I'm not advocating we make games bad. But to pull a direct comparison from TV, look at how shows like Star Trek are set up. Each episode is its own story, and we don't care as much about the full season arc. There might be a season arc, it might even be very very good! But the focus is the episode.

Can you give an example of how that would work in a game? I can only think of Killer7 that has a main narrative, but episodes are self-contained.