Overall I have no complaints about the article's content or construction.  It
clearly and thoroughly outlines the historical development of the short game form -- a
very well done piece.
<P>
     On a more specific level, I think the text itself could do with some minor
revision.  Its simple style makes it pleasantly readable, but in some places (particularly
towards the beginning) it seems to run out of expressive space and step on its own
toes.  For instance, two of the four sentences in the first paragraph begin with the
phrase "Short works", and the first sentence of the next paragraph begins with "Short
games".  In general, as the article gears up at the beginning, it seems to suffer from a
lack of different ways to say "short game".  This is, as I said, a minor point, but I
think it would be worth reworking those first few paragraphs so that the article starts
off more smoothly.  By way of example, here is a (far from perfect) reworking of the
second paragraph:
<P>
     Short games have not always been popular.  During the twenty years between
the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, they were generally ignored by interactive fiction
authors, except as demonstrations of or ads for long games.  Since the inception of
the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, however, the proportion of short games
has increased dramatically.  By 1998, the form's prevalance prompted several people
in the Usenet group rec.arts.int-fiction to express concern that the annual
competition was endangering the continued success of long games.  It is worth
investigating how this dramatic shift in typical game size came about.
<P>
     Of course, the exact revision can probably be better accomplished by the
author himself (who presumably has a better sense of where to go with it), but the
idea is that I've reduced the number of occurrences of "short game" from 5 to 2, and
jazzed up the sentence structure enough that the common elements don't stand out
in such bold relief.  A few other small suggestions:
<P>
     "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." -- I think it would be better to introduce this list explicitly with a colon (e.g.,
"depends on several things: how much time. . .").  The semicolon kind of took me by
surprise and it wasn't obvious that the sentence had shifted into a list structure.
<P>
     "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."" -- Probably better
to restructure the sentence so that"time" in the last clause is closer to its referent
and/or the word is not reiterated (e.g., "players are free to ponder their next move for
any length of time, and this is by custom counted . . .").
<P>
     "For instance, Level 9 trumpeted the 7,000 rooms of their adventure
"Snowball" [. . .] (While a true boast, some 6,800 of those room [. . .]" -- The "while a
true boast" is a misplaced modifier (it is referring to "those rooms").  Should be
changed to "While this boast was accurate" or some such thing.
<P>
     "1998 was a turning point in the evolution of short works. In late 1996 [. . .]"
-- I'm not sure exactly what the solution is, but it seems a bit awkward to begin by
saying how important 1998 was and then immediately shift to 1996 and not mention
1998 again until much later in the paragraph.