When more is less...

In addition to watching TV, I also play video games.   Essentially, I am a teenager in a 30 year old's body.  Currently, I am playing Batman Arkham City and it has taught me a truth about myself.  I want to be Batman, but I don't want to have to change the tires on the Batmobile.

Let me explain.  The game is a follow-up to the award winning game Batman: Arkham Asylum from last year.  In the first game you played as Batman and you got stuck in Arkham Asylum and had to find your way out while dealing with all the bad guys stuck inside with you.  Think Prison Break for comic book nerds.  It was a pretty awsome game.  So for the sequel the developers decided - let's just make it bigger.  They made an entire city into a prison - thus the name Arkham City.  They essentially made the same game again only much, much bigger.  Thus it must be much, much better right? 

Not necessarily.

The problem is the game is much too big.  There are over 400 side-quests in the city and I am constantly veering off the main story to do all kinds of things (like save prisoners or answer telephone calls) and I just don't care about the story anymore.  I have choice - but no clear goal.  By giving the player so many things to do the game makes the player not care.  The "game" begins to feel like a "chore".

So this got me thinking: is bigger better?

Let me go back to my first love - television.   Curb Your Enthusiasm is a show that never fails to make me laugh and a large part of that is that it has a short, tight season.  Each season is at most ten episodes long.  This ensures that the show doesn't lose steam or run out of ideas.  It feels fresh.  Having a season of 18 episodes would destroy that show.   Almost all the HBO shows you probably like have a max episode run of 10-13 episodes.  In TV shorter is necessarily better.  Heroes was killed by having to fill an entire year of programing.  They had one story to tell: "Save the Cheerleader save the World"  and they got to the end of it too fast and had nothing left to say.  If Entourage had a long season everyone would have realised that it was the same story told over and over again.  

Video games and TV shows need to be short to be sweet.    I like to waste time... but I only have so much time to waste.