Wasted Space: A neccessary evil?

The infographic in the previous post illustrates quite a bit of waste from the developer's part, but honestly, is there a way to avoid that? If they worked to make a game to responsibly fill (by which I mean, put useful information instead of something like animated cutscenes^[1]) a 10gb game disc, it would probably take years to complete. Not only that, but the resulting game would also probably literally take years to play from start to finish (barring any game breaking glitches that allow the player to skip huge portions of the game). For those of us who have experience with not playing a game for maybe a month or two, then going back to it and feeling confused about the story, imagine having to play a game constantly for that long just to remember what you were doing. I'm a fan of long games and feeling like I got what I paid for, but that would be more of a chore than a game.

A chore?

Having unrealistically long games doesn't only turn gaming into a chore for gamers, but it would probably end up making consumers buy less games. I know a lot of people who grew up where their parents wouldn't buy them a new game until they were finished with the one they already had (for some children who ended up with brutally difficult games like Battletoads or Treasure Master, that was a tough order to fill!), so any frugal parents of today following that logic wouldn't see a need to buy their children another game until the next year. From another perspective, looking at video games as an art form like I mentioned in the blog's first post, would you want to read a book that took so long to complete? For most people I know, War and Peace is an intimidating work of literature simply due to its size. Even in terms of long movies, it's hard to sit in one place and watch something for so long. The same holds for video games: they need to be long enough to make us feel like we spent our money wisely, and either short or modular enough to let us play them quickly.

Modularity?

I could never call myself a proponent of short games, but I understand that average gamer of today (which is older than you may think^[2]) leads a busy life, and most probably don't have time for the lengthy quests of their childhood. However, instead of short games, I believe that games should be modular, which is to say, they should be relatively long and can even continue to have deep, well drawn out stories and characters, but be able to be put down for extended periods of time without confusing the player upon picking them up again. How that's done is completely up to the designer, of course, but I feel it's probably the best way to bring the classic feeling of video games into the modern world.

Next post, we'll be looking at what a few consumers think about the industry in the form of interviews, and a special guest blog talking about the salaries in the industry.


References:
[1] blue, March 4, 2006: DVD capacity: Team Ninja filled entire disc and had to make adjustments
[2] Jay Jackson, June 14, 2011: Today's Living: Target audience for video games getting younger