Short Games and Long Games - Incentives for Authors

[Havenstone]

Blast from the past…

@Gower

It got me thinking about how best to incentivize longer games.

Well, whatever you did in 2016, @Gower, it worked!

Other threads touching on this include:

Word count vs branching

The question of game length (in terms of words) vs writer effort and branching seems to be one of the hardest to get right. I have been struggling with this myself (a branching game is nice, but so much more effort than a more railroaded approach, and writer fatigue can easily signal the death of the project). In a separate thread Jason recently commented how “the minimum word count of 20,000 for Hosted Games is total word count, not average play-through length”. My feeling, however, (reading …

Growing Game Lengths

Awww…for what it’s worth I love Herald and all the complications Herald seems poised to add to my mc’s personal journey will make it a better journey in the end. How long was “Wise use of Time” Jim? Cause I enjoyed that one too. I do think that for the whole Zombie Exodus series you’ve set expectations you cannot crawl out from under without serious backlash, but that does not necessarily have to apply to other, future projects you might take on in my perception. He says before it is picke…

Word Count Discussion

I used to write some IF for sub-q where you had a limit of 5k words prose (excluding code). Actually a number of HG/COG published writers submitted work there. The pacing is different and the writing needs to be tighter. Short length makes the games neither good or bad by itself. Just different. It makes your writing tighter as a general rule. My favourite thing I’ve written was a 5k game. I think we really need to move the word count discussion OUT of this thread unless it’s to directly comme…