There’s an essay up at GameSetWatch about how there’s just too many dang games out these days.

It seems a little crazy, but I’m starting to agree.

Games aren’t like movies or books. If you pick up a game, it could take between 20 to 100 hours to finish it. Like the essay says, we’re getting old. We’ve got responsibilities. Heck, I write about video games for a living, and even I can’t find enough spare time to get through all the games I want to play. This never used to be a problem when I was a kid.

Maybe that’s why I’m increasingly attracted to the smaller, indie games that flourish on the PC. I want a full-fledged experience that I can fit into my time as opposed to a sweeping pseudo-epic that I’m only going to see half of.

I used to sneer at the idea of “casual” games, thinking that they were siphoning off resources in the industry from the kind of games that I want to play. But here I am today, playing many of those same kinds of games.

Another solution might come in the form of episodic gaming, a form that some companies have experimented with but doesn’t seem to have taken hold. I used to pooh-pooh episodic gaming as well, since it just seemed like a scam for getting us to pay more for less.

An episodic narrative gets screwed up more often than not (think Halo 2) but if done correctly, it can give you a satisfying story with a beginning, middle and end that still works in the context of a larger tale. That might be just the ticket for a time-crunched audience.

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