This Week's Waste of Time

Some games are like novels, lengthy and often telling an involved story. Browser games often don't have the time or capacity to get too deep into characters and plot. Rather many Flash games offer something more condensed, like a short story. I Can Hold My Breath Forever is one of those games.

Art forms like film and music seem largely locked into a certain length. Two hours for movies and four minutes for music. There are, of course, exceptions, but significantly shorter or longer versions of these media are probably committing commercial suicide. Short films can rarely be seen outside of film festivals or before Pixar movies, and songs longer than 10 minutes are verboten on commercial radio.

Not so with literature and video games. From Haikus to Russian novels the written word comes in strings both short and long. The standard length for a disc-based platform video game is 30 hours or so. Role-playing games take me a good 100 hours (I don't want to hear any comments on that. I'm thorough). What we deal with in this blog column (i.e., free browser games) tend to the shorter end: anywhere between a few seconds and a half hour.

This week's waste of time puts you in control of the protagonist, as per usual, spelunking in search of your missing friend. You have 10 seconds to swim to the next pocket of air where you will find a message from your buddy. The story and the water gets deeper and bottoms out in about 10 minutes.

The game's creator, Jake Elliott, designed this game as part of the Experimental Game Project, You might remember Adam Saltsman's Canabalt was made for a different iteration of the same event. The theme on Elliott's endeavor was "10 seconds," hence the time of oxygen deprivation.

Click here to play I Can Hold My Breath Forever.

While you're playing, try out Elliott's other games like Beulah & the Hundred Birds and Dog & Bone Are Friends.