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I think that we've got great inputs for length calculation. I won't go into detail because that leaves them open to abuse, but the way we calculate story length is great. In essence, a bunch of parameters go in an spit out a score. Then, the score is sorted into 8 bins from 1-8 which indicate the length of the storygame.

I think that right now, we need to make it harder to have an 8 length. For instance, Ground Zero at 196 pages is an 8/8. Ground Zero is not a short storygame and can take an hour or more to play. It's long. But it shouldn't be an 8, when Dead Man Walking is 2100 pages. Even OMS is 500 pages and a longer playthrough.

I think that we should change the requirements to become an 8 (and therefore shift all of the lengths a bit lower) so that it actually means something, because there are too many 8/8 length storygames of very diverse lengths, as is. The downside is that we will probably lose a little resolution in the lower lengths, but in all honesty, any storygame that takes me fewer than 5 minutes to read (all length 1-3 storygames, pretty much) should be length 1 in my books.

@alexp

This is a great idea. I'm often surprised by how short length 4-5 stories seem to be, and I totally agree that the way they are now, I find 1-3 to be virtually indistinguishable.

Yeah. @alexp, if you can send me a spreadsheet of all of the storygames that are published and their 'length scores' (the composite score that we use to sort them into groups), then I can come up with good delimiters for the groups.

Doesn't the page length contribute to this as well? Meaning a 100-page story with twenty paragraphs per page could have a higher rating than a 300-page story with one sentence per page?

Could be, but like I said in the OP, I'm not saying. It doesn't really have any effect on the point I'm trying to make, though.

The methods used to calculate are very good.  It's just that the brackets need a little readjustment.  

The way it is now, there's too many stories that fall into the highest length category possible, even though they have quite a bit of variation in length.  Conversely, there are a lot of stories that are all relatively close in length, but get put into different categories.  

Sure, I can do that; do you have the length algorithm too? I'm sure I could dig that up from the depths of the code :)

I don't think I need the algorithm! I haven't seen any storygames which are incorrectly ranked (IE: I haven't found any 4's that are longer than 5's), I just think it needs to be shifted.

Ha!

If it's an old as a feature as "Length" it's going to be needlessly complex and convoluted. There is no "simple shift". I'll dig it up too and email it.

Hahaha. Are you sure? I think that right now, it gives each game a score and then we sort them into one of 8 length bins based on their score. All I think we need to do is change the delimiters on each of the bins. The scores can stay the exact same.

Well, judge for yourself! I'll email the spreadsheet and the code (which hopefully isn't that bad to follow), at least to see what it does with the #s