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're an average player, a critic, or a designer.

It'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'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.

And if you're talking about JRPGs? Or cRPGs? That ~50 games is starting to look like 20 or fewer. Again, if you're playing 2 hours a day and that's *all* you play.