True, but it’s still only 12k words. If you made it interactive and only saw a third of the words per playthrough, you’d still only be up around the 35-40k mark. It’s why I popped it in there because I’m not comparing a 30k word straight novel with a 30k word IF, I’m comparing a much shorter novel you could adapt into IF if you so wished in under 40k.
I think there is some confusion about WHY short games/novels are by their nature generally different to long pieces, and that’s ok. This link is good to read as an overview on the types of lengths (short story/novelette/novella/novel.) What is a novelette? And is it Worth Writing One? | This is Writing
So how can it be that one story can be told in 10k words, and another needs 100k? Shorter stories tend to be more focused and each word chosen more carefully. They often revolve around a shorter period of time and need to move faster. Any fluff or wandering scenes that are not critical to the story development often needs to be cut. The shorter the work, the more important this tends be. Novels tend to be fully fleshed out start to finish works. On the other end of the spectrum a short story may throw you straight into an event without a tonne of world building and background, and good ones have to do it well enough that you know what the deal is. The longer the work, the more plots and sub plots tend to happen. In short stories often there’s one strong plot that gets worked through. Novels tend to have full length “complete” stories, where as short form may not always have this and end with an event, leaving the reader to imagine what happened in the future. (Although not always! One of my 5k ones has an epilogue of sorts so there’s no hard and fast rules that always apply). Depending on the story being told, the effect you want to give, and the pacing will all depend on the length a piece of writing needs to be. Blowing something out to a longer length because that’s the “right way to do it” rather than because it needs that number of words to tell the story the way you want to does not always make it better. It can make it unfocused, or the storyline seem to drag.
There’s actually an art to writing good short fiction, just as there is long form. They’re actually not exactly the same, and short fiction is not inferior because of it. (It can actually be hard to keep a shor story from spiraling. As most authors on here and they will tell you scope creep is definitely a thing!) This is why some authors are better at writing long or short stories depending on their strengths and inclinations.
I’d also like to comment on coding efficency. Wordcount can be REALLY deceptive depending on how efficiently something is coded. I have two games approximately 100k words but one is much longer than the other. Why? Because my coding improved. The playthrough is also very different. One is very branched, one is relatively more linear. It makes a difference. More words also means more attention to editing and bug squashing, something that HGs in particular are challenged by because they are often not professionally edited. It’s easier to get a shorter game well edited and free of bugs than a longer one. This also makes shorter games more suitable for first time authors to learn from which is one of the reasons why I really object to the very harsh comments the Arthur game was getting because a first time author has completed a shorter length game.
I’d also like to quote Mary Duffy here:
Anyways, I’ll pull together some examples of short IF and post them here soon.