Pardon me as I butcher the good name of WarioWare for my post title, but SNK's announcement of Kimo no Yuusha got me thinking: is 30 minutes short enough?

I'll admit that Kimo no Yuusha holds some appeal for me, especially since it's on the DS. If I've got a handheld out, it's often because I'm waiting on something else to happen, like I'm on a break at work or I'm stuck in traffic (yes, I play my DS in fully-stopped traffic jams; the fact that closed = sleep helps a lot). So while 30 minutes is too short, and the 10-second pace of WarioWare is a bit much, maybe we need some kind of weird balance between the two. I propose RPGWare: the RPG made of 10-minute stories.

You'd be surprised how much storytelling you can fit into a miniscule amount of space or time. Writers even have a word for this - flash fiction. Ernest Hemingway even did the flash fiction thing; his shortest story (which reeks of settling a bar bet):

For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

I think the flash fiction genre could be applied to RPG storytelling - not easily, but it's possible. Lots of the dialogue of an RPG is just exposition. What if all that exposition were skippable? In the game in my head, the exposition goes straight into a menu somewhere, so that people who're interested in background, et cetera can read up on it at their leisure... while those people who just want to cast some magic missiles at the darkness, attack some unusual and threatening creatures, or save a princess can do so and experience 10 to 15 minutes of storytelling.

Okay, so maybe 10 to 15 is a bit extreme. But I think this sort of 'flash gaming' could be a great new medium for telling lots of stories, instead of one epic tale, in a short amount of time, while still allowing for that critical element of gaming: fun.