When will gamers finally have way too much of not enough? The tension between game prices and the length of the experience is only becoming more apparent as big-budget, long-hyped releases can be finished in the span of an afternoon. Most recently, Medal of Honor, Vanquish, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 were chastised by critics and consumers alike for being incredibly brief—all take about five hours to complete.

Games are getting shorter, but not many in the industry readily want to admit it. Setting up interviews for this article proved a Sisyphean task: no one wanted to say their games were too short, and those who created longer games were loath to criticize their peers.

Quarter Munchers

Believe it or not, games actually started with short playtimes, thanks to the influence of the arcade, where many designers cut their teeth. Arcade games weren't designed to be beaten or to be long experiences; they were just there to devour money. Looking at XBLA releases of classic arcade games like Contra and X-Men shows the short nature of the format—they even have achievements for beating them in under 30 minutes. Multiplayer was king, and it wasn't until games made their way into living rooms that narratives needed to exist—players had more time with a game and thus expected more. For better or worse, arcade design ethics came home. Crushing challenge and repetition were chief among them. To create the illusion of a longer game, designers would often ratchet up the difficulty level and force players through multiple recycled environments.

"I remember working on games where the lead designer would say, 'I want the player to die X number of times at this boss,'" recalled THQ Creative Manager of Digital Games Scott Rogers. He said it's not a good way to design a game, and he'd much rather do whatever he can to enable a player to succeed.

Technological advances, like saved games, allowed for deeper experiences. "It suddenly became possible to make a game that takes more than an hour to complete," says Andrew Grant, technological director of MIT's GAMBIT Game Lab. At the Lab, the joint collaboration between Singapore's government and MIT focuses on hurdles facing the game industry, with research benefiting the development community locally and abroad.

"The days of having to play a game through all in one sitting, and of having games with extremely long levels, where the punishment for not finishing the level or dying is starting over from the beginning [are over]," said Chris Kagel, chief creative director at Scientifically Proven Entertainment. A 15 year veteran, Kagel's resume includes Rockstar’s Angel Studios (now Rockstar San Diego of Red Dead Redemption fame), and Ubisoft Shanghai where he worked on Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.

"The levels themselves [in PT] were maybe 30 to 45 minutes on the first play-through," Kagel said.

3D games, as opposed to the 2D titles from early PC and console gaming, were never particularly lengthy according to Scott Steinberg, the lead analyst and president of video game consulting firm TechSavvy Global. "If I added up all the time it took to beat them, it'd be somewhere around six to eight hours [apiece]."

Rogers has employed the same design theory on each game he’s worked on in the past 16 years, from Maximo and God of War to Red Faction: Armageddon. He builds each level and runs the character from one end to the other without enemies, just geometry.

His goal is for it to take the player about ten minutes to get from point A to point B. "Then I add in gameplay experiences, mechanics, timing puzzles, combat situations, [seeing] if there's a way to double or triple this time in order to get the player to hit the 20 or 30-minute sweet-spot I'm aiming for in reality."

"It's always better to gauge the experience off of how long you want the player to play it," he said. "We'd generally shoot for 8-10 hours [of gameplay for a PSOne game]. That number stayed pretty consistent until recently."

Does size matter?

Once games made the transition from cartridges to disc-based media, developers did whatever they could to fill up the newfound space whether or not it added to the game experience. Just because Super Mario Sunshine gave players boatloads of content didn't necessarily mean it was better than Super Mario Bros. 3. Quantity does not always equal quality.

"Just because you can put it in, doesn't mean you should," noted Kagel. Many people complain of short games, but then they also complain about tricks such as back tracking that can artificially lengthen a game. People want both length and quality in a game. From a budgetary standpoint that's hard to do, leading to games that may not take long to beat but offer a high-quality experience. At least, that's the ideal.

"One of the biggest reasons [games have gotten shorter] is people tend to be a little more mature about how they design them and make a game the right size, instead of trying to fill a giant vessel," said Josh Tsui, alum of Midway and EA Chicago and president of Robomodo Games.

"Throwing in all kinds of crap to fill up a disc is a thing of the past," he said.