This post grew out of a reply to Holly.

When I go to bookstores, I limit myself to about $20 of books. I love books. I judge them by their cover a lot, too. I have no shame.

I don't feel too bad about buying a book that I don't end up reading, because those dollars don't go to an evil organization. They go to, like, a handful of people with names I know. Sometimes, they directly or indirectly support an author, which is also cool.

I recently read the book "The Butcher of the Forest" by Premee Mohamed. It's around 200 pages, which I think is a very sweet length for a book.

I ended up thinking it was just "meh". Not my kind of thing, 3/5 stars. It never captivated me, but that was okay, because it was just 200 pages.

I also read Piranesi, an excellent book, which was also about 200 pages. It didn't captivate me at first, the first 20 pages were just meh. But I read it through to the end and I was so happy I did.

When a book is short, it much more easily falls into the "I might as well finish it" category. It de-emphasizes those first 30 pages. It doesn't need to hook me like a 1200 page book might.

I have a similar philosophy for games. When I spend $15 on an indie game, I don't care too much if I don't end up beating it. And the shorter it is, the more I care about seeing it through to the end.

Perfect Vermin (Itch, Steam) and How Fish is Made (Steam) are two games that are in this vein. These are all games that rank in the ~30 minutes category.

Like a ~200 page book, a 30 minute game can dedicate its existence to exploring a handful of ideas, themes, and tones. A 10-hour (or, god forbid, 40-hour) videogame needs to establish a core gameplay loop and elaborate and build on it, and many games do so quite effectively, like Portal or Halo. But it also means the narrative is confined to exist around a gameplay loop that provides 10 hours of engagement.

For a short indie game? The gameplay loop can just suck. That might sound bad, but it's actually, really okay if your gameplay loop is "flop around for for 15 minutes." This expands possibilities, because the space of "okay or better" is necessarily larger than the space of "good or better".

Dys4ia and Don't Shit Your Pants are the first two such games I can remember that live among the ranks of Very Short Indie Games. These are fantastic, and there is no way either of these games can exist longer than they are.

The awesome thing about these four indie games is you might as well finish them. I finished Dys4ia as an uncracked egg because, well, why not? I wanted to see what happened. I finished DSYP because it was funny, and I wanted to see how I could not shit my pants. I finished How Fish Is Made because I wanted to find out how fish is made. I finished Perfect Vermin because I wanted to understand what the whole deal was. All of these transformed me a bit.

Outer Wilds, the game I never shut the fuck up about, is one game that I started, and put down at first because I didn't get it. There is a specific moment about 1 hour into the game that flushes out the intrigue that I'd missed until I tried to play it again about three years later. It's fantastic, and every minute of its ~10 hour long gameplay is vital. It shouldn't have been shorter, not everything needs to be short. But if it were, I probably would have finished it right there.

I love short stories and short games; it's such a nice property to possess.