Okay. My comments are enclosed in brackets.
<P>
[This is a nice essay. If my comments seem a little
persnickety, it's only because there weren't any major
flaws in this article. Good work.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
[I thought this article was going to be a history of
the size of text-adventure games, but then it turned
into a history of experimental games. I think the two
things are related, as you say, and it's okay to talk
about both of them in the same article, but it would
be nice if the reader knew what the article was about
from the introductory paragraph (which does mention
both traditional and experimental games, but seems to
say that the article is only going to discuss how
these games have gotten shorter over the years). Maybe
you could bring in the topic of experimentation
earlier, by mentioning how a commercial concern, like
a text-adventure game company, is more likely to be
risk-adverse and mainly imitate previous commercial
successes. (Though Infocom should get credit for
pioneering the "fiction" aspect of text-adventure
games.)]
<P>
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. 
<P>
[I'm not sure this is a good example of a long game.
Wasn't it one of those one-joke mini-games? Perhaps
something along the lines of "Muldoon" or "So Far"
would be a better example, though it might not provide
such a contrast between file size and play time. Maybe
you could contrast the file sizes of "Curses" and
"1893," both long games with very different file
sizes, to make your point.]
<P>
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."
<P>
[This is all true, but you might be overstating the
case for different play times for different players.
I'd be surprised to learn that play time varied by
more than a factor of, say, three for different
players. The Interactive Fiction Ratings site seems to
get a pretty good handle on how long a game is by
polling players.]
<P>
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.
<P>
[I'd consider 10 hours to be a medium-sized game. It
might be helpful to add a few more categories for game
length because, otherwise, you'll end up implying that
games like "Christminster" and "Savoir Faire" are
similar in size to games like "Slouching Towards
Bedlam" and "Shade." I'd, at least, go for short,
medium and long, and considering the number of
one-puzzle or one-joke games that have shown up, you
could probably add a miniature category too.]
<P>
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, 
<P>
[Really? Without a walk-through? I could be wrong, and
I've never completed "Adventure," but from what I saw,
I don't see how someone who hadn't played it before
could get all the way through it in two or three
hours.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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:
<P>
I'm in a sandy beach on a tropical isle Obvious exit:
EAST Visible items: Small ship's keel and mast, Sand,
Lagoon, Sign in the sand says: 'Welcome to Pirates
Island, watch out for the tide!'
<P>
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.
<P>
[I don't think I'd characterize any of the "Zork"
games as short. Also, I've been told that very little
from "Zork  III" was based on "Dungeon." I don't know
how relevant this is to the topic of this essay, but
you may want to mention that one of the reasons that
Infocom developed a virtual machine for their games
was to get around the small amount of RAM available on
PCs at the time. In other words, it was a different
"trick" from the ones Scott Adams used, to get around
memory limits, and this trick allowed medium-sized
adventure games to be played on PCs.]
<P>
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, 
<P>
[I suspect this is true. I've run across some truly
bizarre puzzles in some of these games. But I think
statements about difficult puzzles being put in games
to sell hint books should come from someone who worked
in the industry. Perhaps you could dig up a quote for
this? I believe one of Infocom's play-testers reads
and posts to r*if, and one of the people who worked
for Magnetic Scrolls has shown up in the IF community.
Also, another reason for some of the tougher puzzles
could have been that some of these companies' target
market was "puzzle fiends." I remember reading an
article that said that Infocom felt some pressure to
make "harder" games from some of their fans and came
up with the notion of also making "easy" or
"introductory" games to keep from alienating people
who weren't "puzzle fiends." At one point, they
started putting difficulty ratings on their packaging
and in their catalogs in an effort to let people know
how tough a game would be.]
<P>
which in turn led to longer play times for those who
refused to buy hint books.
<P>
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.
<P>
[Yes, but I believe the addition of more items and
NPCs would, in addition to adding to the ambience of a
game, also drive up the play time to some degree and
it would also increase a game's implementation and
debugging time. Also, the later years of the retail
text-adventure game produced some very long games,
despite the additional logistical problems that adding
illustrations and sound to the games created. Legend
Entertainment's "TimeQuest" has been mentioned fairly
often as an extremely long game and some of Magnetic
Scrolls games took quite a while to play.]
<P>

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." 
<P>
[The quotes suggest that someone else said this, could
you mention who it was? Also, you later mention raif,
rgif, and the ifMUD specifically, so it would be nice
if you mentioned the name of this forum too. Pintar
was available online not too long ago, perhaps you
could contact her to find out what the name of it
was.]
<P>
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.
<P>
[In the context of a book whose target audience is
r*if and the ifMUD, this probably won't matter, but
this is the first time you've mentioned TADS, and
Inform is mentioned for the first time a short while
later, so it might help readers who aren't familiar
with the current community to mention that these are
special-purpose programming languages too.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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. 
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
[Here and two paragraphs down, you start discussing
changes in content, rather than size. It appears as
though you're changing topics. You could also mention
how the IF community's attitude towards unusual games
has changed. "Undo" would be pretty respectable by
current standards, but, as you say, it was the lowest
rated game in the TADS section.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
[I'm no expert, but I believe it was an interpreter
rather than a compiler.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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. 
<P>
[This is why I have a problem with characterizing
games like "Zork" as short. Now we're talking about
games that can be played in half an hour or less. I'd
call these "miniature" games, and the IF Comp games,
"short" games.]
<P>
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.
<P>
[It might be better to say that the short games
required by the rules of the IF Competion, and the
implementation time limits for the mini-comp games,
made it easier, and less risky, for authors to
experiment or release one-joke or one-puzzle games.
Also, I think "+=3" deserves recognition, along with
"Undo," which you mentioned above, for pioneering the
one-puzzle or one-joke game.]
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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. 
<P>
[Yes, but was this a joke on the XYZZY Awards by the
ifMUD?]
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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. 
<P>
[This should probably be up at the beginning of the
piece as well as here.]
<P>
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. 
<P>
[I think r*if and the ifMUD do encourage unusual
works, but experimental works might get talked about
more in the IF community partly because there's more
to say about an odd game.]
<P>
Given this dynamic, it is doubtful that long games
will once again become the default form in the near future.
<P>