Films, or at least the films we watch in cinemas, are linear. We experience them differently. They tell a particular story. When the story ends, so does the experience. If they manage to tell that story to its satisfactory conclusion, whether it takes 1.5 hours or 2 hours, the experience was worth the ticket price. The reason most films are the length that they are is because that’s how long it takes to tell their particular flavour of story. Audiences’ tastes change and vary, and Titanic was the length it was because that’s the length James Cameron felt it had to be to do justice to the story, at the time it came out. The same with Lord of the Rings. Shorter films these days can create a similarly satisfactory experience because audiences’ tastes vary.

The same is true of books, paintings, poems, etc. They are inherently non-interactive art forms. I know the audience engages with these works mentally, but in games, we can change things, however marginally. We get to express ourselves in them. That experience is unfortunately tied to the game’s length. If you don’t have anything more to do in the game world, but your appetite for the experience hasn’t been sated, you feel cheated.

It’s kind-of ironic, because a film’s length directly impacts the value of the experience. A long movie often feels less satisfactory than a shorter one, because the impact of the story is diluted by lengthy monologues or periods of quiet. So a shorter, tighter, better-told film could be worth _more_ money than a longer, long-winded one. Gameplay, on the other hand, is more difficult to relate to time. Your actions in a game determine the value of the experience. And the better that interaction and immersion is, the longer you want it to last. Hence, you don’t value good but short games that don’t deliver enough of the experience they offer, and feel that they are priced too high.

TL/DR Games are interactive. Movies aren’t. Provided the experience is awesome, length increases a game’s value, whereas length can actually decrease the value of a film, because it detracts from the experience.

This can lead to absurdity, such as when the full album price is only $1 more than the individually purchasable songs, as here: http://www.amazon.com/Tarkus/dp/B001CS2TFS/ or it can go the other way… I can’t find it now, but we found an example of an album which had about five 9 minute songs and one 10 minute song, so the 5 songs cost $4.95 if bought individually, or the whole album cost $9.99, so the one slightly longer song effectively cost $5.

So I’m just saying, I don’t think there’s any clear evidence against a price/length proposition in other artistic media.

I can see the argument that you could create a more artful product by cutting Dragon Age down to 4 hours, however it’s incorrect (IMO) to assume that consumers are art connoisseurs in tbis instance. For many a value proposition of spending $60 for a game they will play all month versus $15 for a game that will enjoy in one evening is clearly defined in those terms only. There is some flexibility here but it’s not as clear cut as you’re trying to make it and I don’t think your analogies to other entertainment markets are all that accurate.

In other words, instead of using the lower length to spend more time on gameplay, they’re using it to do the opposite and twist their reasoning once again in the PR wars (modern PR people scare me… those fake laughters…). It can be a cop out. And it _can_ swap back to indie devs. Not saying Limbo is an example… but look at those iPhone “art games” that make it on the front page of places like TIGSource but are just plain superficial crap. Sorry.

Sometimes depth DOES need time. We’re arriving at a point where reviewers are scorned for daring to mention a game being too short. And that is bad. Short gameplay can be a symptom of a lack of depth or not taking an idea to its full potential. Sure, reviewers should talk about the actual causes not the symptoms but I find it strange that indie devs choose THIS of anything as a mass crusade against game reviewers. There are better arguments. For example, whether it’s a good idea that most reviewers try to guess the taste of the masses instead of developing a good taste of their own…

The fact that it doesn’t happen so people don’t talk about it doesn’t seem to me to prove much.

There is no “natural” right length for movies, it’s just the current ballpark length is what the art:commerce meetup that is the film industry has settled on.

Read any Harry Potter books lately?

I think books are the better view of what you’re conveying. Although smaller books are usually cheaper, that’s not always the case. I’m sure very few people would pay $20 for a 100-page book unless there was something very special about it. But it sounds more reasonable than $50 for a 5-hour game.

What it comes down to is balancing that “experience,” which games are often missing, versus general rules of capitalism. Consumers will spend their money where they think it will get the best value. If there’s a 10-hour awesome game and a 20-hour meh game, I’m sure most informed consumers will take the 10-hour game. But the length is definitely a factor. I’ll use Brutal Legend as a recent example. I liked Brutal Legend a lot. Fun, clever, etc. All the things you’ve come to expect from a Tim Schafer game. But I just couldn’t recommend it for $60. If you don’t play multiplayer, it was just too short, to me, to recommend at full price, when there are other very good games out that are much longer. So is length so important relative to other merits? No, of course not. But it does play a role.