Mini games are one of the tender areas inside gaming that nobody is quite sure what to do with. Sometimes the mini games are as simple as pushing one button a hundred times in as short a time as you can. Other times it's more complicated and integrated with the controls of the rest of the game you're playing. One of the most popular methods of minigaming is the quicktime event.
Quicktime events are, to quote a narcissistic australian I'm sure you know, times when you are forced to press X to not die. It's simple, often unexpected, and can bring about long periods of gameplay you are forced to redo, because no matter how skilled you are, or how much time you put into training, if you fail to quickly and properly react to a particular series of all-but-random events, you are brought to the game over screen. So why are they so popular? Because they're easy to do! Programmers have to take like, fifteen seconds to code in 'if this button is not pressed by this time, the player dies', while if they had made it an actual in-game challenge it would have taken them hours, weeks or days to build it.
Allow me to say that I think minigames are absolutely required in today's gaming world. In shorter games they can provide some pacing as well as adding in length for much cheaper than standard levels, and in longer games they can provide a fast-paced moment of pickup much needed in slower sections of the game, especially if they provide in-game rewards for doing them.
Just so long as you don't go gold saucer on us, requiring hours upon hours of play to get any reasonable rewards.
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