Tonight's bite-sized post is brought to you by an interesting Wikipedia article about flash fiction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction

It has nothing to do with Adobe Flash... the "flash" is the amount of time it takes to read the fiction (though the psychological scars could last a lifetime).

It occurs to me that a person could make an interesting BYOND game by stringing together little flash-fiction vignettes. Each one might last 20 seconds or a minute (or more if you throw in some monsters to fight or puzzles to solve), and then the player moves to the next one.

The Wario Ware series for the Nintendo DS (http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/ wariowaretouched) is said to be pretty addictive. Each Wario Ware game is, if I understand the reviews right, simply a long string of very short, but very varied, minigames. This kind of design could be great for the programmer suffering from writer's block; instead of trying to build a mountain, make a whole bunch of molehills!