I recently submitted my Europa Universalis: Rome review, and I hope it will be online sometime in the next couple of days. A lot depends on my overworked and understaffed editors, but I’ll let you know when its up.

I’ll be honest and say that I’m happy with maybe half of what I wrote, primarily because I tried to keep the review to 1500 words or so. I could easily have gone on and on about what I liked, what I didn’t like and how hard it was to come to a final conclusion about how I felt. I could have easily spent 2500 words on it. It’s not a great game. It’s good, but…I’ll say more when the review is up.

All of which reminded me of the illusion that the internet gives you unlimited space. I started writing as if I could keep going and going and going. But then I sobered up, cut paragraphs, reorganized and dug out an illustrative anecdote to open things.

One of the great things about getting the chance to write for a print publication is that there’s no pussy footing around about scroll bars or adding another virtual page. My editor at Computer Games Magazine was certainly open to a plea for bumping a review from one word count category to the next, but you had to make the case.

There are two problems with internet games writing; it is either too short or its is too long.

First, there is a tendency to underestimate the reader and deliver everything in 200 word soundbites or news entries, since that allows the reader to get on with the commenting or, more importantly, to move on to the next story which means more hits and more ad impressions. This means that nuance is largely missing, and what nuance is there is often missed by an audience routed to the story by Digg.

Then there is the problem with the potential infinite canvas of being online. Even if most online reviews don’t top 1500 words, a lot of them could be shorter and most take forever to get to the point. Where the physical limitations of a page confer conceptual limitations on the writer, there is a great risk that the perception of unlimited room leads to unfocused and undisciplined writing.

This is where good editors come in, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with great editors in the past and to be working with very good editors at the moment. Not that I’m usually heavily edited; I have been but it’s not the normal course of thing. But the recognition that there are smarter people than me keeping an eye on my semicolons (I love semicolons) puts a brake on my most florid excesses.