The Short Games Showcase 2025 - coming Nov. 23! (And we want your help!)

Competitions
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Now that IFComp is over and ECTOCOMP’s submission period is drawing to a close, it’s time to start thinking about the next comp on the calendar: the somewhat misnamed weird younger sibling of all those other comps you know and love, the Short Games Showcase!

If you’re not familiar with the SGS, you can take a look at last year’s version to get a sense of how the event operates. It is run by me, Emery Joyce, and my partner in word crimes, N. Cormier (@Encorm).

We will be opening submissions slightly earlier than previous years, on November 23. We are also happy to send you a personal reminder if you want to submit something but think you’ll forget by then—just comment in this thread or send me and/or Encorm a PM.

We are also making some changes as we try to make the SGS better for everyone, and there are some things we’d like your feedback on or help with! (The following polls and requests for feedback are, however, non-binding; we reserve the right to do what’s most feasible for us regardless of majority vote.)

Number 1: We are looking for volunteers to help us vet games for length, year of release, and number of previous event submissions. If you are interested, please respond to the poll below!

  • I would definitely like to volunteer to help with the SGS.
  • I might be able to volunteer to help with the SGS.
0 voters

Number 2: The number of games last year was quite high, which ended up spreading player/voter attention pretty thin. We’re considering some measures to address this, one of which is dropping the number of submissions per author from 3 to 2. How do you feel about this?

  • In favor
  • Neutral
  • Opposed
0 voters

Number 3: Another way we could potentially address the problem is by getting more people to participate as players/voters. Are there any channels we could try reaching out to other than posting on this forum, advertising through the Neo-Interactives, and getting whoever stumbles in from the Itch “current jams” page? Please let us know!

Number 4: We’ve never wanted to strictly police game length, as with the big umbrella definition of IF we’re using, it’s hard to come up with a guideline that works for everybody. However, people seemed unhappy last year with the presence of games that took more than half an hour for most players. Encorm and I are both fast readers, and I’m an experienced parser IF player, so it’s become clear that we need some sort of limit beyond “can one of us complete a playthrough in 30 minutes or less?”

Our current thought is to add the following rule: If a single minimal playthrough (i.e., using a walkthrough if applicable, not seeing any extra optional text) of this game is more than 8000 words[1] in length, it is not appropriate for this competition. This would be in addition to the current rule that it should be possible (for somebody, at least) to complete a playthrough in 30 minutes or less. How do you feel about this?

  • In favor
  • Neutral
  • Opposed
  • I have a better idea that I will explain in the comments
0 voters

Finally, changes from last year we’ve already decided on:

  • When you submit a game, you will be asked which award categories you want to opt into. Every game is eligible for the Best In Show via the Itch ratings, and the Best Previously Unawarded Game list will be compiled by us as before, but for every other category, you will choose whether you want your game to be eligible for an award in that category or not. This will make category voting easier, as people no longer have to scroll through 50 games that the category doesn’t really apply to in order to find the one they want, and may help players choose how to allot their time.
  • We are banning games that have AI-generated images or text. This is not up for debate. (Machine translation is OK, although personally I’d much rather see something slightly stilted run through Google Translate or DeepL than something that’s been ChatGPTified. Grammarly is OK. Code… well, we have no way to vet that, so do what you like.)

Things we are not considering at this time:

  • Banning games that have been in any competition previously (we will retain the limit on number of previous events submitted to, however)
  • Narrowing the scope of what kinds of works are included
  • Setting limits by total wordcount of code or text (as this is something we the organizers cannot reliably determine)
  • Making the SGS an unranked jam (we recommend manonamora’s yearly IF showcase if that’s more your speed!)
  • Changing the name of the event
  • Hosting the event on its own website and not on Itch (we wish we could, especially with this year’s content restrictions fiasco, but we do not have the time, money, energy, or technical know-how.)

Thank you so much, and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

  1. roughly the number of words of fiction an average college-educated adult can read in 30 minutes ↩︎

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I voted “neutral” for now, but may be leaning more toward “opposed”; I think this might place too much of a burden on authors (e.g., having to play through your Twine game copy/pasting text as you go, or creating an ideal playthrough of your parser game so you can get a word count).

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Yeah, I’m with Tabitha, although I do think including a word count suggestion as a guideline for what might take people half an hour might be a nice touch: maybe 8000 as an upper limit and above 6000 is probably going to be half an hour for slower readers… Because I think most people probably don’t really know.

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For reference’s sake, non-completionist playthroughs of my Spring Thing games are just under 30 minutes playtime. Here are word counts for minimalist playthroughs. This is just for reference, I know capturing this information is not the same from system to system.

Portrait With Wolf: 5620 words
Marbles, D, and the Sinister Spotlight: 5609 words

Gosh, it’s surprising that they’re so close together! Anyway, hopefully I will have time to help out.

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I understand this, and part of the reason that we haven’t tried to impose any kind of objective limit is because there’s no way to do it that doesn’t create more work for the submitter or us or both, but people seemed so unhappy about the presence of longer games last year that it feels a little damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

FWIW, it was meant to be more of a thing where we would word-count and DQ if it was over 8000, with no hard feelings towards anyone who has a game DQed that way (which is already the attitude we try to take; last year we had someone who had a good-faith submission that wasn’t eligible but we knew they had another game that was eligible, so although the deadline had passed by the time we realized this, we reached out to them to offer a link to submit the other game. So DQing things for not being appropriate for this specific event really isn’t meant to be a punishment or something we’re judging people for.)

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8,000 words should be a good upper limit for a guideline. Maybe, stress that the game is thirty minutes long or less. I don’t necessarily expect the organizers to evaluate the length of each game, so it’s kinda up to the authors to self-regulate.

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how much work would this take?
I have my final exams from November 16, 2025→November 28, 2025 so I won’t be able to do much in the first few days.

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To be quite honest, that depends on how many people volunteer! The more there are, the less any one person needs to do. But also, we would be happy for anyone who could even spend an hour or two looking up information about a few games. (Sometimes you can speed through a bunch of them quickly because IFDB has thorough information about them; sometimes you get something that’s a total unknown and have to do a little digging.)

Regarding timelines, because we’re traveling for US Thanksgiving we probably won’t start the vetting (get spreadsheets set up, et cetera) until around Dec 1. Submissions will close in late December and voting is meant to start Jan 1-ish. So your schedule wouldn’t really be a problem!

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I think that is a bit complicated for both author, and more so for organisers counting the words, so I guess that is better a simpler definition of “short”.

IMHO, The best one is limiting the lenght of room/object description, let’s say, to 320 character (that is, four 80-column lines, easy to eyeball-check) and put a limit to the number of room/object,let’s say 64 total (ok, this is less easy to check…) [after feline NMI] this gives 20.480 characters, taking five characters for an english word (ISTR to have read that the avg. lenght of an english word is someting between 5 and 6) gives… 4096 words. so, there’s even a substantial margin.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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The 8,000 words rule strikes me as too much of a burden for authors given that it’s in addition to the (I think more practical) 30 minute rule. It also seems to introduce the possibility that a modest Twine game with one longer storyline would fall foul of it, while a massive parser game that more or less required a walkthrough for a sub-8,000-word playthrough wouldn’t.

All in all, I just don’t think that requiring a maximum wordcount for a “minimal” playthrough would do anything to address the issue of how long most players need to finish a game.

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How long the average playthrough actually takes is something we can’t determine unless there’s sufficient IFDB data to that effect, so the “minimal playthrough” thing was intended to be more about weeding out stuff that’s egregiously long: “if the fastest possible playthrough of your game is more words than the average person can read in 30 minutes, then that’s definitely out of bounds.” Which would have ruled out several works that were included last year that people seemed unhappy to have there.

But again, we’ve always been inclined to be lax on this and we don’t really want to make extra work for anyone, least of all ourselves. It seemed like our previous loose combination of the honor system, IFDB data, and spot-checks by two fast readers was leading to a lot of complaints along the lines of “Why is this game here? This shouldn’t be allowed!” but if sentiment has shifted on that since last year I’m happy to simply not change anything in this regard.

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I believe I was one of the people who expressed frustration about a longer game being included, but it was one that was very clearly outside the bounds of what SGS is looking for (its reported average playtime on IFDB is 1 hour 15 minutes). I don’t personally care if a game takes me a little longer than 30 minutes to play.

Maybe the 8,000 words/playthrough could be presented as a general guideline?

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That IFDB data wasn’t there at the time, though, so all we had was the honor system and spot checks by fast readers. In the absence of an objective standard like word count that all vetters are expected to check, games like that could continue to slip through as long as they do not have reported play times on IFDB (which is inevitably going to be the case for some games as we always get submissions from outside this community).

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I guess my thought was that presenting the “30 minutes or about 8,000 words per playthrough” as a guideline to authors would help weed out ones like that from being submitted in the first place.

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That’s the problem we’re trying to solve - there was no average playtime on IFBD when it was submitted last year, and I was able to complete one playthrough in thirty minutes. EJ and I are both unusually fast readers so while it’s clear in hindsight it really wasn’t at the time (especially when trying to vet 100+ other games).

If people aren’t in favor of the word count restrictions I’m hoping that having volunteers will help solve the problem - anything that’s borderline can get a second opinion and everyone will be much less under the gun about it.

Edit, since I didn’t see your second post at first: The first and second SGS has taught us that the vetting step is really necessary - relying on good faith submissions has not worked as well as we hoped. I think providing guidelines for authors to better estimate the length of their game will definitely help (as it’s notoriously hard to do) but I don’t think it will entirely fix the problem. But if the community is happy with just improving on the problem then so are we.

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I think having volunteers with a variety of reading speeds for vetting is probably the best solution here, if possible.

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This might be unworkable, but if a screenreader were used, you could select a specific reading speed, meaning it would be an objective playback speed from one entry to another.

It’d also have the advantage of the authors being able to check their own games with the screenreader to check for length (and as a bonus, it’d probably accidentally make more of the entries screenreader friendly, and thus more accessible.)

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The 8,000 words thing might be helpful as a rule of thumb - “If you hit this, it’s too long” - sort of thing. It’s having a second max length rule that strikes me as a little too arduous.

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I’m not sure if this is in reference to my SGS entry last year, but for what it’s worth, I was able to complete it within 30 minutes during personal playtesting. (But I’m a fast reader) I was honestly quite surprised to see such long playtimes being reported for my SGS entry on IFDB last year after I entered it in the showcase, given that the average IFDB playtime reported for my Spring Thing entry was lower at one hour, and it’s much longer with a lot of looping sections at that.

It was something I completed late last year, so I wasn’t able to get a lot of eyes on it prior to the Showcase, and went by my own personal testing and benchmarking it to my Spring Thing release (which in hindsight, might not have been best.)

In any case, I have no strong feelings regarding the word count rule, and am probably also not going to be participating this year as I’m trying to clear other projects.

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I’m sorry if I gave the impression that we thought you submitted it in bad faith or were trying to get away with something! We absolutely don’t think that. We were also able to complete it in 30 minutes, after all. That’s exactly why I think that there’s no way to totally avoid having some games that people will think are too long without instituting an objective standard.

But having the ability to get a second opinion from a(nother) volunteer with a different reading speed should hopefully help, and that is what we are currently leaning towards.

Also, yours was not the only game last year to come in over the new suggested word count guideline or to have an average play time of significantly over 30 minutes on IFDB now, to be clear, so we’re not trying to single you out, necessarily.

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