something I havent thought about before is this weird obsession with game length and percievable amount of content in games.
Game Length, and the weird focus on More Of It
there are entire websites dedicated to how "long" a game is and i dont understand
why is it somehow implied to be "worse" for a game like Gradius V to have only 7 levels, but a massive game like Elden Ring gets praised for sheer amount of stuff. It feels excessive. This isn't to say big big games are bad by any means, I've enjoyed quite a few big open world type titles, but I don't understand why its a metric that a game should have points detracted from a review because of, or the focus on randomization to pad length.
It feels like one of those "infinite growth" paradoxes of a capitalist system, where the next game MUST be bigger, more sprawling, everything else potentially be damned.
Game Length, and the weird focus on More Of It
more rambling: i think the "length" of a game is completely subjective. Some players will stop after a casual playthrough. Others will play hours and hours of one game regardless of percieved amount of "content". Its different from player to player. You could derrive some kind of average, sure, and the hardcore types are usually a statistical niche for sure, but i feel the only one who can truely decide how much game a game is is the player themselves, instead of a reviewer authority.
