Micro stories
Micro stories are crazy short narratives, carrying the essence of emotions one would found at the climax of a story.ex1: six-word novel by Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn
ex2: [courtersy of 365 MICRO STORY PROJECT ]
Two bodies discovered in house
They talked on the phone all night, stitching themselves into each other lives, papering over the cracks that had grown between them. Distance made their differences seem less important. By the time the first light appeared they were together, entwined.
Micro movies
In the same vein, micro movies would be defined as the essence of emotions one would found at the climax of a movie.ex: One Last Dive
(...before I go)
...nothing more than the essential.
[Edited Aug. 10, 2013]: and Vine goes even further with almost nano-movies :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI-MIhsx1xg
[Edited Jan. 22, 2014]:
http://i.imgur.com/wmrc5Xx.gif
Micro blogging
Todays blogs, micro-blogs, tweets, feeds ...etc, are the reflection of this need to cut, simplify until one reaches a burst of words, intense enough to carry the all news.ex: Today's Gaming Drama
Micro education
ex: Minute Physics: E = mc²Micro gaming
What would micro gaming look like ?ex1: Parameters
(essence of RPG mechanics)... by the way, you should give a try to their other stuff... really amazing work of simplification there.
ex2: A Dark Room
Those two examples are extreme simplification.
But is it all ? Is it what micro gaming would look like ?
If you watch again "One Last Dive" (video above), you'll notice that the shots could have been those of a 2h movie, while "A Dark Room" game could not have been a sub-part of a AAA video game.
So again: what would micro gaming look like if we were to do for games what has been done with "One Last Dive" for movies ?
It'd probably look something like that:
Take the quality of "The Last Of Us", remove all cutting scenes, divide the gameplay hours by 100. You're left with 100 seconds of pure and concentrated horror/adventure/suvival game. Keep a 30sec slow pacing familiarization. Enough to get used to simplified controls, decision system, get bound to characters and set the plot of the game. Then add a 65sec of increasing decisions making, including dangerous climbing, concentrated level design, fights and survival stuff. Finish with a climax, where it all comes together in a brutal ending.
Can we make that for 1/100th of the cost ?... probably something around $500K...
Provided there's enough replayability, players would happily spend $1 for this, resulting in the same gross for fewer risks, and legitimating the effort.
[Edited Aug. 10, 2013]: Rogue Leagcy is a good candidate for plateformer micro-gaming.
