I actually have an anecdote to the point you're making here... One of my friends used to have a game night at his house once a week and one of the games we used to play was called Carcassonne. I won't get into the details of the game (you'd be better off looking it up yourself anyway; it's been so long since I played I don't exactly remember all the rules), but basically it's a strategy game where each player takes turns to lay a tile down to form the game world. You want to control contiguous parts of the world via little player pieces you can set on the tiles, so tile placement is critical.
On this particular evening, three of us were playing. It was near the end of the game and the host was one tile away from winning. While neither myself or the other player really needed that tile, it was beneficial to both of us to block the host from being able to put something there (although it needed to be the exact right tile). In essence, he and I were conspiring/colluding to prevent the host from locking up that last tile and winning the game... EVEN THOUGH we never explicitly said anything or made any agreements whatsoever. It just happened to be in both of our best interests in terms of winning the game. So, eventually one of us got to block him and he ended up getting mad and accused us both of purposely working together (he later chilled out and apologized). I found it amusing as I had never encountered a scenario like this before (and have yet to encounter one again).
It seems to me the author of this article is just speculating on what goes through people's minds without actually having asked any real gamers. Personally, the thing I find lacking in most games today is good gameplay. Developers are so caught up with putting in fancy graphics and realistic physics and all this other dumb useless shit, when all that really matters is the gameplay. I can list dozens upon dozens of games from the NES/SNES era that I love and re-visit from time to time because they were truly fun to play, but nowadays it seems eye candy is the main focus with the gameplay being a distant afterthought.
There are still some good games being released these days, but it's honestly hard to find many titles I am willing to spend money on. Most companies don't do anything original anymore because they are scared to lose money, but playing the same, slightly different game for the thousandth time gets stale. The author seems to discredit people's complaints simply because "EVERYTHING IS AWESOME IN GAMING RIGHT NOW OMG", which is just sad. Everything is NOT awesome in gaming right now; there are many reasons to be dissatisfied with the overall state of the industry, particularly big-budget titles.
I am honestly more interested in indie titles right now, simply because of the risks they can afford to take. There are a lot of platforms for indie games at the moment and practically anyone can get in on it; the entry barrier is relatively low. Granted, there is a lot of crap there too, but the one thing you will see more of is innovation, which to me is what its all about.
Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play.
I always finish games that are worth playing. If it's not worth my time, why the hell would I bother wasting more of my time just to finish it? A good game is like a good book, it draws you in and you find yourself having trouble putting it down every night even though you need to go to bed and wake up early in the morning.
Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length.
Some things are not difficult to implement, but developers seem to waste a lot of time on useless bullshit. Old PC FPS's (DooM, Duke3D, Blood) had endless replayability simply because they shipped with or otherwise offered free level editors and the community was usually very lively, meaning you could go online and download thousands and thousands of user-made maps, thus extending the length of the game. I suppose there will always be those people who cry about graphics in games, but honestly developers should just stop worrying about them so much. If the graphics aren't realistic enough for you, GO OUTSIDE. The rest of us want to play a game that is FUN, not some artist's wet-dream imagining of a virtual world. The graphics should be just good enough to convey the information needed by the player to play the game (mood may be important as well, but you don't need a multimillion dollar budget to accomplish that!) Interaction is easy to implement, even Duke3D had a lot of it! You have a 'use' key, usually, so just add different actions for different objects in the game! This is not rocket science!
I think it's safe to say most developers have lost sight of what game development should be about. The big companies are at odds with themselves; you just can't have that many people working on a game without a myriad of conflicting interests and ideas, but ultimately it is going to boil down to money and what some bean counter has convinced the higher-ups of being most profitable for the game. Thus, they reallocate their resources and you get what we have today -- a bunch of overpriced crap and some idiot writing an article about how people should stop complaining because gaming is SO AWESOME today. Barf!
AAA games are too long? My experience with the latest so-called AAA games is that they are too short. It looks like the developers spend most of their time crafting magnificent graphics and then the rest of the game is an after-thought that you can finish in 10 hours or less. There are so many different things you can do to a game to add replay value, why on earth would you want to shorten a game people are shelling out $50 or $60 for?
Maybe I'm spoiled, but all of the old games I used to play I could play for weeks, maybe months, and still come back a year or two later and pick it back up. I am skeptical of the "gamers are losing patience" line; casual gamers, by their very nature, never had the patience to begin with and you can't really lump them in with the rest of us. Figure out your target market and make your game based on that, don't try to shoehorn your game into a market that doesn't want it.
Don't forget Good Old Games: http://www.gog.com/en/frontpage/! They have a great collection of old PC classics and I'm pretty sure the older titles are updated to work on newer OS's. There are plenty of games on here that work with Linux, as well. Also, everything is pretty damn cheap, so you don't have to spend a lot of money to legally own these classics.
On the eighth day, God created FORTRAN.
