How long should a game be? #devrant 4

I love watching movies. New ones, old ones, comfort movies you've watched dozens of times before, so-bad-they-are-funny ones. There's something about being able to immerse yourself in light and story and a world for a couple of hours that I still find as magical as I did when I was a kid.

But now I have kids of my own, watching movies is a rare luxury. By the time they are asleep, and the detritus is all cleaned up, there's rarely time to watch a whole movie. So my wife and I have been drawn to stuff with a shorter run time, not just TV shows, but TV shows with ~30 minute run-times. In this era of epic streaming series, this seems to have become a novelty, and when our friends ask if we've binged the latest 10 hour epic TV show, we just have to shrug. No time!

Even more than that, I find this shows often disappointing. There's so much padding - unnecessary filler that doesn't drive the plot, or develop the characters. I love love love the 30 min TV shows that can't afford to waste a second, but still manage to get a whole story arc. I'm talking modern gems like Archer, Atlanta, The Bear, Bobs Burgers, I'm a Virgo, Gravity Falls, South Park. But also classics like Red Dwarf - I always loved Red Dwarf as a kid, but now I just can't believe how each episode crams an epic original sci-fi concept that could fill a whole movie, with 100% character driven plot and comedy. I remember an interview with writers Bob Grant and Doug Naylor, where they explained how essential it was that Red Dwarf was on BBC, because you got an extra 5 minutes without having adverts, and that was where all the character stuff could happen. I also love the Wallace and Gromit shots (like A Close Shave, and The Wrong Trousers), each is just like 25 minutes, but it feels like you've watched a whole epic movie!

However, a major advantage of streaming has been that shows don't have to have a set length anymore. I loved Chernobyl and Andor, both because episodes of each are just as long as they have to be. Chernobyl only goes between 60 to 70 minutes an episode, but you can feel how nothing had to be cut or padded to get to an set run time. In Andor, episodes are anything between 40 and 55 minutes, whatever is needed for that bit of the story. I mean, you know those Simpsons episodes where they are desperately trying to fill the time, but it's also a problem I had with The Wire back in the day (scandalous, I know), sometime you could feel how that HBO obligation to fill a time slot left some episodes very uneven.

So what about games? Well, it's the same problem for me with time pressures recently, the time I have to get into epic sessions of things like Skyrim, Civilisation, Banished or No Man's Sky (no shame!) are limited. So things I can quickly pick up and put down are great, and the Steam Deck has been amazing for that - just turn off and on and your game is in the same place! No boot or load times! When you have maybe 20 minutes before dinner, spending even 10% of that waiting for a PC/console to boot, load and do updates is a major bummer!

My children have been playing classic point-and-click adventure games, like Monkey Island (1 and 3 so far) and Day of the Tentacle, which are fine in 20 minute screen-time sessions, but need to be played daily to keep track of the story and puzzles. There's a great renaissance of these games too, like Lucy Dreaming, and the forthcoming Foolish Mortals, but they also benefit from longer gaming sessions.

However, just like with animated shows, these point-and-click adventure games are expensive to make. I think it's in this Noclip interview that Tim Schafer points out how much cheaper other styles of game (like platformers, 3rd person shooters are) are for runtime, because art and sound once developed (the expensive bits) can be iterated for hours of different level design. This is foremost in my mind after our experience with The Protagonish, and as we are planning our first major title (planned as a 3-4 hour game).

So The Protagonish is a bit of an experiment: a paid for (but cheap), professional quality game (like the above) but with a 20ish minute runtime. Partly it's because this is an expensive experiment in making a game, but also because I think it's satisfying to be able to finish something (at least with one ending) in one setting. It's a nod to all the people who don't have 3 hours an evening for gaming, but also raises the possibility of more episodic gaming in this genre (remember Tell Tale??) but where a new chapter is more like a great episode of Bobs Burgers, rather than a 3 hour movie in a series. Who's got time for all that?!