Indie | Short Stuff
Short Stuff
A virtue of independence…
As the debate about the acceptable length of games continues, Fraser McMillan looks at the issue from an independent perspective.
GAME LENGTH has been a contentious issue for years, with the assumption that more hours of play equals better value for money. The latter is a problem that’s ostensibly muted where we’re concerned; freed of shareholders and budgets, indie developers should naturally exist outwith the traditional sphere of financial constraint and its unwavering potential for conflicts of interest. In the case of freeware games, especially those that cost little or nothing to make, controversy is understandably limited. Even if the developer has made some financial investment, it’s possible to rely on donations to cover the cost of past and future projects.
The old attitude may still be there, as evidenced by a fellow customer overheard in a gaming store earlier today – “it’s not a very good game; there’s no skill to it” – but it is in decline. This is a result of indie games’ ability to be as short or as long as necessary. It used to be considered scandalous if a mainstream title’s run-time averaged less than half a day’s play. Now, they routinely fall under the five or six hour mark. It’s still occasionally singled out as a specific con in reviews, but just as we’ve become accustomed to shorter games, we’re less likely to break our investment down into pounds per hour.
What this indicates is that the outmoded notion that it’s necessarily difficulty or playtime that constitute “value” in our games has been challenged by indies. Valve, who are consistently ahead of the curve, have followed the trend with their Half-Life 2 episodes and the splendid Portal, still cited as the marquee short game. Its almost film length duration was one of its 
best assets, which admittedly makes me somewhat nervous of the sequel due later this year.
Ten second rule
Valve’s masterpiece may have demonstrated to the wider audience the potential for shorter, more contained gaming experiences, but even they were merely following the smaller independents’ lead. Indeed, the community’s output is arguably becoming more and more weighted to the trend, reaching its logical conclusion in the Experimental Gameplay Project’s recent “ten seconds” theme. Molleindustria’s hysterical Run, Jesus, Run demonstrates the power of the shorter game to an even greater extent than his earlier titles Oiligarchy and Every Day the Same Dream. There’s no need to pad anything out, as is customary with surprisingly many commercial titles, and it all fits together neatly.
One of the key advantages of these leaner titles is that it’s possible for the player to come away with a fully formed experience without plugging away for hours on end. I can play through a Don’t Look Back in a half hour and reflect on it, drawing what I can from the tremendously high quality of those 30 minutes. It’s almost universally recognised that the majority of games run out of steam before the end; how many times have you honestly been satisfied upon reaching the conclusion? A fun, enlightening and tightly designed short game 
has the capacity to deliver a consistently great experience from start to finish, whereas that’s mighty hard to maintain in even the very best linear games lasting more than a few hours.
Yet players moaned about the pricing of Flower, World of Goo, Braid and most recently VVVVVV because of their relatively modest lengths. Even forgoing the quartet’s comparative cheapness, it’s hard to comprehend just how blinkered the argument is. They each present at turns immensely satisfying, original adventures that are cohesive and well-rounded. They clock in between one and six hours each and cost from five to 15 pounds. That doesn’t seem unfair in any way, especially given that many players will have got more from each of those than the vast majority of full-price releases.
That’s not to say long games don’t have their place. By far the most interesting mass-market releases of the last several years have contained literally hundreds of hours of content, and there’s certainly something to be said for that format. Indie games don’t have to be short either – the freedom to last ten minutes also means the freedom to create a three thousand hour RPG. Something along those lines wouldn’t be viable on store shelves, so we’re served the theoretically infinite Love as a download straight from its lone creator’s site.
But it’s the tyranny of the obligation to bloat that the indie space is challenging the most. The perceived need to do this evaporated along with the publisher and platform-holder monopoly; not every interactive experience need last forever to be of merit, and that’s an important turning point for the medium. A decade ago, we bragged to Hollywood that we could pack 50 times the content into our boxed product. These days, we’d be better off laughing at the notion of sitting through three hours in one go.
This is an interesting way of looking at indie game length. Previously, my thoughts about indie game length were influenced by this:
http://chrishecker.com/Please_Finish_Your_Game
Hecker is worried that some kinds of indie devs are too proud of their games being as slight– sometimes, this translates to ‘as short’– as they are. He’s worried that the ethic behind Indie Game Jams etc. is encouraging indie devs to make games that really deserve a lot more time, effort, and content than they end up getting. But you’re absolutely right: if a game can do all it can do in six hours, and if what it can do is REALLY AWESOME, and conceptually complete, we shouldn’t be complaining at all.
I think there’s a problem where indie software is pitted, like it or not, against the AAA mainstream. Mainstream titles dig deep to produce a plethora of artistic assets and voice actors and levels. This is the standard. Like it or not. [Although this is becoming increasingly expensive as hardware moves on and gamer demands with it]
At the other end of the scale, indies are also up against free flash games, of which there are more than the grains of sand on Miami Beach. A “short quality” indie game may be too closely compared with its Flash kin. (think: Defense Grid vs Desktop Tower Defense)
I was hoping for a sea change where indie software would be considered on its own merit – and origin. Mainstream needs to turn a profit – travelling deep into the back passage of some weird-ass idea that maybe only a handful of people will love is something a big publisher will find difficult to fund. (Anyone see the headline: “EA funding Sleep Is Death”)
Indie software can deliver alternatives to shareholder safety – but there is a price. These small shops have to cover their costs too. I don’t want them to go under. I don’t want the indie movement to get shot in the head by market forces.
But I’m less hopeful. With a recession on and discounts pouring out of digital stores every week, it seems a very difficult time for an fledgling indie to turn a profit.
If we, as a community, aren’t willing to pay higher than bargain basement prices for indie software, maybe that means we don’t care for REALLY AWESOME indie software enough.
Oh, hi Laura.
@Laura – Hecker wasn’t ‘complaining’ that Indie games didn’t have enough content, but that they didn’t explore the possibilities of their ideas very far at all. ‘Slight’ is right, ’short’ isn’t at all. I would love if most indie games were 6 (varied, inventive) hours, but that’s really not common. Most last around 10 minutes.
I believed he compared Braid to something like Cactus’ work. One is a singular statement that was the source of a lot of discussion and progression of the indie scene and the other was a collection of scattershot, almost trivial surface deep look at different ideas, that were largely ignored except in the collective sense of “wow, he’s fast”. What’s worse, having already touched whatever idea was the basis for a mini-game, it discourages others from doing them a much better service.
Btw, I found your blog in the last week. It’s good!
As a consumer and gamer I am constantly on the lookout for good value in what I buy. With so many different, high-quality products competing for my attention from month to month, I have to be extremely scrupulous with what I spend my money on.
Adding to this, a good majority of mainstream game releases decrease in value by around at least a 1/3 after 3-6 months on sale, and they do offer experiences beyond six hours, as well as a degree of replayability.
Just a couple of days ago, I bought Battlefield Bad Company 2 for the PC for £15. Compare this to VVVVVV, which is £10 roughly. Now, on the face of it, Battlefield BC 2 offers more bang for your buck – literally. State-of-the-art graphics; single player; an in-depth multiplayer experience; the potential for new downloadable content: these things matter to me.
“That doesn’t seem unfair in any way, especially given that many players will have got more from each of those than the vast majority of full-price releases.”
And this, to me, is the issue: I don’t many of these indie games truly do offer more to me than a “full-price” release. (I use “full-price” like this, because very few games release at full-price these days.) And if indie games aren’t being sold, and people are complaining the games are priced too high, then they probably are priced too high – because price and value are amounts based upon expectation, of what the consumer is willing to pay.