutes and put the game down satisfied, to pick it up later. Sometimes, like with Inside or Abzu or Firewatch, this means a game that is itself a short experience that tells a contained story. I've played these types of games since they started getting popular in the 360 era, but I've always treated them as palette cleansers; something quick to play through between the big, in depth, meaty experiences I thought I craved.

Now I'm ready to accept that's not the case. When I have some time to play something I actually prefer that it be short rather than long. I make a good living so spending $20 on a few hours entertainment isn't a big deal to me, but even if I had a lot less money I think I'd still prefer the more compact experiences (I just might wait for them to drop in price before jumping on board. Fortunately these days if you wait a few months or a couple years at most, everything gets cheap.)

It's not just that I can finish the games, it's that I've come to realize that most video games have a lot of padding. Whether it's grinding for resources, fighting the same enemies in roughly the same environment over and over, or traveling around a big open world from one point of interest or mission to another, there's a lot of time in games that's just kind of wasted. Sometimes this provides pacing, like the long (skipable) car rides in L.A. Noir that showed you the city and gave atmosphere, but often it's just there for the sake of extending length. I don't understand why so many games have time-sink crafting systems (I'm not talking about something like Minecraft where you can make something truly creative and interesting) and bad checkpointing will put me off a game quicker than just about anything.

Short games tend to be all meat and no gristle. They don't have tedious repetitive side quests. They don't have stories that take forever to get going and drone on and on. They don't make you fight the same enemy 400 times, even after it has long moved from being a challenge to being a chore. Looking back over the games I've finished in the last few years, with a few notable exceptions I've gotten just as much satisfaction from the short compact experiences as from the sprawling ones, only the short ones didn't make me feel like I was compromising something else in my life to be able to play them.

So, at least for now, I am accepting that I'm a "bite-sized" gamer. No longer will I buy a lot of big sprawling games and let my backlog swell with games I don't have any time to play. No longer will I look at a 4 hour game as "less than" a 15 hour game, even if the short game does everything it wants to and wraps things up in time for dinner.

The truth is that looking to length as necessarily implying value is silly. A long movie isn't inherently better than a short one. A good book wouldn't be made better if you added a hundred pages of padding. And the same is true of games. Call of Duty gets a lot of flack for 5 hour campaigns, but those five hours are full of hand-crafted content and thrilling moments. They are tight and quick and fun and there's nothing wrong with that.