The Evolution of Short Works
From Sprawling Cave Crawls to Tiny Experiments
by Stephen Granade
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Short works of interactive fiction offer many pleasures. If the work
is a more traditional game, when well-designed it is a fine Swiss
watch, every piece meshing together and turning in time, with no
unneeded parts. If it is more experimental, it can surprise and
delight without becoming tiresome, a brief flurry of technical
fireworks. In either case, the main pleasure is in seeing something
small done well. Short works are constrained, the short story to the
novel of longer works, and have become the form of choice for many
interactive fiction authors.
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Short games have not always been popular. For the twenty years between
the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, interactive fiction authors generally
ignored the possibility of a short game which was entirely
self-contained, rather than a demonstration of or an ad for a long
game. Recently, the number of short games has increased dramatically,
spurred on by the first Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. Short
games have become so prevalent that in 1998 several people asked in
the Usenet group rec.arts.int-fiction, "Is the yearly competition
hurting the release of long games?" Given the dramatic shift in game
size over the last eight years, it is worth seeing how short games
came to be the near-standard.
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One primary question must be answered before the evolution of the
short game can be explored: what is a short game? How do we measure
the length of a piece of interactive fiction? Works are considered
long or short based on how long it takes to play them to completion,
but no reliable metric exists for measuring the length of play time
across even a majority of players. File size alone cannot serve, as
some games with multimedia resources such as pictures and music have
large file sizes yet can be readily completed in the space of an
hour. One of the longest games on record, "Journey to Alpha Centauri
(In Real Time)" (Julian Fleetwood, 1998), which would take 3000 years
to play to completion, has a file size of a mere 50 kb. Other similar
numeric measurements, such as the number of rooms, the amount of
descriptive text, or the number of puzzles in a piece of interactive
fiction, correlate weakly with play time. The length of time to
complete interactive fiction is very player-specific, and depends
strongly on how much time a given player spends solving a work's
puzzles, if any; the player's reading and typing speed; and how
motivated a player is to finish a work. Since all but a few works of
interactive fiction do not occur in real time, players are free to
pause for any length of time between moves and consider their next
course of action, time which is by custom counted as "play time."
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The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, which was created as a
showcase for short games, had to answer the question of "how short is
short?" G. Kevin Wilson, competition creator and organizer, settled on
a fixed length of play. Judges were to play games for no more than two
hours before voting on a game. Though play time varies among players,
the average time does not vary that widely on such a short time
scale. In practice this has produced competition games that are
commonly regarded as short, and consensus about which games are too
long for the competition is readily reached. For the purposes of this
article I will use a similarly nebulous definition and say that any
work widely regarded as taking ten or fewer hours to play is short.
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Every element of early works of interactive fiction was a reflection
of those in "ADVENT" (Crowther and Woods, 1976), and game size was no
exception. "ADVENT" was a sprawling game which took place in a large
underground land filled with puzzles and treasures. While some players
were able to complete "ADVENT" in a handful of hours, many took tens
of hours to finish it. Early works mimicked "ADVENT" in size and
length of play time. Games such as "DUNGEON" (Tim Anderson, Marc
Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, 1978) and "Acheton" (Jonathan
Partington, David Seal, and Jon Thackray, 1978) were large affairs
taking many hours to complete. For a while, each successive game was
larger than the last.
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The trend towards increasing size was temporarily reversed when
interactive fiction moved from mainframe computers to personal
ones. Personal computers had small amounts of memory -- the standard
maximum memory of 16 kb on the TRS-80 Model I was typical -- and
programs were stored on cassette tapes. Scott Adams led the way in
this field, becoming the first to sell interactive fiction
commercially for play on personal computers. The adventures he wrote
for his company Adventure International were tiny, and used every
imaginable trick to squeeze more game into the finite space
available. His tricks were of sufficient interest to warrant an
article in the December 1980 issue of Byte magazine. Adams's
adventures lacked the prose of "ADVENT;" consider the following room
description from Pirate's Adventure:
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  I'm in a sandy beach on a tropical isle<br>
  Obvious exit: EAST<br>
  Visible items: Small ship's keel and mast, Sand, Lagoon, Sign in<br>
  the sand says: 'Welcome to Pirates Island, watch out for the tide!'<br>
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When Infocom was formed, its first product was "DUNGEON" ported to
personal computers. To make this possible, "DUNGEON" was cut into
three parts and each part rounded out to make a complete game. The
results were "Zork I, II, and III" (Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce
Daniels, and Dave Lebling, 1979). Yet despite their small sizes, works
such as the three "Zork" games and "Pirate Adventure" took a while
to play. And works did not become any shorter as time went on.
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Economic pressures, more than mere homage to "ADVENT," drove the size
of commercial works of interactive fiction. Once companies began
charging for interactive fiction, players expected a certain amount of
play time for their money.  Companies began to boast of having large
games in an effort to attract customers. For instance, Level 9
trumpeted the 7,000 rooms of their adventure "Snowball" (Mike Austin,
Nick Austin, Pete Austin, and Ian Buxton, 1983). (While a true boast,
some 6,800 of those rooms formed a maze consisting of near-identical
rooms.) In addition, many companies used hint books as a revenue
stream. The best way a company could insure the sale of hint books was
to include fiendishly difficult puzzles in the company's works, which
in turn led to longer play times for those who refused to buy hint
books.
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At the same time, economics, not just available memory and storage,
kept works from becoming extremely long. Longer works require more
time to design, develop, and debug than shorter ones. As more memory
and storage space became available, works became deeper, with the
addition of more prose, items, and non-player characters (NPCs),
rather than more game play per se.
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This situation remained more-or-less unchanged throughout the 1980s
and on into the 1990s. Even as the commercial market for text-based
interactive fiction declined, game length changed little. Given this
history, it is unsurprising that early works from the nascent
interactive fiction community were similar to commercial ones in size
and scope, limited mainly by the capabilities of interactive fiction
languages of the time, such as GAGS and AGT. A goal of many authors
who took part in the Cosmoserve online community for interactive
fiction was to make games "just like Infocom's." AGT games like "Cliff
Diver, Investigator for Hire: Crime to the Ninth Power" (Patrick
Farley, 1990) and "The Multi-Dimensional Thief" (Joel Finch, 1991),
TADS games like "Save Princeton" (Karine Schaefer and Jacob Weinstein,
1991) and "Unnkulian Underworld: The Unknown Unventure" (D. A. Leary,
1990), and independently-programmed games such as "Jacaranda Jim" (Graham
Cluley, 1987), were of moderate
size, comparable to the sizes of many commercial games of the 1980s.
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Short games were rare, and the ones which did appear were mostly
sections from a longer work made available for demonstration purposes
or, like "Unnkulia One-Half: The Salesman Triumphant" (David Baggett,
1993), self-contained games which served as ads for other, longer
games. One notable deviation from this was "John's Fire Witch" (John
Baker, 1995). Described by author John Baker as a "snack-sized game,"
the work was very favorably received. A large part of its appeal came
from the novelty of its short length.
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Such short works would not remain a novelty for long, so to speak, as
their creation experienced a tremendous boost later in 1995 with the
creation of the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition. The
competition was organized by G. Kevin Wilson and the denizens of the
two Usenet newsgroups dedicated to interactive fiction,
rec.arts.int-fiction and rec.games.int-fiction. The competition's
initial purpose was to increase the number of works written using the
interactive fiction language Inform; only after much discussion was
the competition opened to games written in TADS as well. The decision
to limit the competition to short games was a pragmatic one, as judges
were required to play all entries, and who would have the time to play
five or six longer works?  Thus the first competition had but one
rule: games had to be written to be completed within two hours of
play.
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The works entered in that first competition were similar to "John's
Fire Witch," a short game with traditional gameplay. Certainly "Uncle
Zebulon's Will" (Magnus Olssen, 1995), which won the TADS division of
the competition, was much like "John's Fire Witch" in feel and
style. Even "A Change In the Weather" (Andrew Plotkin, 1995), winner
of the Inform division, was traditional in style despite its cruel
scheduling of events and rigid in-game timeline. The most unusual game
of the competition, "Undo" (Neil deMause, 1995), finished last in the
TADS division.
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Other than the lengths of entries, what was most notable about the
Competition was the plethora of game reviews and discussion which came
on the heels of the Competition's conclusion. The community was asked
not to discuss the games during the adjudication period, resulting in
a pent-up flood of opinions which burst forth after the
Competition. Entries were heavily discussed and reviewed, garnering
feedback far in excess of that enjoyed by non-competition games.
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Most short games entered in the next several annual competitions
remained traditional in style and design. "The Meteor, The Stone, and
A Long Glass of Sherbet" (Graham Nelson, 1996), which won the 1996
Interactive Fiction Competition, could easily have been an Infocom-era
work which just happened to take around two hours to complete instead
of twenty. A few competition works experimented with form and
function; Andrew Plotkin's entry in the 1996 competition, "Lists and
Lists" (Andrew Plotkin, 1996), was a compiler for the computer
language Scheme coupled with a Scheme tutorial.
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More unusual works were beginning to appear outside the confines of
the competition. "The Space Under the Window" (Andrew Plotkin, 1997)
was more an interactive presentation of text than a traditional game,
while "Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die" (Rob Noyes, 1996) was a
dada-ist game whose title is entirely descriptive: the work contains
one room and one item, a phone booth; should you pick up the phone
booth, you will die.
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1998 was a turning point in the evolution of short works. In late 1996
Eileen Mullin, editor of the e-zine XYZZYnews, created the XYZZY
Awards. The Awards honor works in given categories such as Best NPCs,
Best Puzzles, and Best Game, and are chosen by any members of the
interactive fiction community who wish to vote. Several games are
nominated in each category, after which a single winner is chosen.
The 1997 awards were voted on in early 1998, and every XYZZY award
went to a short game. All but "I-0" (Adam Cadre, 1997), winner of Best
Game, were entries in the 1997 Interactive Fiction Competition.
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Then, in May of 1998, Lucian P. Smith and Adam Cadre both began
mini-comps, small competitions in which entrants were to write short
works which fit a given premise. Lucian's mini-comp involved a rich
relative leaving behind a wacky will and a scavenger hunt, while
Adam's merely specified that the game should involve chickens. The two
mini-comps resulted in twenty-five works between them, all short. If
the Annual IF Competition had increased the acceptance of short works
in the community, the mini-comps helped make short works the preferred
form for experimentation and one-off jokes, and made mini-competitions
the standard way of encouraging new short works on a given theme.
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More experimentation with the form was to follow. In October of 1998,
David Cornelson held the first SpeedIF event on ifMUD, an online
meeting place for members of the interactive fiction community. People
who were online and logged into ifMUD at the time generated a list of
suggested requirements in the style of a mad-lib: David would call out
a request for things such as "what you might find in a glass," and
then collate his favorite reponses. Entrants then had two hours in
which to write a short work which fit the chosen requirements. Both
the mini-comps and SpeedIF sparked the creation of short, often silly
works whose content was as likely to be a convoluted community in-joke
as a carefully-designed traditional game.
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One work in 1998 had arguably the greatest influence on later short
works: "Photopia" (Adam Cadre, 1998), winner of the 1998 Interactive
Fiction Competition. "Photopia" combined multiple viewpoints and a
nonlinear narrative in a way which had not been seen in interactive
fiction before. It eschewed traditional puzzles for narrative drive
and a tightly-constrained plotline. Many authors later imitated
elements of "Photopia" in their own short works. By winning the Annual
Interactive Fiction Competition, "Photopia" marked the acceptance of
"experimental" interactive fiction by the mainstream community.
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Despite the inroads made by short works of interactive fiction, most
of the 1998 XYZZY Awards went to longer games such as "Spider and Web"
(Andrew Plotkin, 1998), "Once and Future" (G. Kevin Wilson, 1998), and
"Anchorhead" (Michael Gentry, 1998). Only two short games, "Photopia"
and "Little Blue Men" (Michael Gentry, 1998), received awards, with
each garnering one award apiece.
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1999 saw the arrival of "Aisle" (Sam Barlow, 1999), a work which took
exactly one turn yet had a multitude of possible endings, and the
Interactive Fiction Art Show. The IF Art Show, the creation of Marnie
Parker, further advanced the cause of short works. Entries for the Art
Show were meant to expound upon a single theme rather than to be
complete games in their own right; to create a single object, scene,
or character and explore it fully. Galatea, the eponymous non-player
character of "Galatea" (Emily Short, 1999), which was entered in the
second IF Art Show, is widely accepted as the best NPC to date to
appear in interactive fiction; she appears in a work devoid of the
usual trappings of interactive fiction such as objects, puzzles, or
even multiple rooms.
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The number of short works released each year continues to increase. In
2000, despite the release of such lauded longer works as "LASH" (Paul
O'Brian, 2000), "Augmented Fourth" (Brian Uri!, 2000), and "Dangerous
Curves" (Irene Callaci, 2000), every one of the 2000 XYZZY Awards went
to short works. In addition, 2000 marked the first time that a SpeedIF
game, "You Are a Chef!" (Dan Shiovitz, 2000), was nominated for an
XYZZY Award. In 2001 only one long work, "First Things First"
(J. Robinson Wheeler, 2001), was released. During the same year, there
were 52 games entered in the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition,
nine in SmoochieComp, six in TelegramComp, four in the IF Art Show,
seventeen IF Arcade Games, and countless SpeedIF games, not to mention
"Textfire Golf" (Adam Cadre, 2001) and "The Weapon" (Sean Barrett,
2001). In just seven years the balance between short works and long
ones had completely reversed.
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In addition, the number of experimental games has risen.  "For A
Change" (Dan Schmidt, 2000) used altered forms of English, while "The
Gostak" (Carl Muckenhoupt, 2001) dispensed with known language
altogether, using instead a language in which the signifiers and
signified were never clearly identified. Games like "Heroes" (Sean
Barrett, 2001) and "Common Ground" (Stephen Granade, 1999) employed
multiple viewpoints in the same time and place. "shrapnel" (Adam
Cadre, 2000) is a deconstruction of interactive fiction which, in the
end, dissolves into a jumble of random characters -- random, except
for one encoded message.
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Long works of interactive fiction may not ever die out, but short
games are undisputedly in ascendency. Short works give authors the
chance to experiment with ideas or gimmicks which would be stretched
thin if used in a longer work. In addition, they are more quickly
written, as longer works may take multiple years to write, and provide
authors with player feedback much sooner. In the case of entries in
the Annual IF Competition, the amount of feedback and number of
reviews will likely be an order of magnitude greater than that
associated with non-competition games. The interactive fiction
community has come to expect short works, especially experimental
ones, and rewards them with reviews and critiques. Given this dynamic,
it is doubtful that long games will once again become the default form
in the near future.