I honestly thing that game length is holding the medium back, because of how difficult and time-consuming it makes it to actually have any sort of broad understanding of videogames, whether you& #39;re an average player, a critic, or a designer.
It& #39;s pretty easy to watch 100+ movies a year (hell, you could watch a movie every evening and see 365). If you read a lot, and are a fast reader, you could get through 100+ books a year.
Meanwhile, you& #39;d have to dedicate a *lot* of time and probably actively seek out shorter games just to reach 50 games in a year
If you spent 2 hours a day watching movies, that would be around 365 movies in a year. You could bang out a pretty huge swath of "important" movies in a wide variety of genres. You could watch enough movies that any reasonable person could call you a "film buff"
Meanwhile, if you spent that amount of time playing videogames, that would be just under 50 15-hour games (which is on the short side for some genres). You could maybe get a deep understanding of a few genres, or a very shallow understanding of a lot of genres.