As the end of the year approaches, it might be salutary to remember what the biggest videogame phenomenon of 2000 has been. Perfect Dark? No. Deus Ex? Nice try. PlayStation2? Small beer. No, the big story, once again, was Pokémon. Pokémon Yellow sold a million copies throughout Europe in just six days in August; 750,000 kids entered the summer Pokémon championship; and the global turnover of the franchise in 2000 was a staggering $15 billion. And all this running on the most rudimentary videogame hardware available today.

You might say Pokémon is a law unto itself, that it’s a kids’ fad, that it has nothing to teach the “serious” end of the videogame market. But I suggest that it does. And fundamentally, it comes down to an argument about size. Yes, size matters. But not in the way that some people think.

There is a school of thought, for a start, that just says baldly that bigger is better. When Metal Gear Solid first came out and offered only around 12 hours of gameplay in total (at least, to complete it the first time), many gamers sniffed and said “too easy”, “not big enough”. This argument in itself is illogical in the wider context. To say that only your Final Fantasies, which require a 70-hour trudge to complete, offer true “value for money” is to ignore the fact that even a shorter game like MGS compares well with a London cinema ticket on a pure bang-for-buck basis. (Ten quid for two hours or thirty quid for twelve?)

Clearly, we don’t rate Hollywood movies according to how long they are - we don’t think a five-hour film is necessarily better than a two-hour film. Of course, there is a subculture of Wagner fetishists who think it fun - and even artistically satisfying - to sit through six hours of picture-book musical bombast, but we should be grateful for the fact that it keeps them off the streets. And would anyone argue that a thousand-page doorstop by Tom Clancy is better than, say, a 300-page novel by Iain M Banks, just because of its size?

No, in itself it’s a ridiculous idea. And that’s because it confuses two ideas of size. Let’s call them “width” and “depth”. Width, let’s say, refers to the sheer scale of a videogame: the number and size of environments, the lengths required to finish it. Depth, on the other hand, would be a measure (admittedly a fuzzy and subjective one) of how interesting and complex the game is at any one time: how much tension and thought it generates in the player.

Now it seems a likely rule of thumb that width is usually going to be inversely proportional to depth. Development studios, after all, cannot triple the width of a game while keeping the depth at the same level without increasing the product cycle by a similar factor. And what do you get in very wide games? Numerous dull half-hours spent trudging around stupidly large maps (hello, Turok 2), or scrolling through shatteringly banal text conversations (our friend Final Fantasy again). Lords of Midnight was a thrilling novelty a decade and a half ago because it crammed thousands of locations into the 48 kilobytes of a ZX Spectrum. But was each one unique and interesting? Er, no.

For this reason, genuinely exciting moments in very wide games are few and far between. Even if they have as many such moments as Metal Gear Solid, which is far from usually the case, the fact that they are more spread out makes for a watered-down and less reliably thrilling gameplay experience. Would you rather have a measure of Scotch diluted in two pints of water, or drink it neat? Even Perfect Dark, not a huge game by today’s standards, could easily have been shorter: the miles of featureless green spaceship corridors in the latter levels rapidly become tedious, because they’re just a quick fix for width and offer no novel gameplay possibilities by that stage of the game.

Now, it’s true that some wide games also manage to be very deep: Deus Ex is a brilliant example. But such gems are greeted with critical and public rapture precisely because they’re exceptions to the general rule. The fact is that most very wide games contain vast stretches of gameplay that is extremely boring. Some such stretches even deliberately hinder the gamer in totally uninteresting ways merely in order to stretch out the experience: Half-Life really didn’t need all that precision platform-jumping, did it?

But, you might say, why is tedious width a problem, if some people genuinely like it? It’s because it turns off the mainstream. Remember how many copies of FFVIII were returned to shops last Christmas, after disappointed newbies realised that this wasn’t actually the future of interactive entertainment but its past: a tinselly, electronic version of Dungeons and Dragons. Now, a certain proportion of gamers, sometimes known as the “hardcore”, are quite happy for their favourite entertainment to alienate massmarket PlayStation owners. They’ll put up with the manifold failings of very wide games simply for the snob value of having a leisure pursuit that most people just don’t understand. But if we put up with things like this, and always hungrily buy the latest ultrawide slab of barely interactive gameplay, there’ll be no reason for developers to try to improve their products, and that will be bad news for everyone.

So the great thing about Pokémon and Gameboy is that the hardware itself immediately precludes any great ambition in the direction of width for its own sake. Sure, a Pokémon game takes a very long time to complete, but not because of pointless physical width - it’s because the depth of the gameplay offers so many interesting combinations of monsters, and symbolic possibilities of nurturing and fighting.

Counterintuitively, it seems that perhaps PlayStation2 and X-Box might help make this problem go away. Yes, they have greater storage capabilities, which might seem like an open invitation to go width-crazy. But because next-generation hardware provides a canvas that is so much broader for digital artists, a lot more work has to go into each scene to make the most of the visual possibilities. Do people really want to keep up this higher and more exciting graphical standard across quite so many locations as in the past, or will more of them realise that it’s what you can do in a new place, and the achievement of a constantly high level of tension and interest, that are what counts in videogames?

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