Jobye-Kyle Karmaker

One final thought about pacing and why this idea of a 3-4 hour "short game" is compelling (to me, at least). It's very easy to underestimate how much of a film or tv episode (or series) "feeling right" comes down to how it is paced.

That comes down to being able to, in the example of a feature film screenplay for example, knowing that by page X, narrative event Y should have probably happened. People who have seen 100s of movies inherently understand this and expect this when they watch movies.

It's part of the unspoken, subconscious experience of watching a film. A good example of this is, IMO, watching something like the extended edition of the LOTR films. They feel tremendously bloated and LONG and it's actually kind of tiring to watch them...

...because the narrative anchors, the pacing you have come to expect from a 2 hour film, are no longer there. (I mean I love the LOTR films and the extended editions are awesome so I'm just talking about pacing here, not about the quality or what they add to the films.)

I think part of the reason why narrative and gameplay can often feel so decoupled from each other, is that we don't have a similar ingrained sense of when things typically should happen in a game store, because some are 2 hours long and some are 200 hours long.

(game story, not game store)

This especially problematic in vast open-world games where the player determines the pace. It's why we have so many "OMG the world is ending please get on this urgent quest ONLY YOU CAN DO IT!" followed by players going off and collecting 100 flowers or flags or orbs.

You can look at the episodes of WINTERMUTE, our story mode in The Long Dark, as compared to our open-ended Survival mode, as an example in this contrast. The episodes are much more constrained (although they are still too long to nail strong narrative pacing -- 5-10 hours each).